Super Mario Galaxy is a sequel tailor-made for its fans and only the youngest ones: the movie review

Some films find a precise audience that leads them to success and hold onto it tightly, making it their absolute priority, even at the cost of making subsequent films that are only good for that specific target. This curiously happens much more often in video game adaptations than elsewhere: it's exactly the approach taken by the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise and the first Minecraft movie, which proved to be excellent commercial successes, but left critics skeptical and the general public cold or at least perplexed.

If your fandom is devoted enough and large enough, making the right film to please them, making a profit, and continuing to shoot new chapters in the saga is a solid economic plan, even if it forces cinematically mediocre titles. The point is to create another product to give to an audience willing to pay, not to create a new film adaptation: economically it makes sense, even if artistically it seems (and is) disheartening and mercenary. Super Mario: Galaxy moves in exactly this direction and it's at least strange, also because it's unclear how much the choice is deliberate and conscious. This is because a long-lived and global franchise like Super Mario doesn't need to move this way, being able to count on a multi-generational, vast, and extended potential audience including families with no particular video game interests but looking for an animated film to watch at Easter in the cinema with their little ones.

Super Mario doesn't try to be a good film, but to make its fans (and children) happy

So much so that the last chapter had a very different approach: it was an introductory adventure to the world of Mario and its characters, with a narrative structure just slightly more complex than the "pure" one of the first games, which presented the characters and, as a treat, connected them to our reality in the first true and only plot twist of the story. All with a simple and very direct approach, so as to involve even the youngest audience. Light, inconsequential, but all in all pleasant for families.

Given that the title contains the word Galaxy, it was reasonable to expect a film that exploited the intuition of one of the most recent video game chapters in Mario's history on Nintendo consoles, with a three-dimensional approach and a myriad of small planets designed to make gameplay always surprising and fresh. A trait easily transferable to a film, which can adopt stylistic solutions in the screenplay or direction to amaze the viewer. Instead, at the beginning, Super Mario: Galaxy is disorienting because it seems like a film for very, very young children (practically preschool age) and it takes a long time to dispel the doubt that they are not the target audience, never quite succeeding.

The first characteristic noticed about this film is how the characters, especially the female ones, revert to being flat, stereotypical. The previous Super Mario heavily emphasized the concept that Peach is a princess who can take care of herself, independent and strong. Here, instead, Rosalina, who should be even more powerful and important, is reduced to the rank of a glorified babysitter for a multitude of childish stars.

With the introduction of Bowser Junior as the new villain and the return of Mario (voiced by Claudio Santamaria) and Luigi protecting Peach's kingdom, the film tries to pick up the adult audience along the way, focusing more on Nintendo fans of yesteryear, on connoisseurs of its catalog, going so far as to devise a planet capable of containing a multitude of quotes and cameos: a bit like what happened in Wreck-It Ralph in the Internet world, but without the same inventiveness or narrative coherence. In Super Mario: Galaxy, in fact, there is precisely the great difficulty of introducing circumstantial explanations and backstories naturally and without pausing the film. The script is so lazy in this sense that Peach is forced to read her own past from a book (and we with her), because the film cannot give us and her the necessary revelations in any other way.

Super Mario Galaxy brings with it all the "successful" flaws of Illumination

In this sense, I feel compelled to use an adjective I often use for animated productions managed by Illumination Entertainment, the studio behind the success of Despicable Me and the Minions (who here, inexplicably, are introduced in robotic form into Mario's world in a prolonged and rather irritating cameo): mercenary. Illumination has practically made an art of "taking inspiration" from others' ideas hoping they will work the same way in their own films, building more than decent commercial successes on inspirations from afar. This is certainly not an isolated or inherently negative approach, were it not for the fact that the operation is a mere calculation and, as such, carried out with such clumsiness as to be immediately obvious even to the most distracted viewer. It is so evident, from its very first sequence, how Rosalina, in her movements, attitude, and shade of blonde, is (re)traced from Elsa of Frozen. Her storyline then exists only to confirm a decade-old fan genealogical theory, thus ensuring that, overwhelmed with certainties and cameos, they don't leave the theater too disappointed. 

The most blatantly calculated adjustment is how the character of Fox McCloud (originally voiced by Glen Powell) is inserted and for what purpose. In the theater, the adult audience was palpably heard murmuring "Zootopia," so much did the character chosen for the space pilot fox, Fox, resemble Nick. All this, of course, after the explanatory presentation, for a film that truly cannot launch a flashback or provide background information without stopping the narrative.

At least I appreciated the audacity of how Fox McCloud's arrival coincides with a clear fetishistic allusion (at least for those familiar with the scene). Practically the certification that whoever imagined how and who to bring to the theater with this film did some calculations on how much the furry community contributed to the success of Zootopia first and the Sonic films later, digging through their archives in search of a furry character to use in this sense and finding none other than a fox, the queen of animated characters loved by genre enthusiasts.

Jokes aside (and I assure you I'm serious about this), as a person more interested in the cinematic aspect than in the Pikmin cameo (which still gave me a thrill of pleasure), it is truly disheartening to see how the film approaches the mission of speaking to its audience without even bothering to do so with a good, long-lasting film that can entertain everyone, even while winking at this or that fan in the theater.