It’s gutsy to plunge into a sequel without reminding the audience who these characters are, or what happened to them previously or why, for instance, one of them is all shrunk down and living in a tiny castle. Even the Avengers usually toss off a line of dialogue reminding one another about their most recent escapades, in case you’re blanking on the events of the last movie.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” instead, starts out with a joke about giving exposition, with Rosalina (voiced by Brie Larson) attempting to tell a bedtime story to her scampish Lumas, before abandoning that part entirely and barreling forward, guns blazing. This suggests a few assumptions. Perhaps the movie’s creators expect most viewers to be familiar with the Mario universe — reasonable, since Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario series of games is turning 40 this year. Maybe they’re guessing most of the audience saw “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” the second highest grossing film of 2023, and that at least one of its two target audiences — that is, children — have been watching it on repeat ever since. (Which means parents in the room are all too familiar as well.)
Or maybe they believe it doesn’t really matter, because the plot is not exactly the point of Super Mario Galaxy. It is merely a vehicle designed to move us along from set piece to set piece and introduce new, fun, weird little guys. And that’s both its strength and its greatest liability.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic from a screenplay by Matthew Fogel, is loosely based on the Wii game, which was first released in Japan on Nov. 1, 2007. The game’s plot has been scrambled, presumably to preserve an element of surprise. The main characters remain, though: Mario (Chris Pratt), a Brooklyn plumber, and his brother, Luigi (Charlie Day); Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who rules over the Mushroom Kingdom; Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), one of the Mushrooms; and Bowser (Jack Black), who was shrunk down teeny-tiny in the previous installment and now is trying to control his villainous nature.
In addition to Rosalina, there are a few other new characters. Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) is anxious to please his dad by destroying the universe for him. Yoshi (Daniel Glover) is a green dinosaur-looking creature that Mario and Luigi unearth in a pile of rubble. And the character whose appearance got the most applause at my screening was Fox McCloud (Glen Powell), who is from an entirely different Nintendo series, Star Fox.
Most of the story concerns chasing down things that have been stolen and finding out Who Your Real Friends and Family Are, the fallback lesson for all children’s movies in Hollywood, presumably so the stars have something to moralize about during press junkets. It’s also rather perfunctory for long stretches, lots of bashing and smashing and not as much humor — childish or otherwise — as you might like.
The best moments come whenever the characters land on a new planet or enter a new environment. That’s when the animators at Illumination (responsible for unleashing the Minions upon society) let their imaginations loose, building worlds that integrate elements from the game and the broader Nintendo universe — there are tons of Easter eggs here I’m sure I missed — with sometimes chuckle-provoking creatures. Little blips of game music show up in the movie score, and occasionally elements of 8-bit gameplay do as well, which can be either fan pandering or a fun tribute to the history of the medium this story began in, depending on the angle you take.
Still, there’s a flat empty nothingness to “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” even more than its flat empty predecessor, and that’s a huge bummer. Even the children in my screening were strangely quiet for longer stretches than I expected. Perhaps some of this has to do with cramming too much plot into a film that would do well with more breathing room, the better to show off the aforementioned weird little guys. A few B-plots with Lumas or Octoombas or Gearmos would be awfully fun, even if they didn’t technically have a point.
Perhaps the bigger problem is just inherent to the medium. If you’ve never played Super Mario Galaxy, it’s hard to explain how revolutionary it felt at the time. It’s considered one of the greatest video games of all time for a reason. Visually, it was dazzling (for 2007, anyhow), with each tiny world its own interesting place to look at and cool new characters to discover.
Gameplay was unusual, too. Because it was released on the Wii, it integrated gravity mechanics that were localized to each planet in the galaxy, and the controls felt different from other games — like you were both inside Mario’s body and also sometimes operating outside of it, pointing at things on the screen like the hand of some god.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is just the opposite. There are some audiences for whom pointing at the screen and saying “I know that reference!” is sufficient to make them feel engrossed in a film, and perhaps they’ll be happy. But lots of viewers — including children! — want to feel absorbed in a movie, which means being emotionally engaged with the characters and the stakes of their story. They want to be given a second to enjoy the visual splendor of a well-rendered image. But this film is overstuffed in a way that leaves little room to get invested, and though its characters and worlds are witty, they barely get enough screen time to notice.
Watching a movie is an inherently more passive activity than playing a game. You don’t get to make choices, pause, spend a minute looking around. The creators make all of those decisions for you. Much of the joy of the Mario universe has always been its zany, whimsical visual humor — and it’s still waiting for a movie to match it.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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