The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026)

PG.  Honest to Pete, outside the fact that there is constant videogame action throughout, I have a hard time saying anything that might be even slightly inappropriate for children.  There are some mildly scary moments.  A realistic dinosaur chases a cartoon dinosaur?  I don't know.  This all seems fairly tame.  It's made by Illumination, so it has the same level of questionable content.  Actually, it might be less.  People aren't farting in these movies, as far as I remember.

DIRECTORS: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Fabien Polack, and Pierre Leduc

I'm in trouble here, guys.  I took my kids to go see the Super Mario Galaxy movie immediately before leaving for a one-week vacation.   They were so excited.  I knew I wasn't going to have time to sit down and write about it in a timely manner, so I said I was going to hold off for about ten days.  Is this blog an immediate take on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie?  Absolutely not.  The most generous version of this blog is admitting that I had time to sleep on the movie.  I hate that.  I hate that for you.  I hate that for me.  But here I am, refusing to watch this movie again before writing about it.  (Also, how would that even happen?  This week is going to be straight hell, so I can't --as a grown man! --sneak off and rewatch The Super Mario Galaxy Movie for the sake of a blog. I'll be fine.   I remember enough.)

I don't have the hot take on this.  I basically align with the consensus on the quality of this film.  The nice version is that Illumination has proven that you don't actually have to make a movie to make it entertaining.  Geez Louise, how is this a feature length film?  Here's the deal.  I've played almost every major Mario game.  I beat Super Mario Galaxy.  I didn't even play Super Mario Galaxy 2, but my knowledge of the first game seems more than what most people probably know about this story.  Normally, movies --especially kids' movies --at least attempt to welcome new audiences into the series.  Heck, the Super Mario Brothers Movie did a fabulous job of getting new audiences involved in the movie.   It has everything that you need to know to help new people understand.  The first movie?  Princess Peach lives in a magical mushroom world.  She's kidnapped by a dragon person.  These two plumbers from our world have to save her.  (Actually, let me remind myself.  Princess Peach isn't really kidnapped for the majority of the movie.  Luigi is kidnapped, but still!)  But this movie?  I understood everything that happened because I've played decades of Mario games, but what did my 80-year-old mother understand?  She wanted to make her grandkids happy by accompanying them to a movie that they're excited to see.   There's nothing that's even trying to help her.

But the thing that people are talking about relentlessley --and justly so --is the fact that the movie has no plot or arcs.  I don't know about "No" arcs.  The movie introduces a pretty compelling storyline.  The problem is that the film undoes it immediately.  I'm sorry if you heard this other places first because it has been out there.  But Mario has nothing to do in a movie called Super Mario Galaxy.  As a character, that dude is straight up flat.  There's a little something about asking Princess Peach to be his girlfriend.  But nothing advances that plot whatsoever.  It quickly becomes an afterthought in the story.  This is a bit of a stretch, but we can kind of see Luigi as a character as opposed to a plot device.  But even Luigi has nothing to offer except for another version of Mario.  The character who almost has a story is Bowser.  I didn't see that coming.  As the trailer shows, the movie starts off with Bowser resenting Mario for the events of the first movie.  Luigi believes in rehabiitation, so he spends the first act asking Mario to give Bowser a second chance.  When Mario is in the thick of it, he concedes to Bowser's request.  And from there, the story seems to be about the power of forgiveness and change.  After all, Bowser sacrifices himself for Mario and understands that Mario was doing what he thought was right.  The biggest frustration is that the second and third acts kind of forgot the path that they laid out for Bowser.  When Bowser Jr. appears, Bowser Jr. reminds what makes Bowser a compelling villain.  All that stuff then disappears, which is disappointing because Bowser's tranformation is the only dynamic thing that happens in this movie.  If anything, this movie has a weirdly negative message about the role of fatherhood.

One of the things that Bowser suffers from is the notion that he's a bad father.  (I'm not arguing against that.  The dude is a literal monster who abandoned his children for his own selfish world domination schemes.)  But Bowser Jr. bonded with the toxic version of Bowser.  He loved the idea that his dad was this great bad guy who was going to take over the galaxy.  Now, when Bowser Jr. interacts with Bowser eventually, he reminds Bowser of all the great times that the two of them had plotting the destruction of the cosmos.  But this is at a time when Bowser has been doing some soul searching about his own mistakes.  Bowser Jr. spends the rest of the movie trying to manipulate his father into being the toxic one who made Bowser Jr. feel like the most important kid in the universe.  I find it odd that there isn't a lot of pushback at any point to have Bowser sit Bowser Jr. down and have a talk about what manhood and parenthood means.  Instead, it feels like Bowser Jr. parents Bowser into returning to old addictions.  And there really isn't a clear resolution that "What Bowser believes is bad."  If anything, it ends with a message that "I'll do anything for my kid, even if that thing is bad for my kid."  Yeah, it's an incredibly dumb movie and it's stupid that I'm putting this much thought into this.  But the overall concern is that is that Bowser actually became a likable character in this one.  You are meant to despise Bowser in the first movie.  He's incredibly unsympathetic, as a lot of great villains are.  But with this one, the movie really tries to get you to like Bowser.  To have him abandon any pretence of redemption is good for the franchise, but terrible for storytelling. 

And a lot of the problems of this movie come from the idea that the priority is the franchise, not the movie itself.  Golly, there has been a lot of frustration with the dangers of fan service.  As a Marvel and a Star Trek fan, I don't deny that fan service can be really fun.  When the Enterprise-D was rebuilt by Geordi in Picard, I think I actively cheered.  It was beautiful.  But nothing in this movie feels even remotely earned.  Is it fun to see Fox McCloud in a movie?  Absolutely.  Is he portrayed as a fun character?  I mean, yeah, he's just Han Solo, but I don't care.  But so much of this movie is going out of its way to capitalize on the Nintendo nerds.  Like Pikmin?  Mr. Game-and-Watch?   These are fun moments that don't make a lick of sense narratively.  I go back to thinking of my 80-year-old mother wondering why the camera is focusing on these tiny aliens for no reason.  Or why there's a poorly designed character appearing out of nowhere to fight Dry Bowser.  These are just choices that are meant to make nerds scream.  But good fan service feels earned.  I'm not even claiming that the Picard fan service is necessarily the best example.  But it was nowhere near as rough as the Super Mario Galaxy fan service.

The most baffling thing of it all, as almost submissive as the plot --what little there was --is to Super Mario Galaxy the game, the story didn't matter.  Listen, maybe a lot of this is coming from the fact that I don't really care that much about Mario lore.  But I also think that Rosalina was kind of wasted in this movie.  Again, I cannot stress enough that I do not care about Rosalina as a character.  It's fun to have a Super Mario Galaxy movie and good for this movie giving her some attention.  But I also don't know much about her overall placement in this universe outside the fact that she's one of two alternate princess that this movie could be about.  But Rosalina shows herself to be a capable fighter in the first act, only to be captured and sidelined for the majority of the film.  What she was doing to power a big cannon didn't make a lot of sense.  Rather than actually being a character, she's just there to push the story forward.  My frustration with the first movie is the fact that we didn't really get to see Luigi as a character and only as a plot device.  The same could hold true for Rosalina in this film.

The insane thing of it all is that I don't hate this movie.  Like, it's actively bad.  It's not as funny.  It's a chaotic mess.  But in terms of eye candy, it does a mildly decent job.  I've been hearing that Super Mario Galaxy is a response to TikTok culture and I don't know if I agree with that.  More along the lines that, because nothing matters, all you can do is choose to watch the silliness without any stakes.  My soul hurts from that concept.  There needs to be stakes to tell a story.  But instead, like playing a video game, you are often more interested with the aesthetics and the mechanics of the story.  Like, it's funny to see Yoshi walking around and eating stuff.  I can't believe that the folks at Illumination strung together enough novelty to piece together a whole movie.  But somehow, it works better than it should.  I'm never going to admit that it works.  I got a little bored halfway through the movie.  But I was nowhere near saying "Ah, look at this hot trash."  I was just thinking that this movie is incredibly dumb and maybe there might be some resolution.  Maybe this is a movie that weaponizes your own apathy against you, but I left the theater thinking that I at least was mildly entertained throughout.  

The worst part about all of this is that I'm probably going to end up watching this movie half-a-dozen more times.  It's going to be the car trip movie and I'm low-key depressed about that because I'll be hearing this movie instead of watching it.  Like, if the first movie has funny lines that I can hear while driving, this movie is just going to be noise in the background.  But my kids liked it, so who really cares?