I don’t think I’ve ever been to see a film on its opening day – but I made the effort for the Super Mario Bros Movie last week. Using my six-year-old as a convenient excuse to see a children’s movie in the middle of the day, I sat in a suspiciously quiet cinema and tried to keep a handle on my trepidation. The reviews had come out the day before, and they weren’t good. I anticipated spending the next 90 minutes feeling bitterly disappointed that, yet again, Hollywood had screwed up a golden opportunity to bring a beloved game to the big screen.
Perhaps my expectations were just exceedingly low – I have, after all, suffered through 30 years of offensively terrible movie adaptations of video games, with only the occasional reprieve – but I thought it was fine. It’s not as surreal and funny as Detective Pikachu, nor as creative as the video-game-inspired Wreck-it Ralph or Free Guy, but it looked right, sounded right, and didn’t labour the nostalgia too much. Plenty of critics have characterised the film as a lazy and meaningless sequence of empty references – and, yes, it suffers from a distinct absence of plot – but how much narrative justification do we actually need for a trip down Rainbow Road in go-karts? (Side note: a Mad Max/Mario Kart mashup road battle was not something I was expecting from this film.)
I honestly thought there was quite a lot to like about the Super Mario Bros Movie, as a gamer parent of small children who fall directly into its target demographic. It’s not like the Mario games offer much in the way of story to work with, and recasting Mario as a struggling Brooklyn plumber who hates mushrooms felt like a stretch, but I was happy to go with it despite Chris Pratt’s predictably generic take on Mario himself (Charlie Day as Luigi was a little better). Jack Black’s performance as a jealous stalker Bowser was almost enough to carry the whole thing for me – whenever I was bored or dismayed by some unimaginative Mushroom Kingdom antics or the nihilistic, imprisoned Luma (truly groan-worthy), Bowser would show up and a smile would briefly return to my face.
The sequence where Mario learns how to run and jump around the abstract playgrounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, meanwhile, was a fairly accurate representation of what it felt like to be repeatedly brutalised by 2D Mario levels as a kid. For every scene where Seth Rogen was half-assing it as Donkey Kong, there was another that brought something of the joy, colour and exuberance of Mario to the screen. It was also a small joy, for me, to see Princess Peach as an active participant in the story, rather than trapped in a distant castle, waiting to be rescued. I’m all for the de-damseling of 90s video game characters. Long may it continue.
This isn’t a good film, really, but it’s perfectly fine – especially if you go into it expecting a kids’ movie, which is what it self-evidently is. There are no arch Pixar-esque appeals to the adults in the audience, here. So I do wonder why critics have been so very savage about it. Several reviews dismissed it as “for fans only” – which is fair enough, as I wouldn’t wish this movie upon anyone who didn’t have a significant fondness for Nintendo – but also carries a vague whiff of snobbery about those fans, who (it is implied) are childish and easy to please. Some criticised Mario’s nonsensical backstory, but Mario barely has a backstory to begin with. The character exists as a context-free embodiment of the joy of movement. I don’t know what anyone was expecting.
As for its overreliance on the iconography, power-ups and surreal logic of the games, which also came in for criticism … well. Some reviewers seemed to despair that the Mario movie is, in fact, unashamedly a video game movie, with video game references and the visual language of a game, as opposed to something that follows cinematic logic. But at what point does a video game become popular and well-established enough to cater to its own audience? I’d say that after 35+ years and close to 400m games sold, Mario is definitely there. It doesn’t need to try and become something else for the benefit of a broader cinemagoing public.
This isn’t a high-point for screen adaptations of games, but the Mario movie is adequate; it’s been made with respect for Nintendo’s world and characters, with the involvement of the people who created them. As a result it’s super corporate and slick, but at least it isn’t an insult to its source material. It preserves the vibe, and when my six-year-old wasn’t complaining bitterly because I wouldn’t buy him more sweets, he really enjoyed it. I would have loved a better Mario movie than this, but I wasn’t expecting one. Given its huge box-office success, though, it looks like Universal will get another shot before long.
What to play
This is a recommendation for anyone who’s taken their kids to the Mario movie and now wants to know the best game to play together as a family: it’s gotta be Super Mario 3D World. I cut my teeth on the classic 2D games, but forcing your kids to run that brutal gauntlet would probably be considered child cruelty these days, so this is what I play with my boys instead. 3D World is four-player, wildly playful, relatively forgiving for beginners whilst still challenging for veterans, and blends the best of 2D and 3D game design heritage. Vitally, you can babysit your kid through the levels as they slowly learn how to avoid continually falling off the edge of them. The Nintendo Switch version comes with a fun short Mario experiment called Bowser’s Fury, too, which is also fun to play as a pair.
Available on: Nintendo Wii U and Switch
Approximate playtime: 20+ hours
What to read
I went to Now Play This, a festival of experimental game design in London, to play a bunch of games about love – not a theme that mainstream video games have approached with much subtlety or curiosity, let’s be honest. The games in this exhibition made me think differently about how love and care (and their dark mirrors, manipulation and hurt) can be expressed through interactive art.
I spent a lot of time talking about the Mario movie (and video game adaptations in general) on various radio stations last week, but I had the most fun chatting with Chanté Joseph for the Guardian’s pop culture podcast about the cultural influence of games, and why we should all be playing them.
Support for Media Molecule’s indescribable collaborative game-making creative tool, Dreams, will be ending this September, the developer announced on its blog. The game will still be available to buy and play, and players can still share their creations, but no new content will be made for it. Visiting Media Molecule to write about Dreams while they were making it was one of my favourite things I’ve done in this job – it is a truly fascinating game, and worth diving into, even just for a weekend skipping between other people’s wild creations.
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Question Block
No Question Block this week as I’m on holiday this week. As always, if you’ve got a question – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com
