The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the follow-up to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which made a billion at the box office and seemed destined to spawn tons of spinoffs and sequels to form a Nintendo universe. Well, one such sequel has already arrived just a few years later. It’s predictably dominating the box office, but the critical reception has not been great.

There are criticisms about a lack of storytelling and paper-thin characters, while fans of the movie are claiming it’s made for them and not for critics, and that it’s a movie made with children as the intended audience. There’s an interesting conversation being held over this movie; do kids not deserve better in their movies? If they’re happy about it, does it matter?

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Review

This conversation is not new, and it won’t end here. Not as long as movies made without much care for storytelling, but that land well with younger audiences continue to get made and make billions at the box office. The first Mario movie was like that, although most agreed that it worked.

Despite a lack of strong storytelling or dynamic characters, The Super Mario Bros. Movie largely worked because it put in at least a little bit of effort in those areas and filled the rest with treats for video game fans to devour. This time, the storytelling and character depth and/or development are dialed back even further, and the Easter eggs are dialed up.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie moves at an insane pace, zipping from one thing to the next. Yet, plenty of moments feel like they’re useless. There’s so much in an already-short movie that could honestly be cut. It’s a roughly 90-minute movie, and it’s already stretched thin.

There’s a debate over whether or not moviegoers who haven’t played the games will enjoy them. As someone who only recently beat Super Mario Galaxy, I can say it definitely enhances the experience, but it felt like Nintendo and Illumination were banking on that way too much.

Critic scores are low, and fans will explain it all away by saying that they’ve obviously never played a Mario game and can’t appreciate it. If a movie is built on the necessity of understanding a game they haven’t played, then it’s not a good movie. If you’re not at least attempting to bring in new members of your audience, then why bother adapting a game? Just let people play the game, then.

Plenty of those aforementioned scenes that could be cut are those Easter egg sort of scenes. There’s a whole scene with Baby Mario, Baby Luigi, and a T-rex that serves almost no purpose, but if you’ve played Yoshi’s Island or Super Mario Odyssey (which I have and adore both), you’ll appreciate it.

That does not make a good movie. A good experience, maybe. But we should at least be trying to provide a good movie and a good experience for everyone, including those unfamiliar with the lore and deep Easter eggs tied to the source material. Fallout and Sonic the Hedgehog are great examples of how to provide Easter eggs without sacrificing the rest of the medium.

I was a big fan of the first movie despite knowing that it offered nothing groundbreaking on the storytelling front and that the characters were largely one-note. It was just so incredible to see all these things I grew up playing brought into a wonderfully animated movie.

The novelty, I fear, has worn off. It’s no longer cool for Nintendo and Illumination to be able to fit all these cool references into their movie. We’ve seen them do that, and it worked once. Isn’t there anything else you can do? Isn’t there a good story you can tell or characters you can develop? It’s no longer super interesting just to see Bowser Jr. use his paintbrush or to see the dinosaur from Super Mario Odyssey.

Bowser’s character development feels incredibly forced and is then abandoned when it’s convenient. Mario still has no discernible trait other than the fact that he’s in love with Princess Peach. Luigi doesn’t even have one discernible trait. They moved past Peach’s trait, which was that she wasn’t a damsel in distress and that she could handle herself.

The new characters are a mixed bag. Rosalina is cool, but she’s hardly in the movie, and her backstory is a curious deviation from the games. Like most characters, there’s not much depth to the backstory that is kind of shoehorned in to try (and fail) at creating emotional stakes. The Pikmin were in the marketing for the movie, and they’re literally just used as a brief visual gag and never seen or heard from again.

Fox McCloud is awesome, though, and he’s a shot of energy that the movie desperately needs. His arrival helps bridge the gap between the beginning, when The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hasn’t lost audiences, and the end, when things genuinely do get better.

Glen Powell does a solid job voicing the Star Fox hero, which automatically makes him a standout. Benny Safdie is great as Bowser Jr., too. If not for them, the whole cast (minus Jack Black, of course) would be underwhelming. Chris Pratt’s bringing little to the table, and his accent even slips sometimes.

It probably sounds like I really hated this movie, but that’s not the case. As much as I am committed to the idea that young moviegoers deserve better, richer, deeper stories, I am also a big fan of Nintendo and Mario. It’s been a big part of my life, and so I do appreciate seeing some of these things.

There are good sequences of action throughout, and the final battle scene is incredible. There’s a stretch that begins with Bowser Jr. essentially playing Super Mario Maker to stop Peach and Mario, and it goes back and forth from the movie’s 3D animation to the 2D style of the game.

That transitions into a final battle of Bowser and Jr. versus Yoshi, Mario, and Luigi that is pretty awesome. That leads into the conclusion, which is also pretty great. There’s a fully 2D sequence in the style of Super Mario World that rebuilds Peach’s castle, and it’s incredible.

That stretch run was largely Easter eggs, but it didn’t seem like they were there to distract from the lack of a story. It felt like there was a moment where the story didn’t have to be as deep, so they chose the right time to give fans of the games something to enjoy that didn’t leave others out. Everyone knows what the Mario games look like, so it’s not like the other references that really require having played the games.

That was enough to salvage it for me. It showed a brief glimpse into a better version of the movie, although it seems pretty clear that they weren’t capable (or didn’t care to try) bringing that level of effort and quality to the entire runtime.

Conclusion

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is going to make a ton of money. That is good, because it will help a struggling piece of the film industry with an infusion of cash. Much like A Minecraft Movie, it’s kind of a necessary evil. But the thing is, it doesn’t have to be. Mario is as bankable as anything, so they could try something new or take risks with it and still make plenty of money and not lose their audience.

So why not try? Hopefully, for the next one (and there will be plenty more), they try to tell a good story with better characters instead of engineering an entire movie to fit the references they believe would be cool. But based on this admittedly working formula, I doubt that’ll happen.

Score: 2.75/5