TLDR: Yeah, overall this movie was just like the first: All style, no substance. This should’ve been a Super Mario WORLD movie, not Galaxy.

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The good: Animation continues to be a step above what Shillumination normally churns out.

Donald Glover killed it as Yoshi.

Brie Larson can act when she does anything other than Captain Marvel.

Luigi and Bowser are best buds.

Ukiki being a little kleptomaniac.

Mario and Peach actually feeling remorse about dropping Bowser into lava once they realize “oh shit, that’s right, he has a kid” and the movie actually lingering on that before the obvious Dry Bowser reveal.

The animated StarFox sequence was really good.

I realized the joke with ROB moving slowly was actually really clever after I watched the movie, considering the actual ROB toy was slow asf.

Most of the characters properly introduce each other and refer to each other by name, the absence of which was fucking jarring in the last movie.

That first fight with Bowser Jr. was actually coreographed well.

The Mr. Game & Watch cameo was fantastic because it was the only one that wasn’t ruined by shit-tier marketing, though I’m sure of he was voiced, it would’ve been spoiled early too.

The one subtle moment of Bowser deciding to turn face completely because he saw Jr. be really disappointed he couldn’t stop Mario and Peach from breaking through his defenses.

Mario deciding to use the Flying Star from Galaxy to save Jr. from the Odyssey dragon was a good character moment, as well as staying back to fight Bowser and Jr. to allow Peach to rescue Rosalina.

The pixelated NES overlays during the scene where Jr. traps Mario and Peach in his gauntlet are clever, especially when the credits reveal it was supposed to mimic the original Mario NES game.

The ending gag with Lumalee is slightly better contextualized than in the first movie, and I guess is a clever inverse of how Lumalee was captured by Bowser and torturing the other prisoners from the first movie, only to become the warden of the supermax prison where Bowser and Jr. are held, and torturing them.

“HI I’M DAISY!”

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The Bad: So Lumalee’s referred to as female in the post-credits despite being referred to as male in the previous movie. They could’ve easily avoided that mistake by making the Lumas non-binary or refer to them with “they/them” pronouns, but I guess they wanted to avoid the right-wing grifter chuds from throwing yet another hissy fit.

What is this movie’s problem with bringing up plot elements, character arcs, and other ideas just to drop them completely after they’re introduced:

Mario x Peach has a set up, hints of follow-through and a payoff with her kissing him on the cheek at the end, but that’s it. Those scenes of them bonding may as well have not happened. It just doesn’t feel like a natural progression at all. It just feels like a hot-potato style handling: Oh, I’ve got the potato, but I can’t hold onto it for too long or else it’ll be a slow burn.

Toad hating Yoshi is the same. Just introduced, followed-through but never paid off.

Bowser reforming, feeling slight remorse at the idea of Jr. taking out Mario and friends, then dropping it with the flimsiest excuse, even if that excuse made some sense in the context of the moment.

Rosalina and Peach being related. Just another setup and payoff. Doesn’t even feel connected to the last movie. Almost as if they should’ve used Rosalina and teased her connection to Peach as the post-credits stinger in the previous movie as opposed to Yoshi, who amounted to just being the cute animal sidekick character of the movie.

Fuck that long, drawn-out Pikmin cameo. That felt like the most gun-to-their-heads moment that Miyamoto forced into the movie.

Didn’t Peach already have an umbrella in the last movie? The one that she used to float down after showing Mario her skills on the course? What was the point of Mario getting her another umbrella?

Why the fuck is Fox McCloud a secondary character, hell, almost primary character, IN THE MARIO MOVIE SEQUEL?! And why oh why does he get top billing over Rosalina? Is it because of the rumoured StarFox game in development for the Switch 2? Cause that’s the only reason Miyamoto would’ve shoved him into this movie. At least he serves a purpose for getting the characters to Planet Bowser and gets to pilot the Comet Observatory, and admittedly has slightly more rizz/personality than his game counterpart.

Does Kamek just…not have a name? Neither Bowser nor Jr. refer to him by name. Also, I don’t think any of the characters refer to Fox by name.

Why was the Odyssey dragon here? Literally any other Mario boss, hell, any other Mario GALAXY boss could’ve worked better here. Why not have Jr. use his paintbrush to make Bowser a new body like his final boss form from Mario GALAXY?! Now they just blew their load on potentially doing an Odyssey movie because Miyamoto just had to squeeze one more unnecessary cameo into the movie.

The SNES pixelated overlay at the end felt very jarring. Like it was Sonic Prime, Megaman Fully Charged levels of jarring. I get it was a Mario Maker reference, but I would rather have seen that fully animated.

You like that Lumalee bit at the end of the first movie? Well, here it is again! And somehow instead of Lumalee being connected to this entire fucking movie about MARIO GALAXY, they’re used as an ending gag about how fucked up a childlike character takes pleasure in death and darkness. Again.

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The Ugly: How the fuck do you kneecap Rosalina, the star of the Super Mario Galaxy games, this fucking hard in her own movie?! She barely gets 20 minutes of screentime throughout the entire 99 minute movie.

The fuck was the point of having the Honey Queen from Galaxy 2 here? What a waste of a good Isaa Rae cameo. Also, it was EXTREMELY unclear that Mario, Luigi, Yoshi and Bowser had landed on an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PLANET dyring that scene. Maybe adding a bit more HONEYCOMBS AND HIVES would’ve made it a bit more obvious it was a different planet.

The fuck was the point of having King Wart and almost all of the bosses from Doki Doki Pa-ER I MEAN, Super Mario USA-I MEAN Super Mario Bros 2 here? (rip Hothead). That entire casino fight scene, Mario Bros Movie '93 reference aside, was pointless. Wart doesn’t even show up again aside from informing Jr. offscreen that Peach is on her way to rescue Rosalina. What a waste of a good Luis Guzman cameo.

Pacing is non-existent in this movie. Just THINGS! EXPLOSIONS! EXCITEMENT! one after the other with, and in Miyamoto’s own fucking words: “No time to breathe in between.”

I swear, Miyamoto has some vendetta against telling stories. How are there so many plot points in this movie that are just never expanded upon even though that would be the easiest lay up for the writers?! Just a little more depth than a shallow puddle evaporating in the Sahara desert is all I ask. But nah, Shigeru “I Hate Stories so much the Galaxy Team had to hide Rosalina’s entire fucking backstory away from me during development, oh and I kneecapped the entirety of the Paper Mario series starting with Sticker Star” Miyamoto just has to fit in ten thousand more references to other Nintendo IP because these movies are not movies. They’re advertisement slop for Nintendo first, movies third.

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My idea of a sequel:

This should’ve been a Super Mario World movie instead. If you wanted to make the stinger with Yoshi from the last movie matter (not that it mattered much considering Yoshis appeared earlier in the movie, but I guess it wasn’t OUR Yoshi so what the fuck ever) and bring in Bowser Jr., then combine the settings of Mario World (Yoshi’s Island/Dinosaur Land) with that of Mario Sunshine (Isle Delfino), make Bowser Jr. the leader of the Koopalings (so that damn boarding school mention makes sense), have Jr. and the Koopalings go after the Shine Sprites to use to take over the world, or, better yet, bring in Mario Bros. 3 and have Bowser, Jr. and the Koopalings disguise themselves as Mario to steal the Shine Sprite and use its power to steal the Magic Rods from each of the Kingdoms to take over the world. All the while expanding on the worldbuilding. Maybe you can continue the theme of Mario and Luigi wanting to prove themselves to the rulers of each kingdom by trying to prove they can save the world, only to be outcast due to Jr. and the Koopalings disguising themselves as Mario and Luigi to do crime and slander their names in an attempt to distract them and free Bowser in the process. Then Mario, Luigi, Yoshi and the gang go across the world the stop Bowser, Jr., and the Koopalings. No unnecessary cameos needed! And as an end credits stinger, have the dopplegangers (Wario and Waluigi) show up to try to take over Sarasaraland, where Daisy and Toadette reside, clearly inspired by the havoc Bowser, Jr. and the Koopalings made smearing Mario and Luigi’s names. Badabing, badaboom, you got a sequel taking inspo from the Mario Land games.

They really dialed back on the modern music drops. Mostly it was orchestral music that wove in motifs based on the games’ soundtracks, the way it should have been in the first movie.

I see from Lymmyng’s comment I’m not the only one confused by the castle dropping back down onto a completely different planet.

For like 3/4 of the movie I thought Rosalina was going to be Peach’s mother, not sister.

The excessive attention given to Fox lends credence to those rumors there’s a Starfox game coming later this year.

No Fryguy or Triclyde. So glad we finally got Wart and Mouser recognition again, at least.

Overall, like the first movie, but bigger. A vehicle for random references and cameos where stuff just kind of happens for the fun of it. My standards for video game movies are still pretty low, so I enjoyed it for what it was. Probably won’t revisit anytime soon, but I don’t regret watching it or anything.

Also the Toy Story 5 trailer beforehand (and its “toys vs tech” story) hits a little different when half the kids in the theater were looking at their phones just a few minutes earlier. Kinda looks like you lost that fight already. :(

I saw this last night, I thought it was quite a big drop off from the first film (although I still enjoyed it). The first film had a much stronger identity; it knew it was a film about Mario so it really focused on his characterisation and that of other Mario mainstays like Bowser, Peach, Luigi and Toad. Most of the references were references to Mario games and their cultural legacy.

This sequel feels a lot more like a Nintendo film that just happens to have Mario in it/feature the setting of a Mario video game. There are references to Mario video games, particularly Galaxy, but there are also many references to other Nintendo characters and worlds, to the extent that in some cases I wasn’t sure whether the thing I was seeing was from Mario, another IP or just invented for the film. It felt quite overwhelming at times, I guess like when I was a kid walking into a giant toy store and I didn’t know where to look first.

It’s a bit of a shame because the minimal narrative that exists in this film actually had some potential. Peach’s backstory could have been interesting, as could the father/son relationship between Bowser and Bowser Jr. But I guess maybe even if they’d focused on those things more, instead of rushing them to make way for more Nintendo visual references, it still might have struggled to feel like a Mario film. He is basically a side character here, and the romantic sub-plot involving Peach that is teased throughout the film goes absolutely nowhere and seems forgotten about by the end.

This film also seems unusually similar to Star Wars in places, which makes me wonder whether the writers used it as a reference when developing the story. Personally I found it quite distracting, particularly Fox who really contributes nothing and takes up a surprising amount of screen time. Another new character who really overstays their welcome is Yoshi, who doesn’t seem to have the innocent, lovable personality from the video games and is instead very annoying and constantly being used for cheap laughs alongside Luigi.

I suppose there will be more of these films, and they’ll probably be okay too, but with the amount of stuff packed into this one it feels like Nintendo will be forced into rehashing references at some point soon. They are blowing through the most recognisable ones very quickly.