If you needed another bleak reminder that we’re living in a dystopian post-story, social-media-clip-driven, instant-cut, TikTok-pilled era of filmmaking, where IP is mined and exploited at all costs, look no further than “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.” After the success of the previous Mario installment, the studio doubles down on what it thinks audiences want: endless game references, every possible Easter Egg, and a barrage of dynamic action sequences engineered to play well in clips, GIFs, and breathless social feeds. But the result is a glossy shell, empty of anything resembling an actual story.
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That’s the dispiriting part. Not that the movie is incompetent—it isn’t—but that it has the polished, efficient quality of so much modern studio product: relentlessly paced, visually slick, and almost totally indifferent to the basic pleasures of storytelling. Characters don’t really deepen, stakes don’t meaningfully evolve, and emotions don’t accumulate. The movie keeps delivering the pre-sold idea: the icon, the callback, the familiar silhouette, the fan-service beat, the next “remember this moment from the video game?” dopamine hit. After a while, “Super Mario Galaxy” stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling like a hollow ad for the Super Mario brand.
Directed by again by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, the sequel sends Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) into outer space, where they reunite with Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), encounter Yoshi (Donald Glover) and Rosalina (Brie Larson), and once again square off with Bowser (Jack Black)—or at least a miniaturized, weirdly “ethically” imprisoned version of him—essentially under house arrest in the Princess’ castle. Meanwhile, the diminutively loud Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) tries to free his father by kidnapping another princess and harnessing her potent star power. That’s the plot, more or less, though “plot” may be giving it too much credit. In practice, it’s just enough narrative scaffolding to justify one giant set piece after another.
And that’s the movie in a nutshell: four or five enormous action sequences stitched together with the thinnest connective tissue imaginable: Chase, rescue, smash-up, escape, reset. The story doesn’t build so much as respawn, grinding through the same basic objective in shinier settings. Bowser Jr. needs this. Mario and Luigi must stop that. Another world opens. Another threat appears. Another stretch of hyperactive motion takes over. Then the cycle starts again. It’s less a story than a delivery system for spectacle.
The frustrating thing is that other big, brand-first studio movies have figured out how to do more with seemingly shallow material. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller took “The Lego Movie,” which could have easily been little more than a plasticky retail tie-in. They turned it into a surprisingly nimble story about conformity, individuality, creativity, and collective imagination. Greta Gerwig did something similar with “Barbie,” taking the doll’s glossy, commodified surface and turning that into the movie’s subject—identity, beauty, selfhood, performance, the burden of idealized perfection. Those films understood that if you’re going to make a movie out of an aggressively market-tested piece of corporate iconography. You still have to interrogate the thing, ask what it means, what it represents, what anxieties or fantasies live inside it, and then turn it inside out.
“Super Mario Galaxy Movie” has no such curiosity. It doesn’t even seem remotely interested in the question.
Instead, it clings to the oldest, emptiest version of its own premise: these stories are about saving princesses, so here’s another princess-in-peril story, only now it’s been blown out to galactic scale and stuffed with more recognizable pieces. That isn’t reinterpretation; it’s franchise maintenance, like gaining health points for the next big assault. The movie keeps stacking game iconography, lore, and new characters on top of the same wafer-thin dramatic skeleton, hoping velocity will pass for invention. The dad joke humor doesn’t help. Pixar knows how to appeal to universal audiences; Mario aims at 8-year-olds, not the parent forced to bring them to the theater at gunpoint. 
To be fair, the movie is mercifully short at just over 95 minutes. And the animation is terrific—bright, polished, and often genuinely dazzling. The cosmic settings have real sweep, and there’s obvious craft in the way the film ricochets from one planetary arena to another. But once the music swells and another giant action stretch begins, you realize you could step out for five minutes and miss nothing but more velocity. For all its polish, “Super Mario Galaxy” never levels up as storytelling. It keeps grabbing new power-ups, new characters, and new noise, but never builds anything underneath them.
That flatness infects nearly every character. Mario and Luigi don’t evolve, Peach remains mostly functional, Rosalina is reduced to lore delivery, and Yoshi is just another familiar face folded into the machinery. Bowser Jr. is a thin plot engine, and Glen Powell’s Fox McCloud arrives with such prefab, “Top Gun”-adjacent swagger he feels less like a character than sequel bait. Even a potentially emotional reveal involving two princesses and a long-lost sibling connection barely registers before the movie respawns and races off to the next distraction.
Even the slightly weird edges are sanded off. One of the dumb, but slightly absurdist delights of the first film was the songs, Jack Black crooning to the amusingly silly “Peaches” song, for example. But ‘Galaxy’ has no such time for mildly odd tangents that create weird moments of brief personality; it’s all just super plays and time attacks. To that end, there’s an entire element of lingering unrequited love—Bowser and Peaches—that seems ripe for manosphere lampooning or some fun cultural commentary, but forget it —there’s another boss to take out.
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By the end, the whole thing starts to feel less like an adventure than a kind of endless grinding—one familiar objective after another, one loud set piece after another, all of it speedrunning its own mythology instead of building one. That’s why the film feels so hollow. It has the spiritually vacant quality of AI fantasy slop—familiar iconography assembled for instant gratification rather than meaning. Younger audiences will probably feast on the sugar rush, but characters still need arcs, and these sequences still need to build toward something. “Super Mario Galaxy” is nice to look at and dead inside, a committee-made franchise object masquerading as an adventure, and ultimately little more than an empty commercial for Super Mario branding. [C-]