The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) - Empty Visual Space Noise - REVIEW

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Taking your kids to see a video game movie on a Saturday is one of those parenting situations where you go in fully prepared to suffer through it for their sake, you have been doing this for years, you know how this works, you buy the overpriced popcorn, you settle into the seat and you mentally clock out until something actually gets your attention, but I do have to say that now days movies like the Mario movies or Sonic movies thank God exist and are my kids favorites so I can enjoy them too, this time we watch it at home though. Visually the movie is fantastic, they went all in on making it look exactly like the Wii game from 2007 and I mean exactly, the shiny textures, the floating star bits, the deep purple skies full of planetary rings and tiny glowing Lumas everywhere you look at and if you were the kind of person who lost entire weekends to that game back in the day then there is a specific flavor of nostalgia in watching it all come to life at that scale on a big screen, for about the first twenty minutes it feels like someone turned your living room into a video game, I personally spend time playing with at home when ever I could after work. The kids sitting around me were absolutely losing their minds from the start specially my oldest son who surprisingly is a retro gamer, he is not into the latest AAA titles but is into older games, including Wii games and the movie never really let of, it just kept going as I was expecting, this thing moves at a constant sprint and the colors alone are enough to hold my kids down during the entire movie. I know my kids didnt but I was expecting something out of it with some meaning, somewhere between all that movement and all that color I kept waiting for the moment where it would stop showing off and start actually meaning something and that moment never really arrived the way it should have, probably?!, not sure if its just me.

• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28650488/
• Platform: PRIME VIDEO

The whole story is simple and centers on Bowser Jr. kidnapping Princess Rosalina, the adoptive mother of all these little Luma star creatures, so he can drain her power and fuel some massive galaxy destroying weapon he put together as a tribute to his imprisoned father Bowser and that setup does feel pretty solid for a kids movie because it gives the villains a motivation that is huge in scale almost feeling like a Death Star plan and weirdly personal at the same time. The Lumas are very like Minions in my opinion, they all cute and small and are everywhere, there is a small pink one in particular who has this constant thing about the sweet release of death that is so absurd and dark that it made me laugh every single time they brought it back. Yoshi is the big new addition and Donald Glover is did the voice, bringing real personality and warmth to a character who usually just squeaks in the games, there is a walking montage with the whole crew that drops some Biggie Smalls underneath it and it was hilarious that made me laught to how completely unexpected that choice was for a kids movie about a plumber in space. The Peach and Toad investigation thread that takes them off to a casino planet with Wart is fun too, it felt draggy at times but but it gives the movie some energy that steps out of Mario so its not all about him and probably something that this Mario movies sometimes have like its a one man show when it shouldnt have to be this way.

Jack Black is still the standout as Bowser and it is not particularly close, the man can flip from being this weirdly sweet and present father figure to an absolute raging volcanic menace just like that with a shift in his voice and I bet how much fun he might had doing this character, this is something I was thinking about how deep actors get into their roles enough to learn all this lines by memory, at some point it has to affect you at least to care about the character. Now some adult perspective here, for me the problem is that Mario and Luigi just do not go anywhere as characters over the course of the whole movie, they walk in already established as the heroes and they walk out exactly the same way, no internal struggle, no real growth, no moment where you feel like they earned what they got or learned something they did not already know. That is a real issue because the story that actually hooks you, the one about family and sacrifice and whether a son can prove himself worthy to his father, is happening on the villain side and not the hero side, also there is a lot going on in between from jumping to a desert bike race straight into a space battle with no breathing room between them, so the growth and sentimental part of the movie is mainly about the villain, a bit backwards from what anyone would expect. Every time the movie tries to add some sort of sentiment to it there is a glowing creature on screen doing something ridiculous that takes you right back out of it.

Everything about the world building felt rushed because the movie never stops to explain how gravity functions differently on each planet or why some of them are pure candy and others are pure lava, yes this is a kids movie but can you give us some context? I would put it in the same world of super hero movies where certain things just dont make much sense and fly by, it is just there for you to accept on faith while the characters zip past in their little star ships and that is fine for a straight up kids movie but come on, there is that part of the audience that would like to know about it a bit more and those who are let down because the movie totally fly by the context. Bowser Jr. wanting his dad to see him as worthy is the one topic that carries some real emotional weight but the tone shifts so fast between comedy and sincerity that you barely have time to feel anything before the next action sequence takes over. There is another aspect external to the movie that directly affects it and thats marketing, from clips to trailers they already gave out big moments of the movie that once they happen felt burn out and watching them with the surprises already gone, its almost like they didnt care and rush out or I dont remember if at the moment of the teatrical release they were compiting with some other movies that often let to sell it cheap, meaning giving out all this key moments, the kids do not care about that stuff but for those of us who actually watch trailers and are looking for the new stuff coming out, its huge spoiler.

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