The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

Gravity and Other Complications

I went into *The Super Mario Galaxy Movie* bracing for a sugar blast. The 2023 film delivered exactly that: a bright, slick machine built to fire nostalgia straight into your bloodstream. This time, though, Michael Jelenic and Aaron Horvath reach for something a little softer and stranger. It doesn’t work in every scene, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise, but when the movie relaxes and lets itself drift, it finds a hushed melancholy you do not usually expect from plumbers out of Brooklyn.



The story pulls the brothers away from the familiar comfort of the Mushroom Kingdom. Bowser is locked away, and Bowser Jr. is rampaging across the cosmos trying to piece a broken family legacy back together. Jelenic and Horvath do something genuinely smart with the camera here. The first movie moved in that clean left-to-right line, echoing the flat momentum of an old arcade run. Here, the *Galaxy* games’ little spherical worlds scramble any stable sense of direction. The horizon keeps curling away. Sometimes the sky sits beneath the characters instead of above them. It makes Mario and Luigi seem tiny, and more than a little adrift.

That doesn’t mean the whole thing is moody or introspective. Not even close. The middle stretch gets bogged down by franchise homework. Too many scenes stop cold so somebody can gesture at a recognizable ship or explain a shiny new power-up that the image has already done the work of introducing. It gets old fast. The movie keeps overexplaining itself right when the emotional pressure should be building.



Then the ice-ring sequence arrives. Eight minutes, barely any dialogue. Mario (Chris Pratt, wisely turning the swagger down into something more worn and easy) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are separated from their ship, floating through a field of crystalline wreckage. The score disappears. All that’s left is the muted rhythm of their breathing inside the helmets. Mario reaches out, fingers stretching toward Luigi’s hand and coming up short by almost nothing. You read everything in his body: the sag of the shoulders, the useless kicking in open space. For a minute, the movie stops worrying about the universe at large and narrows down to one terrible thought, losing your brother somewhere cold and black. It lands.

The real curveball, though, is Benny Safdie. Yes, that Benny Safdie, the filmmaker and actor behind anxiety engines like *Uncut Gems* and *The Curse*, now voicing a cartoon turtle in a bib. He gives Bowser Jr. this jittery, uncomfortable edge that never lets him settle into generic brat territory. Every line sounds strained, like the kid is trying to force himself into a role that doesn’t fit yet. The anger is there, but the fear underneath it is what sticks. He doesn’t sound powerful. He sounds desperate not to come up small. (It’s an oddly moving choice, and it makes the villain the most exposed person in the movie.)



By the end, I wasn’t thinking much about the animation flexes, impressive as they are. What stayed with me was the movie’s interest in the weight people inherit. A son trying to free his father from both a real cage and a symbolic one. Two brothers just trying to stay grounded while the whole world tilts under them. The film gets at how hard it is to keep hold of the people you love when everything around you keeps moving. That doesn’t make it great cinema. But it does give it something rare in this kind of studio product: an actual pulse.