“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is neither an impressive exploration of the “Mario” universe nor a memorable film. Beneath a colorful exterior lies a skeleton of a story covered with innumerable, emotionless worms of characters picking at the scraps and competing for space on the pile.
A continuation of 2023’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Galaxy” sends the “Mario” cast on an interplanetary adventure to prevent Bowser Jr. from draining Princess Rosalina’s energy to power a universe-ending superweapon.
With stakes that high, one would assume Bowser Jr. must have a sinister, over-the-top motive to destroy all of existence. A villain must have a motive, after all, especially if his goal was total destruction.
However, “Galaxy” was content to leave that motive mostly unexplored. A flashback sequence explains that Junior got the idea from a bedtime story his father told. Although Bowser has always been a rather narrow-sighted villain, the simple desire for the film’s antagonist to make his father proud seemed like an afterthought to the overall story. It did not make for a compelling plot, especially considering the dynamic was barely explored.
The whole production really struggled with its characters. Bowser, for one, was initially working through his anger management issues and finding his peaceful, less diabolical side. Although his rage still often poked through, he did genuinely seem to be making a face turn through an occasional selfless or thoughtful act, even attempting to de-escalate his son’s rampage for a moment before being swayed by his own bedtime story. If he had completed his moral redemption, perhaps convincing his son that he doesn’t need to conquer existence just to make him proud, that could have made for a satisfying end to the story. It would have been a refreshing and somewhat unique evolution of the character, too, as heroic Bowsers are exceptionally rare in the “Mario” franchise, despite his soft side occasionally shining through.
Unfortunately, no other character is very complex either. Despite being the name in the title, Mario himself does not exude much personality, let alone display development or growth in any meaningful way. His brother Luigi is much the same; though both of them have become more confident since their previous cinematic appearances, they don’t express any wants or needs other than to assist Peach.
It would be more appropriate to consider Peach the film’s actual protagonist. Out of the film’s many primary characters, she received the closest thing to “character development” of them all. That isn’t to suggest any rash decisions should be made regarding the film’s title, but if she was preferred by the filmmakers over Mario as the film’s protagonist, this role should have been emphasized by giving her more screen time and opportunity for growth.
While debatably the secondary protagonist of the original game, Rosalina largely took a back seat for most of its adaptation. Her backstory is also significantly different from its incarnation in the original game. Although the change was made in service of the film’s story, it is underutilized, and some more emotional points that could have been hit were quickly ignored.
Fox McCloud from the “Star Fox” series, controversially, also appeared in the movie. While his inclusion was somewhat influential on the story, filling the role with a non-“Mario” character rather than a series mainstay further demonstrates the filmmakers’ attempt to bloat the film with as many recognizable characters as possible. The crossover character contributed little to the story that was uniquely “Fox McCloud” beyond brand recognition.
The sheer number of plotlines to follow and faces to show on screen left little time for reflection or even exposition, as the focus was clearly on the quantity of recognizable Nintendo faces to point at and exclaim, “Look, there’s…!” rather than the quality of characters actually relevant to this story.
Brief scenes or sequences focusing on a character who had just been introduced, only to disappear just as suddenly, were constant throughout the film. Halfway through the film, a fight breaks out between Princess Peach and countless minor villains from the series that ultimately contributed nothing to the narrative, despite the scene’s length.
In the final battle, Bowser falls into lava and becomes his popular skeletal “Dry Bowser” form, but it occurs so abruptly, and with so little gravity, it was as if a major character of the film, the series’ main antagonist, hadn’t just died and been reanimated in under 30 seconds. The cameos become so frequent that they become the majority focus of the story over the actual plot.
These spontaneous, dramatic events and character reveals occur so suddenly, one after another, that it’s almost exhausting. Its namesake game broke the excitement of intergalactic adventure with quiet moments to change the pace and show how far its heroes had come. Such moments do not exist in the film. Even the wonders of space travel are undermined by the filmmakers’ reverence for constant cameos and hollow side-plots.
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” was not a memorable moviegoing experience, and its only similarity to the games it was based on was the look of its characters and a space-travel narrative. This felt more like the filmmakers wanted to spend millions of dollars playing with toys rather than creating a film with a story to tell. It’s an excellent advertisement for the “Mario Galaxy” games, but it’s not very “super” and can hardly be considered a “movie.”
