It’s been 3 years since the box office phenomenon The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a movie which received very mixed reviews from both fans and critics across the world. And now, we finally got the sequel titled The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and I’ve been dying to talk about this one…
“Mario ventures into space, exploring cosmic worlds and tackling galactic challenges far from the familiar Mushroom Kingdom.”
We have the entire cast from the first film returning for this sequel (besides Seth Rogen’s Donkey Kong) and at least all of them deliver. Props to Benny Safdie’s Bowser Jr which was probably my favorite character on this film. Chris Pratt and Charlie Day reaches the same level as the first film while Anya Taylor Joy’s Peach goes a little deeper with a more prominent role. The whole cast does mostly an amazing job but what really stand out technically in this film are the visuals, this film is not only beautiful to see, it’s Illumination’s most visually stunning film ever by far and one of the best ones I’ve seen in a long while. They probably upped the budget for this sequel because theses visuals rocked.
But what really bothered me in this film is how massively coagulated this script is, and how worrying this is for the film industry. You know how little kids nowadays have reduced attention spans and short-form content addiction due to either YouTube Shorts, or TikTok or any other platform? Well, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was literally made for this audience! The film has no plots, and every time they would try to develop a plot point, they would rush it so kids won’t be bored. They felt the desperate need of adding an action sequence every 2 minutes through this film because of this kind of audience. And the fact we’re normalizing this is what worries me, but I guess that’s the world we live now and I gotta get used to it…
But even though there’s no plot and it’s just many action scenes compacted together, most of the scenes are enjoyable. What can I say right? It’s an extremely rushed film that will go by so fast, this film was 1 hour & 38 minutes long and it genuinely felt like 20 minutes, but not in a good way. So many characters with a massive potential of being developed in a better way and they ended up just sidelined because otherwise the story would “take too long” to be told and the audience just wants frenetic action sequences that won’t take your attention away… One thing I must praise this film for are the massive amount of references, and I think that for this reason it was already worth checking it out.
Still, it’s safe to say that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was made for YouTube Shorts viewers. The constant need to add an action sequence every time the story (with lots of potential) begins to develop makes it feel like just another soulless animated film.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie releases in theaters on April 1.
