Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,
In 1902, filmmaker, magician, and all-around legend Georges Méliès released A Trip to the Moon. A revolutionary work for a nascent medium, it remains one of the purest expressions of cinematic art to this day. Méliès’s impeccable craft challenged the very definition of art, forever imbuing film with a desire to grasp the unknown.
In 2026, toy-maker Nintendo released The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. A revolutionary work for the still-young medium of “technically a film,” this movie reaches heights in Intellectual Property management never before thought possible. For years, filmmakers and audiences alike assumed we simply lacked the power to cram a film this full of references to games released before 1998. But, like Méliès before them, directors Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath have truly changed the game for what can be achieved in the field of “cinematic arts” while still being legally considered a movie. The animation is competent, the voice work passable, and the story is discernable. While I have personal qualms calling this a “film” — it is much closer to a five-second clip of keys jingling on a 90-minute loop — it’s right there in the title, so who am I to argue? The images certainly move.
Following Mario Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi Mario (Charlie Day), or The Mario Brothers, for short, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie sees our mustachioed heroes venture into space to find Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and help her save her long-lost sister, Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson). Our motely crew must contend with Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie, Silver Lion for Best Director 2025), who has kidnapped Rosalina and is using her to win back the love of his father, Bowser (Jack Black). Yoshi is also in this film, played by Donald Glover, and he is a precious, completely innocent soul. There will be no Yoshi bad-talk in this review.
This oddly blunt story of parental abandonment is diluted through a series of hell-like detours to colorful planets filled with characters, signs, or even slight visual nods to video games that no one has heard of or played. The last time Fox McCloud, an anthropomorphic, spacefaring fox, had his own game was 2016, and it sold just under 500,000 copies. That game was essentially a remake of Star Fox 64 (1997), which in turn was a remake of the original Star Fox released in 1993. I have now gone through the sum total of all Star Fox games. Voiced by Glen Powell, Fox McCloud is a main character in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. You would, of course, be forgiven for having no idea who he was.
Nominally a comedy-adventure film for kids, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is actually directed toward men in their mid-30s. In order to understand every single reference in this film, you have to be at least 35, if only due to the passing nature of time. One of the movie’s longest (and according to the middle-aged men sitting next to me, funniest) jokes concerns the character R.O.B., based on a toy released by Nintendo in 1985. I feel I must now offer a correction to my previously stated age range of mid-30s; in order to actually have played with and remembered R.O.B., you have to be, generously, 45. I suppose R.O.B. was a very slow-moving toy, as the film makes us sit through an oddly long scene of him turning around. This joke is repeated twice.
Not to be outdone, immediately after the first R.O.B joke is a ten minute action scene that sees Princess Peach fight Wart, a green toad, Birdo, a pink Yoshi-like thing, and Mouser, an admittedly very cool mouse. These are all villains from the game Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA), which released in 1988. At some point, you may begin to wonder if there are any references to Super Mario Galaxy, the game which this movie is allegedly based on. Released in 2007, today’s kids are still much too young to have played it, but perhaps they bought one of the many re-releases Nintendo has offered. I know I have. Unfortunately, though, beyond a few “turn to camera moments” wherein the names of certain levels in Galaxy are simply said out loud, the game is all but absent from this film. Famous for its live-recorded orchestral soundtrack, the movie decides to only sample a few of those songs, and makes sure to not let any of them play all the way through, instead favoring strange remixes which sound much worse.
In recent years, film critics have been accused of going too harshly on children’s films. Supposedly, we should leave space for people to simply have fun. The kids who were in my screening of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie were not having fun. They did not understand 95% of what was going on, because it all relied on built-in knowledge of Nintendo lore, something a nine year old simply cannot be expected to contain. But no one making this film was thinking about them. A film that reduces children to confused bystanders in their own entertainment, so that grown men can feel seen, is not a children’s film. I’m not really sure what it is. Therapy with a marketing budget? Those adults who enjoyed this film have, in their incessant need to be catered to, helped bring about the slow death of an entire medium of art. Cinema has always had its parasites. Rarely have they been this well-fed.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is not the last film that will ever be made. But with its release, we have certainly inched closer to that horrible day.
Signing off,
Max Bolen
Seriously I don’t want to see anything bad about Yoshi in the comments.
This made me actually laugh out loud
Lmao this was a hilarious review and a good point about how the catering to short attention spans goes directly against the pandering to older audiences.
I also do funny nostalgic film reviews would love to subscribe/follow you if you’d like to do the same in return :)