There’s imagination and enthusiasm here, but little else beneath the spectacle.
Weird as this sounds, I think The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has the same basic problems as Love Story, Hulu’s glancing exploration of the doomed romance between Carolyn Bessett and JFK Jr. Both film and TV show have a handful of decent performances and a thrillingly bright eye for visual detailing. But both suffer from the fact that, for most of the running time, there’s actually very little at stake. Sure, one is more likely to have a clever joke about sadistic Mario Maker levels, but the other is more likely to drop in Roads by Portishead at just the right second. Swings, as they say, and roundabouts.
At least The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is made with good intentions. This is the second big screen outing for this animated, Chris Pratt-voiced Mario, and I’m tempted to say it’s quite a bad movie that’s been conjured with enthusiasm and imagination. Its badness is therefore kind of fascinating.
Let’s see if I can get the plot to fill a whole sentence. Rosalina has been captured by Bowser Jr, and everyone else has to try and rescue her. Okay, another sentence: To do that they’re going to need to explore the galaxy!
What this amounts to is a lot of quite vivid sequences, many of which are brisk and enjoyable. There’s that gag about Mario Maker, for starters, and there’s a fight in a kind of gravity-muddled space casino. Yoshi turns up and swallows lots of things, and even gets to explore Manhattan for an afternoon. There’s a T.rex and then a baby T.rex. There’s a nice scene with ROB and a legit wonderful cameo from Fox McCloud, voiced by Glen Powell in perhaps the most perfect piece of casting since Sam Elliott played Lee Scorseby in another bad movie that had some good moments.
Beyond that there are literally thousands of easter eggs, whether it’s a sight gag about a beloved old peripheral – not the Power Glove, but I’m sure that’s in the background somewhere if you look for it – or the music from Mario 1-2 being referenced whenever the heroes head underground. Speaking of soundtracks, the movie is in love with the Gusty Garden theme, which is one of the series’ best. Speaking of the series’ best, there’s a neat riff on the overworld map from Super Mario World. I could go on listing clever bits like this forever.
But clever nods make for good post-credit sequences rather than movies, and at times any section of this movie could be a post-credits sequence to another, slightly better film. So what brings it all down for me?
For one thing, and I feel mean for saying this, Chris Pratt’s Mario places a bit of a killjoy right at the centre of the movie. It’s not just that the performance is flat, but the dialogue is awful, and most of the time Mario’s just there to comment on what’s already happening.
But I think Mario’s performance is a symptom of a bigger problem. The movie has a basic set-up, which is fine: so does Oakley Hall’s Warlock. But in its love of Mario games it also has assumed the pacing of Mario games. This means it’s very dense with ideas that fly by in an instant and are then gone. It’s an adventure of disjointed sequences.
Gimmicks and speed are a perfect combination for platform games, not least because you can go back and replay levels. This, after all, is how all the beloved things that the Mario movies reference became beloved in the first place. But in a film, all these things rushing past incessantly can stun you into an elevated kind of boredom. Nothing is a proper movie moment in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, because absolutely everything is a moment. Everything is beautifully designed and conceived and choreographed, but it’s here and then it’s gone and it didn’t really have any consequence anyway. The movie winks at fans constantly but doesn’t have anything to actually say to them.
I appreciate that I am a 47 year old man reviewing a film aimed at five-year-olds. My answer to this is, yes, I’m almost 50, but I’m still almost embarrassingly ready to lose myself in fiction. There was a Specsavers ad that ran before the film and took 45 seconds to explore the world from the perspective of short-sighted children and it absolutely destroyed me. I will remember it forever! On my death bed I’ll probably be thinking: cor, Specsavers hit a home run that day. But the Mario movie I saw after that advert didn’t register, and I suspect that’s because there was no theme being explored beneath all the action, and the theme is what helps elevate a thing. It’s the thing you actually have to say, or just to pick at and worry over.
To put it a different way, when my daughter was younger we watched a lot of animated movies, and it was fascinating to see how the ones she returned to actually had a bit of substance to go with them. She wasn’t a young media studies lecturer, but even so, the ones we rewatched until the discs burned up were all about something. You could argue that the Mario movies are about nostalgia: fine, but whose nostalgia? And anyway, that’s not really enough.
I am not being entirely honest. The weird thing is there’s almost an interesting movie in here, or rather there are parts of a movie where the ideas are briefly as brilliant as the dynamism and spectacle. But it’s not a Mario movie, it’s a Bowser movie. Bowser and Bowser Jr have an intriguing dynamic for much of the film, with the son trying to complete a villainous plan that the father might have outgrown. The best sequence in the film belongs to them, and it’s also one of the simplest: the father tells the son a thrillingly nasty bedtime story, and in doing so falls under its spell again.
But this isn’t a Bowser movie, just as it isn’t really a Mario movie or a Luigi movie or a Rosalina movie or any of that jazz. There isn’t enough space and time for anything truly memorable to develop.
And it’s a shame! After I left the cinema I looked through the cast list and, mates, it’s dazzling. The people and talent in this film! But none of them really have a chance to shine – other than Glen Powell, of course, but you just try and stop him, buddy. So. Perhaps Portishead said it best. “Never found our way. Regardless of what they say.” That’s nicely put, to be honest.
This review is based on a viewing of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Eurogamer sourced its own tickets.
