“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie”
Rated: PG
“See it, Stream it, Skip it” is a movie review column giving readers spoiler-free reviews of new box office films and reporting back on whether readers should see it now, wait until it comes to streaming services or skip it altogether.
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Plot Summary:
Less than one year after the events of “The Super Mario Movie,” Mario and Luigi must help Princess Peach on an interstellar mission to rescue Princess Roselina from the clutches of Bowser Jr., who aims to take over the galaxy with his father and seek revenge on the Mario brothers.
Review:
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is, in fact, a movie.
It’s not particularly good, nor bad. It is just an hour and 38 minutes of continuous content being streamed into my brain, not much to my enjoyment.
Most of the noticeable good qualities of “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” happen in the opening half hour, in the (extremely bloated) “day in the life” section for the Mario brothers and Mushroom Kingdom fellows. Once the gang leaves for space, the film quickly takes a nosedive in both quality and enjoyability.
The script gets continuously worse the longer the film goes on. It genuinely feels like they took out all human writers after the first thirty minutes and asked ChatGPT to fill the rest in with niche and pointless references.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” unironically has the line “Mario, prepare to meet your maker” moments before Mario is subjected to a Super Mario Maker-esqe trap. This is shortly followed by Bowser proclaiming “Bowser is back, and now you’ll feel my fury.”
I understand that I may slightly be out of the demographic for this film, but the fact that screenwriter Matthew Fogel decided that lazily name-dropping previous Mario titles was a cute way to make references to these IPs should fasttrack him to a blacklist from Hollywood.
Other reviews or fans of the movie may try to convince you that the film isn’t actually all that bad. And, in reality, the film isn’t a pile of garbage. It’s just a complete nothing-burger of a film. There is no character development for any returning characters involved in the film. There is no overarching lesson to be learned and most of the enjoyment comes not from the story but from hearing the incredible Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack.
I wish “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” could have been even worse, because it could have approached “so bad, it’s good” territory. Perhaps if Nintendo and Illumination tried harder to create an actually compelling story with focus instead of nostalgia bait, they could have made a trilogy to rival the Sonic movie franchise. Instead, the film is uninspired garbage that seemingly only serves as a way for Nintendo to fast-track a film adaptation of Super Smash Bros.
Don’t waste your time watching this movie. It isn’t unenjoyable, but you will facepalm and cringe numerous times and will not be a better person by the end of it. Save your ticket money and donate it to your local starving film or art student, because Hollywood clearly needs some help.
SKIP IT
1.5/5.0 mushrooms
