The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

What the animation team can do is not in dispute. There is a castle-invasion sequence that toggles between the film's CG world and a flat, side-scrolling register borrowed from the 2D games, and the back-and-forth is genuinely inventive, the kind of formal play the rest of the film mostly declines to attempt. A galactic space chase and a long continuous shot of characters fleeing a collapsing structure show off scale and control. The fight choreography has a relay logic to it, with Mario, Luigi, and the newly introduced Yoshi tagging in and out of brawls in a rhythm closer to kung-fu staging than anything you expect from a family cartoon. When the picture leans fully into a set piece, it pops.

Brian Tyler's fully orchestral score does more quiet work than the visuals get credit for. Reworking the original game themes and dropping the licensed pop songs that cluttered the first film, it gives each locale a distinct sonic identity the editing rarely sits still long enough to earn on its own. It is the connective tissue the screenplay leaves out.

Because the screenplay does leave it out. Matthew Fogel's script treats character motivation as optional and sometimes as a punchline; Yoshi joins the team for no stated reason, and the film knows it, letting Toad ask the question aloud. Some viewers will read this as honesty about what these characters are, which is to say bright avatars for adventure rather than people with interiors. Others will feel the hollow where an arc should be. Both readings are available, and the movie does little to tip the scale.

The voice cast is stacked and mostly does what the material asks. Donald Glover's Yoshi is the standout, a babyish coo that mimics the in-game sound and slots into the group's comedy with immediate ease. The Star Fox detour, which shifts into a 2D anime register, is the single most alive stretch in the film, and it is also the sequence that has the least to do with Mario at all. That is worth sitting with.

So here is the honest verdict. If you want to be dropped inside a Nintendo game for an hour and a half, handed one gorgeous vista after another and asked to feel very little between them, this delivers exactly that and does it with real craft. If you want a story that accumulates, that builds a place you can stand in and characters who change while standing there, the film keeps moving before any of that can form. It is beautiful on the surface and thin underneath, and it is largely at peace with the trade. Your mileage depends entirely on whether you consider that a bug or the whole point.

I keep landing on the Star Fox sequence, and I think it tells you everything. The best three minutes of a Mario movie are the three minutes where the film stops being a Mario movie, switches to 2D anime, and lets Peach and Toad meet Fox McCloud. That is not a small observation. It is the movie quietly confessing that its most inventive instinct is to escape its own premise. And of course Fox is being teased for his own picture; nearly every scene here is a foyer for some future installment. You can feel the cinematic universe being assembled in real time, one cameo at a time.

Owen Gleiberman called it frenetic and disappointing, a threadbare adventure that never settles on a locale long enough to give you a sense of place, and I think he is right about the mechanism even if I am softer on the result. Two Bowsers in the climax really do add up to less than one. Benny Safdie's Bowser Jr. is a fun little pipsqueak tyrant, but his daddy-issues arc resolves so perfunctorily that the second Bowser mostly dilutes Jack Black, who, yes, never gets a song this time. That is a strange thing to withhold from your best asset from the first film.

Bianca Farmakis, scoring it low, argued it is designed to be forgotten the instant each scene ends, engineered for an attention-deficit economy, and that you'll retain maybe a single-digit number of sequences. I don't fully buy the cynicism, but I can't fully wave it off either, because the film's structure genuinely does mimic a scroll feed. World, gag, spectacle, next. It is built to prevent your attention from settling.

And yet. Soren Andersen scored it 75 and made the case I find hardest to dismiss: the screen-filling imagery, the wall-to-wall Easter eggs, are best experienced theatrically, and there is a real pleasure in feeling like you are inside the 2007 game. That is a legitimate thing for a film to offer. Jesse Hassenger graded it a C and put his finger on the exact fault line, praising the little rushes of opening new worlds while every character stagnates into bland affability. Both critics are describing the same movie. One is charmed by the rush and forgiving of the stagnation, the other is not. The film cannot be defended or convicted without conceding the other side's evidence, and that is unusually true here.

What would I cut? Not the set pieces, which are the reason to show up. I'd cut a Bowser. Consolidate the villains, give Jack Black the song and the room, and let one antagonist carry actual weight. The two-Bowser climax is the clearest case of the film's more-is-less arithmetic, where doubling a thing halves its impact.

The minimalism debate is the one I keep turning over. There's a genuinely defensible reading that treating Mario and Luigi as candy-colored avatars rather than psychological subjects is the correct and even relieving choice for this IP. I'm sympathetic. The problem is not that the characters lack interiors. It's that the film gestures at arcs anyway, gives Peach a new origin Miyamoto is now canonizing, sidelines her romance by keeping her and Mario apart for most of the runtime, then does nothing with the space it cleared. If you're going to abandon character, abandon it cleanly. Half-abandoning it is the worst of both.

The money makes all of this academic in one sense. Biggest debut of 2026 at $130.9 million, past a billion worldwide, the predecessor still the highest-grossing game adaptation ever. Miyamoto is baffled by the hostility and doubling down. None of that is a craft argument, but it is the context in which every craft argument now happens. The audience has already voted, warmly, and the split with critics is the same one that defined the first film. I don't think either side is lying. I think they want different things from ninety-eight minutes, and this movie made a clean choice about which of them to serve.