Lost in Space

I won’t pretend like I enjoyed The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Released three years ago, in 2023, that movie was very well made at a technical level but was otherwise an incredibly shallow and vapid experience. There was only the most basic and threadbare of a story, going exactly the way you’d expect, beat for beat, while the film most threw shiny things, bright colors, and nostalgic Nintendo references at you in hopes you wouldn’t notice that it didn’t actually have anything to say about Mario or his world. It also made $1.3 Bil at the Box Office, so while I didn’t care for the film, clearly a lot of people did.

But, come on, expecting anything from an Illumination production is like expecting water to not be wet. This is a company that rose to prominence on the back of Despicable Me, a film that, generally, people seem to like. After that one film, though, the group has cranked out one shallow, empty film after another, with the likes of Hop, The Lorax, The Secret Life of Pets, Sing, and more all earning money and then getting forgotten as soon as audiences left theaters. This is their bread and butter – family-friendly, narratively empty movies that keep the kiddies entertained without offending anyone – and they make a lot of money doing it. Why would they change the formula now?

If they were going to improve, you would think they would have done it for the first Super Mario SeriesHe's the world's most famous plumber and the biggest face in Nintendo's stable, a character so ubiquitous you already knew we were talking about Mario even before we said his name. production they handled. They were given one of the biggest IPs in the world, one would think they’d rise to the challenge. They didn’t, instead turning Mario into just another vapid piece of IP slop like everything else they made, and since that worked, you would expect them to give the same treatment to a sequel. And yet, even with those low expectations, somehow the sequel, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie manages to slide under the bar, being more empty, pointless, and horrid than I could have even expected.

The nominal story, such as it is, is that Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson), the magical princess who protects the Lumas as their adoptive mother, is kidnapped by Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) because princesses are magical and Bowser Jr. needs to tap into that magic for his doom machine. Bowser Jr. has a plan: invade the Mushroom Kingdom, rescue his captured father, Bowser (Jack Black), and then join forces with his father to use his doom machine to destroy the galaxy for… reasons.

Obviously standing in his way are the heroes of the first film: Mario (Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), joined on their quest by new ally Yoshi (Donald Glover). After Bowser Jr. attacks, Peach and Toad head off with a Luma to the Space Junk Galaxy to find out what happened and why Bowser Jr. is doing what he’s doing. Meanwhile, Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi work to thwart Bowser Jr., joined for a time by Bowser who seems to have turned a leaf… right up until he turns it right back again. There’s a lot of running around, and a bunch of big, colorful set pieces, all before we finally get to the big confrontation between the Bowsers and the heroes, which ends about how you expect it to. And then everyone goes back to have a party in the Mushroom Kingdom once more.

Whether you enjoy The Super Mario Galaxy Movie or not is really going to depend on what you expect from this film. If what you’re looking for is a bunch of action, a huge number of Nintendo cameos, and plenty of bright, shiny set pieces to distract you, then this film has all that in spades. The film never stops, going from one location to another with very little connective tissue. We see locations from Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Mario Sunshine. We get cameos from the Super Mario Bros. 2 villains, Fox McCloud, Pikmin, and more. We’re treated to any number of action sequences as the characters run to, and from, danger repeatedly. It’s a bright, colorful cacophony that never really stops.

And, in fairness to the film, it’s all lovingly designed and rendered. No matter what else I think about the film, I cannot deny that this is a meticulously crafted movie. Everything looks gorgeous, with details and textures adding to the world and making it feel more real. Hell, there’s a sequence halfway into the film featuring hand puppets and it’s so well done that I thought they had to have filmed actual puppets and put them into the movie. The level of craft and care on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s artwork cannot be denied… I just wish that level of care extended to the story at all.

At a relatively svelte 98 minutes The Super Mario Galaxy Movie doesn’t have time to worry about things like story or characters at all. Rosalina is introduced at the start of the film, gets to show she’s a happy mother to Lumas (star-shaped beings who, outside this one scene, barely have any consequence on the film at all), is then captured, and basically exits the film at this point, her job done. Yoshi is similarly introduced, gets a couple of cute sequences, and then otherwise has no bearing on the story. Hell, Mario and Luigi are in this film (and arguably are the title characters), and they really don’t do anything besides run around a bunch and sometimes fight monsters. The characters aren’t given anything of real substance to do at all.

The only character with a nominal arc in the film is Peach. We first see her at her birthday party, but learn that it’s not actually her birthday because the Toads, who adopted her, celebrate the day she arrived in their kingdom. No one knows where she came from at all. So her arc is about her going out into the galaxy to discover who she is. This is a solid foundation for a story, if the film were interested in that. It isn’t really, though, so after raising the question of, “who is Peach,” the movie then spends most of the time not answering that question before tossing out a crumb of a story before wiping its hands and saying, “job done.”

At even a basic, mechanical level, this movie doesn’t really care about its story at all. It’s there not to motivate the characters and get them to engage with each other, learning and growing and caring, but just to move them around like action figures so it can introduce the next big set piece. Rosalina and Yoshi don’t need to be in this movie, but they’re included because they’re popular characters and this movie needed more ways to sell toys. Fox McCloud doesn’t need to be here, but Nintendo wants to make a Star Fox movie, so in Fox goes. At each turn, characters are thrown into the film because they are recognizable, not because they add anything. The film just keeps moving, dashing from place to place, but never saying anything about anything going on within its bounds. It just… does.

And I guess you could say it worked. Raking in a cool $1 Bil at the Box Office, the sequel is a success by almost any metric. Yes, it didn’t make quite as much as the first film, but no one is going to complain about a movie making $1 Bil, especially when it was done on a budget of just $110 Mil. That’s solid Hollywood math. Illumination raked in the cash, everyone walks away happy, and a third film is, presumably, in the works already. Hell, there are also rumors of a Donkey Kong project and a Luigi’s Mansion spin-off, so you know Nintendo is perfectly happy with the performance of this film.

But just because a film makes money that doesn’t mean it’s good, and I can think of no clearer example of that than The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. This is a film not built on cameos and bright colors, without anything actually interesting to say about anything that happens in the film. It’s the most hollow, empty, tedious film I’ve ever seen that also never stops running forward. Credit where it’s due, Illumination can make very distracting movies, but distraction only gets you so far, and all The Super Mario Galaxy Movie manages to do is run as fast and hard as it can right into a wall. These films will keep getting made, but I think we all have to realize they’re going to be as empty as they can be going forward.