Okay so what happened was this: I was in the mood to go to City Walk and see a movie on Thursday night, since I’ve got the AMC subscription and I’ve been spending too much time indoors. I made a reservation to see The Drama, the new movie with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson that A24 desperately wants you to believe everybody’s talking about.
But then I read a spoiler for The Drama, and I decided I wanted nothing to do with it. I’m sure the performances are good and all, but I’ve already seen one movie this year that trivialized an extremely serious topic by just using it as a jumping-off point for an unrelated story, and I already thought it was inexcusable then.
So I decided to see something a lot more light-hearted, which was The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. I never got around to seeing the first one, but I still had no expectation that I was going to enjoy the new one. I believed I knew what I was getting into. I figured worst case, I’d be able to let my eyes and brain glaze over and just passively take in all the lights and colors, and occasionally say “oh hey I remember that!”
The thing that I hadn’t anticipated was that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie works like the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank. It’s such a constant barrage of noise and music and overdone effects and Matrix-style slow-mo and 1990s Cool Video Game Mascot moments1Yoshi wearing sunglasses?! Can you even imagine?! that it’s impossible for a normal brain, or at least my brain, to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds.
Here’s my attempt to show what that was like:
The Trailers
Oh dear, no one prepared me for just how bad the wisecrackin’ Animal Farm movie would be. It’s somehow even worse than if you tried to make a Robert Smigel-style parody of someone completely missing the point of Animal Farm.
I hope Animal Farm is successful enough to warrant an animated 1984, all done in vaporwave style with neon blue grid backgrounds and everybody’s got Walkmans and leg warmers.
I feel kind of bad for whoever had to put together the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu, because the only one of the title characters who talks deliberately does so in a low monotone. I would bet that the trailer contains 99% of the dialogue he speaks in the movie. Must be a pretty good gig for Pedro Pascal, but then I really do think he does a great job with the voice.
I wonder if Universal/Illumination paid to have the Animal Farm trailer placed before this movie, so that you’d always be thinking, “Well, I guess it could be worse.”
The new Minions movie isn’t my thing, but I do at least appreciate that they lean into the fact that they’re villains and have them summoning a demon. I wonder if it might be my thing after all? Oh, nope, never mind, they did the “use mummy bandages as toilet paper” gag.
I don’t know if I’ve seen an Illumination movie since my second date with my now-husband, where we saw Despicable Me.
Oh no wait, we saw Megamind. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an Illumination movie. This should be interesting!
Act I: Setting Expectations
Okay, sure, fine, they’re introducing their marketable cute star child characters, that’s how these movies work and what they’re for. And they’re all naming their favorite Nintendo IP that they’re big fans of, cool, cool.
This giant robot attack sure is going on for a long time. I seem to remember the beginning of Super Mario Galaxy establishing its entire story in about a minute.
But for real, though: the game franchise is famously not story-driven, light on dialogue, and not at all concerned with continuity. And they still have more solid storytelling than this huge-budget Hollywood movie?
Seems like you could’ve said “Bowser Jr attacks, Rosalina and one of the stars gets captured and taken away” in less than, how long have I been here now, 30 minutes? No wait, it’s less than 10. This does not bode well.
Okay, now we’re in a commercial for Mario Kart World, which is a very fun game. Complaints about the open world being shallow and unnecessary were kind of missing the point — it’s delightful to just drive around this huge world, full of decades worth of references, with no time pressure. It feels like Nintendo literally taking a victory lap around their decades of history. Much more fun than watching these versions of Mario and Luigi riding around a desert on dirt bikes.
Hey look, it’s that Mexican-inspired world from Super Mario Odyssey. That’s kind of fun! I wonder if we’re going to hang out with — oh nope, they’re just a cameo.
This is the first I’m hearing Chris Pratt’s voice as Mario, and after all the fuss made over the first movie, it’s actually not the worst. I already hate giving anybody associated with this any credit, but of all the big-name actors, only he and Keegan Michael Key seem to be actually doing a character.
Okay, step aside, bitches. It’s time for the real star of the movie… huh. So Yoshi’s just Yoshi, then. Not a new take or anything, just Yoshi doing regular Yoshi things.
Well at least we’ll get a fun flashback to Yoshi’s origin story, which is probably going to be either all in yarn or like kid’s drawings or nope it’s just New Donk City.
I honestly can’t tell whether this movie — which is targeted at the five year old human boy standing behind my seat and yelling — is trying to make a joke about how Yoshi’s origin story flashback doesn’t do anything.
Like, I’m not a complete imbecile; I know that the immediate joke is that Mario and Luigi can’t understand him. But is the gag for the audience supposed to be a bait-and-switch that Yoshi’s origin story doesn’t actually explain anything? It’s an extended sequence with like 50 different characters and like a dozen city sets that aren’t used anywhere else, and it must’ve cost as much as the entire budget as a different animated film. What is even happening?
Look, there’s the Moai head guy! I hope we get a funny line from… nope, we’re moving on.
Okay, so now they’re back with the Toads and the joke is that Yoshi’s just a core part of the group now with no question or introduction. I guess I have to begrudgingly give them a small bit of credit for that, as long as they don’t repeat the same joke multiple times. [spoiler: guess what]
Act II: Chuck Begins to Regret His Poor Decisions
Mario wants to give Peach a birthday present and Luigi and Yoshi are teasing him for having a crush and now Luigi is doing a Walk Like An Egyptian dance for some reason and Yoshi’s in sunglasses and making a B-boy pose.
Just checked my phone and yes, I am in fact still watching a movie that was made in the year 2026.
If I do end up documenting this for some reason, I should make a note that this is the exact point where the movie broke me. If I weren’t surrounded by screaming children, I’d be yelling profanities at the screen right now.
Princess Peach was discovered by the Toads and has no memory of her father, which is King Toadstool erasure and some straight-up bullshit.
Bowser’s tiny. Maybe he won’t be in this one much? Considering how this movie seems to have been edited by someone receiving electroshock therapy while having Alfred Molina from Boogie Nights throwing firecrackers at them, it shouldn’t last too long… oh, nope, we’re going to stretch this out. Yep, longer… looooonnnnnnger. Get all the ad-libs in; this is solid gold Robin Williams-as-Genie stuff. Don’t you dare cut out even a second.
Okay so I’m really not enjoying this at all, and it’s somehow gone even lower than my already low expectations. This puts me in an uncomfortable position, since I vowed to just ignore things I don’t like and move on without wasting time on them, and yet there’s still over an hour left to go in this thing and my brain isn’t turning off.
I wonder if these movies are like a boss fight, and they have to do it three times before they get one that’s not shit?
Is Bowser about to sing? I swear to God, movie, I will walk out of this theater… okay, whew.
I have become unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim, and I’m not processing this movie as a linear sequence of events, which will make it difficult to remember later. And I probably should at least write something about this movie, since that comparison to a boss fight could be pretty clever if I just workshop it a bit.
They’re showing the Mario world map, which is something I’m supposed to appreciate because I have played the video games on which this movie is based. They are not doing anything clever with these vignettes.
Hey look, a Cheep-cheep.
Has this already happened? Is it still 2026? I have been in this theater for four hours and they still haven’t been able to set up the let’s-go-save-the-princess story in a movie based on Mario Brothers.
They’re giving Bowser some kind of redemption arc and crisis of conscience? Okay, that’s almost kind of an interesting idea. Enough to warrant a half-star on Letterboxd?
Does Letterboxd let you record a movie if you give it zero stars? I’d better not be watching this without getting credit for it.
Now Mario and Luigi are talking about having to get off of this planet? I thought they were on the Toads’ planet. Hah, it’s adorable how my brain is still trying to make sense of this.
At least the movie’s halfway over already.
Act III: Making a Mental List of People I Hate
Oh shit, no, this is at AMC, which means there were 30 minutes of pre-show.
Does anybody remember that Stephen King story The Jaunt? I think it’ll be funny to muss up my hair and extremely white beard and as I’m leaving the theater, look wide-eyed at the people in the lobby and say, “It’s longer than you think!!!”
Apparently they’re on a planet of bee people and Bowser offers himself to indentured servitude to let the others go free. I’d been wondering how Issa Rae was going to be worked into this movie. Now I’m wondering how she’s going to spend the enormous paycheck she got for that 30 minutes of voice work.
Speaking of which, I don’t think Yoshi’s going to talk, you guys. Thank goodness they snagged Donald Glover for that, huh? He probably got paid more than I’ve made in the last 10 years put together to go into a sound booth and make an hour’s worth of Gurgi noises.
Oh, and then go on press tours where he and the other big-name celebrities probably have to answer video game trivia questions and explain how the characters of Peach and Yoshi and Magikoopa have special significance to them. I bet you anything Glover has said that he took the part because he wanted something he could watch with his children, which I believe is the line you’re contractually obligated to say at least once before you’re allowed to deposit the check.
It’s a shame, because I used to really like Donald Glover a lot. Brie Larson, too.
They’re all dead to me now. Everyone associated with this movie in any capacity can go straight to hell.
Act IV: A Time Outside of Time, A Land of Thoughts and Ideas, A Place of Ego Death and a Dream of Rebirth
Now Peach and Toad are on a mission to Canto Bight, I guess? This is where you’re supposed to play spot-the-character-I-recognize-from-the-video-games, even though it’s 99% the islanders from Super Mario Sunshine.
This casino is full of characters from Super Mario Bros 2. I am the only person in this entire theater old enough to remember Super Mario Bros 2, and I just barely do.
The whole sequence is apparently just to give Princess Peach her action star moment, with the requisite three-point-landing and slow-mo shots that entails. There are hundreds of bad guys who don’t fit with the style of anything else in the movie, because they came from the Super Mario Bros game that was a re-skin.
This movie is like if someone watched Demi Adejuyigbe’s “Rejected Theme Song From READY PLAYER ONE” and couldn’t tell that he was making fun of the movie. Except instead of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” it’d be the Super Mario Bros theme.
If I end up trying to document this experience, I’ll probably try to use headers that refer to Acts, even though this movie doesn’t follow any known storytelling structure that I’m aware of. It is more like tales told in the oral tradition, where there are rounds, interspersed with interludes where you say “Hey look, Pikmin!”
Hey look, Star Fox!
Credit to whoever designed the ship, for making it have the low-poly angles of the original but still fitting into the visual style of the rest of this bullshit. You’re really earning that half-star on Letterboxd!
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, bless its heart, is trying to do something with this idea that Fox McCloud and Mario are supposed to be rivals but no not really, they’re fast friends! Someone was dead set on making sure that idea made it into the screenplay, only for it to fail, because this is a movie where ideas go to die.
Anyway, this is the Star Fox portion of the movie, including a 2D animated sequence that, again, probably cost as much as entire other, better movies. It doesn’t really do anything at all, but it looks cool enough and just makes you think about how much better that could’ve been had they expanded it to feature length instead of making this.
I hope they don’t just keep doing “barrel roll” jokes over and over again. [spoiler: guess what]
Act ???: That Part in Altered States Where He Has Blasphemous Hallucinations Against Rear Projections
Mario and Luigi are babies now! That’s a thing that happened because they got shot with a gun that does that.
Those little irrepressible scamps are now on top of the T-Rex from Super Mario Odyssey. Which was a weird non-sequitur in that game because it didn’t fit with anything else, but was just an excuse for you to be able to run around as a T-Rex with a Mario hat.
Now, though, it’s an impeccably-rendered plot point that is I guess played for comedy while making the very young children behind me scream in what sounds like genuine terror, and I wish I were upset by that but they kind of deserve it. The game handled it so much better because it was positioned to take advantage of the fact that it’s a non-sequitur: this is your reward for finishing the level, don’t think too hard about it, just run around and have fun! There’s none of that here, because it’s yet another one of the 1000s of things that simply make no sense and serve no purpose.
Yoshi must have been keeping a close eye on the stopwatch measuring How Long A Thing Has To Be In This Movie Before It Can Become a Movie Tie-In Toy, because he immediately changes them all back to adults. No one will ever speak of this incident again.
Luigi licked a dinosaur’s eyeball, but they will all act like it never happened.
Now I’m trying to imagine what a real movie might have done with the requirement to turn several of its main characters into their Baby Versions. Turns out it’s not all that hard to think of like a dozen different ways it could’ve been made into an actual complication in an actual plot, instead of an extended fever dream that amuses no adults and horrifies children, but I guess that’s why I don’t work in Hollywood.
But now I’m thinking of why they made it a gun. If only there had been some type of magician character right there on the very same spaceship, some sort of Magic Koopa, maybe, for whom it would seem less out of place to have the ability to turn characters into babies. Oh well.
Credit to the movie, I guess, for having Magikoopa talk like Peter Lorre. (Another touch sure to delight the target audience and their millennial parents). But one of the best things from the video games was how he’d shoot geometric shapes out of his wand as spells. I bet that would’ve looked really cool in a big-budget 3D animated movie. Oh well.
Looks like we’re finally on the way to the boss confrontation, and fortunately it was right there the whole time.
We get brief glimpses — maybe about a minute’s worth, if that — of these tiny, tiny planets with over-sized characters running around their surface. It’s such a neat, iconic, image, and it seems like exactly the kind of thing you’d spend a lot of time exploring if you ever were to make a Super Mario Galaxy movie.
Hey look, they’re in a 2D-and-3D version of Bowser’s castle dungeon.
Bowser falls into lava and they’re going to do the Terminator thumbs-up gag in 3…2…1… Okay, they didn’t do it. But I would bet you any amount of money that somebody involved with this movie suggested it and was pissed that it wasn’t included.
Hey look, it’s the Game and Watch guy.
Are these power-ups from the New Super Mario Bros games? Were these guys paid by the reference, or something?
Finale: Dissociation Time
The movie goes on for another eight hours after that or maybe it was 10 minutes or maybe it’s like Lost Highway and I’m still in the theater right now?
Anyway, it pulls off the remarkable feat of being both a non-stop assault of complete nonsense and exactly every single thing you expect to happen. I would never be able to recount the events of this movie, but at the same time I bet that you could ask me “did [literally any random Nintendo-related thing] happen?” and I would have to say “yes.”
I spent an awful lot of the movie just thinking about how much better the video games are than anything the movie had to offer. And not in the way that you’d expect, or at least that I would’ve expected: where the games have minimal story in favor of outstanding game design, and the movie calls back to the best action moments of the game while delivering a stronger story. It’s not like that at all. I just kept thinking over and over again how the games are so much better than this movie in every way.
Because I was far too old to be seeing this movie in a theater, that means I’m also old enough to remember when people would treat the question “are video games art?” as if it were a reasonable topic of discussion. Even people who were immediately dismissive of it even being a question would often go to the trouble of presenting an explanation of how game design itself is an art.
And that’s true, but what I kept thinking while trying to keep my basic brain functions alive during The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was how the question was so completely irrelevant by any standard. The movie is nothing but references to decades of Nintendo games, and every time it reminded me of one, I remembered a moment of pure delight.
Discovering I could punch out of the top of a dungeon and run around where the score is, to find a secret warp zone. Turning into a tanuki, throwing my arms back, and running until I took flight. The game stopping for a jazzy musical number, where I can just stand there and dance like a maniac. A parade of piranha plants all singing in unison while I run through a level jumping on musical note blocks. All of these moments of pure, concentrated joy.
The game Super Mario Galaxy had many of these moments, like jumping into one of the star gates and blasting off into space while a volcano erupted behind me. I still have a vivid memory of that; I was over 30 years old and I was sitting on my couch laughing like one of the kids who just discovered E.T. was still alive. And then over and over again afterwards, running over these tiny planets, each one with a different game mechanic, and jumping high enough to escape its gravity and be pulled onto the surface of another one. Just magical.
This Shouldn’t Exist
So while I didn’t expect anything from The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I admit that I expected they’d at least be able to recreate that. After all, they didn’t have to do anything; those moments were already done. But the few times the movie does even acknowledge those moments, they are either given a begrudging acknowledgement, or are executed with zero sense of magic or even timing. I saw characters about to jump into a star gate for the first time and thought, “oh boy, this is gonna be special!” and instead it was as if the filmmakers were given a challenge of how to present a can’t-fail animated movie moment and figure out how to drain it of everything wonderful.
Before I saw the movie, I watched a video on The Nando Cut where he tells Nintendo fans: You Deserve Better. He’s coming at it from the viewpoint of a comic book fan who’s had his favorite stories and characters adapted into movies over the past 20+ years, several of which were good to great.
And initially while watching The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I was strongly inclined to agree. It was trivial to come up with hundreds of ways that the story could’ve been restructured, character moments given the correct weight, timing of scenes overhauled to actually make them land instead of feeling like a meaningless assault of noise and color.
But after spending the sixteen and a half hour runtime of this movie thinking how everything I was seeing was an affront to God, I realized how empty the entire premise was. When I say “this movie shouldn’t exist,” it’s not just a case of my writing over 4000 words (!) to try desperately and find some way to entertain myself from a dogshit movie. It’s literal. My years of thinking that traditional narrative excels at this, while interactive narrative excels at this, and we’ll get better and better at finding ways to create a synthesis of the two, is flawed.
To put it in a simpler way: the fact that this movie absolutely is not art doesn’t automatically mean that the games are. But it does make it even clearer why they are. A series of games that, again, are famously unconcerned with narrative beyond “I made you a cake. Meet me in the castle.” has already synthesized storytelling moments that are for me as powerful and unforgettable as many of the most significant moments in movies and TV. Media that I always just took for granted were obviously more naturally suited to impactful storytelling.
Discussions about the primacy of one medium over another — the book was better than the movie, the movie was better than the game — are pretty empty anyway. It implies a hierarchy, almost always with books on top and games at the bottom, that says absolutely nothing, because it ignores how much artistry is involved in knowing exactly how to use the strengths of a medium. In a just world, this movie would finally put an end to that hierarchy, even as an empty thought experiment.
It’s not just that Nintendo fans deserve better than this movie (although they certainly do). They already have better than this movie, several times over, in the form of the games that made them fans in the first place.
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