The Super Mario Galaxy Movie — my kid says A+
Took my daughter and my wife to see The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this week. I went in hoping for a fun afternoon. Came out genuinely impressed, and my kid came out informing every adult in the lobby that it was the best movie ever made.
Quick caveat: I haven't finished the original Mario Galaxy game yet — my daughter and I are still working through it together. So I came in fresh enough that I can't tell you how much of the movie pulls directly from the game's plot. From my seat it played like its own thing using the game's geography. People further along than us can tell me how much got lifted; the parts I recognized I enjoyed, and the parts I didn't recognize stood up on their own.
#It hit the nostalgia notes without leaning on them
Forty years of Mario history shows up — power-ups, villains, locations, tiny visual gags I didn't expect — but the story walks under all of it instead of stopping to point at every reference. The plot has actual stakes, actual setups, actual payoffs. That's the part I didn't expect. Most movies built off a game IP feel like a clip reel. This one had a plot.
#The strong-female undertone is the most surprising thing about the movie
Yes, the plot involves rescuing a woman — but she wasn't taken because she's a woman. She was taken because she's the strongest piece on the board and the antagonists needed her power. That's the right kind of damsel-in-distress story: one where the damsel is the most dangerous person in the room, and getting captured is a strategic move against her, not a setup for someone else to be the hero. Around her, Peach does most of the heavy lifting. It may be a Mario movie, but she's one of the true heroes of it. Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi do their thing too — and they do it well — but the moments that landed for me were Peach's. None of it feels checkbox-y. Nobody pauses to deliver a speech about it. They just do the work and the movie trusts you to notice. That's the right way to do it, and it's the version of the message my kid actually absorbs without me having to explain anything afterward.
#Yoshi steals the show — with help
Yoshi is exactly the Yoshi you want him to be. The help comes from a guest character out of a different Nintendo franchise — I won't say who, because watching every adult in the theater simultaneously realize who walked in was half the fun. The two of them walk off with every scene they share. The crossover energy is the part of the movie I'm still grinning about. If you grew up on Nintendo, you'll know exactly which beat I mean within ten seconds of him showing up.
#The verdict
Solid for kids. Solid for Mario fans. Solid for adults who were kids twenty (or thirty, or forty) years ago holding a Nintendo controller. My daughter gave it an A+ out of 10 and I am inclined to defer to her on this one. I'd recommend it.
#About the Rotten Tomatoes score
The scoreboard at the top tells the story before I do. As I'm writing this, RT critics have it at 43% and the RT audience has it at 88% — a forty-five point spread, on the same site, between the people who get paid to watch movies and the people who actually went to see this one. That gap is the whole argument I'm about to make. The people writing the reviews aren't the people this movie was made for. It wasn't built for jaded film critics. It was built for kids and for the adults who used to be kids holding a Nintendo controller. Pick the right audience and the score makes sense.
If your kid likes Mario even a little, take them. If you used to be a kid who liked Mario even a little, take yourself.