With all the emphasis placed on nostalgia and cheap Easter eggs, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a creatively bankrupt movie that’s insulting to kids, adults, and fans of the Mario video game series.
There are 1.36 billion reasons why The Super Mario Galaxy Movie needs to exist, none of which are good on any creative or entertainment level. Look, I get that big-budget IP movies like this is designed to make money. But this is easily the most audience-insulting cash-grab in recent memory. F1: The Movie and Jurassic World Rebirth are masterpieces compared to this.
On every single conceivable creative level, this is a depressing rock bottom for what movies can be in 2026. Comparing it to rock bottom is an insult to rocks and bottoms. At least rocks can make me feel something after I hit my head against them, unlike this dumpster fire I just watched.
The first movie is far from accomplished, but it at least had moments of imagination, like the linking of the ‘real’ world with the Mushroom Kingdom via warp pipe and funny visual gags with the penguins from the Snow Kingdom. This movie, by dispiriting contrast, is a 98-minute sugar rush of non-stop action set pieces, all of which are stuffed with Easter eggs from various Mario games. It’s almost like the movie is desperately asking us, ‘are you having fun yet?!?’
While there’s a plot in the most threadbare definition of the word – Mario and gang need to save Rosalina from Bowser and Bowser Jr. – there’s no semblance of an actual story to be found. Any hints of a potential storyline – like the father-son story with the Bowsers – are almost immediately dropped in favour of more ‘remember this level/power up/monster from the video games?!?’. What’s doubly baffling about this pandering approach is how the movie moves so quickly that there’s no room for audiences to appreciate anything.
By trying to appeal to Mario fans’ nostalgia in such a nakedly embarrassing way, all the characters are effectively sidelined. Every single speaking character has no more than a handful of lines, and those that made the cut are pure exposition or dumb jokes with no punchline. Why this movie even bothered to expand its voice cast to include Brie Larson, Glen Powell, Donald Glover, and Benny Safdie escapes me because the script might as well be non-existent. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie could’ve been a literal wordless movie and still had the same effect. Kudos to the whole voice cast for what must’ve been the easiest job of their whole careers.
Young kids are obviously the main audience for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, but the emptiness of all the visual chaos is so dire that we need to have a serious intervention on the quality of content we serve them. Kids may not understand the nuance or subtext of something like Ratatouille, but at least that movie doesn’t insult their intelligence. Hell, even Zootopia 2 had some kind of family-friendly moral message about tolerance. This, on the other hand, is the purest distillation of ‘minimal effort’ in the form an overwhelmingly colourful pile of brain rot that’s as insulting as it is lazy, almost like the filmmakers are outright disdainful of their young audience.
The inciting incident where Rosalina is captured by Bowser Jr. only unfolds the way it does because one of her baby star ‘children’ gets in the way, causing her to lose focus. This thread occurs multiple times throughout the movie as almost every hurdle or complication only arises because a character is being stupid or because some young baby characters are getting in the way.
On occasions where the disdain is less apparent, the laziness comes more to the forefront. During a later sequence involving the characters building something big, the movie changes its visual style to match the Super Mario Bros. 3 aesthetic. This may seem cute initially, but it’s hard not to view this as another shameless Easter egg play mixed with ‘it’s cheaper to use old-school video game visuals than expensive CGI.’ There’s a lot of slop out there – both of the AI-generated and non-AI kind – but kids deserve better than whatever this muck is being served up to them because this will dampen creative curiosity rather than inspire it.
One might argue that the movie’s story-light, rapid-paced structure is exactly the point because it captures what it feels like to play a Mario video game. To that, I would counter by saying that video games and movies are different art mediums trying to achieve different things. Video games put agency and control into the audience’s hands, allowing them to create their own story or journey. Movies, on the other hand, require audiences to give up that control, which puts the onus on the filmmakers to fill that gap with a coherent story. That’s not to say it’s easy by any means, but it does allow for creative freedom to adapt the material that works best for a movie audience. The fact that the filmmakers didn’t even bother to try is simply disheartening.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is almost certainly going to be one of the worst moviegoing experiences of 2026 and a depressing example of what big-budget IP filmmaking looks like moving forward. This doesn’t deserve to be awarded any stars because I at least think long and hard about each movie I review, whereas this movie is firmly against any kind of thinking. It’ll just have to make do with its annoying star-like characters, that’s as close to a participation award as we’re going to get for this abomination.
