Super Mario Bros. – The Movie Review

Plumbers with a few pipes to fix, in Brooklyn Mario e Luigi they are not doing well and are the laughingstock of family and colleagues: a mysterious tube discovered in the city’s basement sucks the two into a fairytale worldbut separates them. At that point Mario has only one imperative: save Luigi wherever he ended up, because he’s the only one who ever truly believed in him. On the way, made friends with the strong-willed Princess Peachhe will understand from her how the strange world in which she finds herself works, at the risk of Bowser’s threata demonic turtle who has got his paws on something very dangerous…

Let’s be honest: the Nintendo could not choose a better partner thanIllumination Entertainment to (re)bring its flagship brand, that Super Mario more than iconic, with few other names practically paradigm of the very concept of video gamefor more than forty years. This is precisely because the Illumination of Despicable Me, Minions and Sing knows how to put aside the more complex authorial ambitions of other studios such as Disney, Pixar or DreamWorks, to focus on the characters and bring home the result without thinking too much. At the same time, the team (mainly French) guarantees a technique and professionalism up to the current 3D animation market. In short, it is not hard to believe that that marriage is in production between Shigeru Miyamoto e Chris Meledandri was really the most practical combination to give birth to Super Mario Bros. – The Movie.

I’ve been left wondering for a long time if what we’re facing is a monument to fanservice brazennessor in its joyful and sunny simplicity of approach does not hide instead one of the best adaptations of a video game ever made. Because it is clear that the film directed by Aaron Horvath e Michael Jelenic (of television militancy), based on a script by Matthew Fogel (Minions 2), concentrates in an hour and a half all the elements that the average gamer of the saga has lived and breathed for decades: the cubes, the mushrooms, the enemies (in the foreground or extras), the parallel adventures of Donkey Kong, Mario Kartthe bonuses, the flavor of the first platformers mixed with a detailed 3D look, which is expected later Super Mario Odyssey. And the quotes, sensational and refined: watch out for the arcade of “Jumpman” in one shot! Ears open for centered melodic re-enactments of the work of Koji Kondo on soundtrack. We even accidentally spoiled a scene when Mario picked up something that would have produced an effect imaginable by anyone who knows those video games and has visual memory.
But you don’t make a film just like that, or rather: you shouldn’t, even if the citation for a growing number of spectators it seems to be not a side dish but the substance of experiences, in the name of belonging to a specific community. Something surprised us.

The writer admits that he loved and loves video games with a narrative fabric more full-bodied and articulated than that offered by the very essential, archetypal and rather repetitive platform saga of Mario (I state that I have not experienced the derivations gdr). With a taste for cinematic linear storytelling, the companies of Naughty Dog con The Last of Us they lend themselves better to a translation compatible with a different medium. This Super Mario Bros. – The Movie instead it pushed me to think outside these boxes.
The construction of the story and the journey of our hero does not exist only as a function of the quotations, but the dynamics of the gameplay is reported verbatim in the scriptwith full and unconditional confidence in its narrative power. Repeating the same areas a thousand times, continuing to die and learning to overcome them, keeping calm, looking to the finish line and resisting obstacles that appear insurmountable, learning how to overturn predictions using what we have available: it is the philosophy of a gamer “hardcore”, is the story theme and – some might say – also one of principles of existence. Mario is the embodiment of the on-screen resilience: judged ridiculous or tiny by anyone, he takes it hard but gets up, starts over and doesn’t give up. Even the typical “tutorial” level (training) is translated into a sequence, with the exact same function: training against obstacles to prove oneself up to something.
One does not look for the easier nostalgic and somewhat historiographic way of demolishing the fourth wall, as happened in the precious Wreck-It Ralph e Free Guy. Ma we don’t even take ourselves too seriouslybecause with all those saturated colors you have to remember a Mario mantra: smile, have fun.

The disarming elegance of the film lies precisely in the calmalways sunny, joyful, crackling, with which Miyamoto and Meledandri have had confidence in the sense of gameplayto the point of making it narrative sense without the slightest tweaking. Inferiority complex for “Cinema”, zero. Humility… more than what could have been foreseen: after all, the narrative premise is the same as that of (for the writer) bankruptcy Super Mario Bros from 1993 from life. Because it matters to him: just as Mario discovers self-confidence looking out to a fantasy world, so we gamers for decades have challenged ourselves by exploring its colorful digital fairy tales. Behind the gags and action scenes, Super Mario Bros. – The movie hides a proud and transparent claim of the peculiarities of the videogame medium: that is, the atmosphere of traditional narratives, plus a actual physical involvementwhich the cinema lacks, but which is explained very well by the cinema, in the importance given to Mario’s body… and to all the blows he takes!

It will also have been dictated by the Hollywood need to counter the clichés about female charactersma la Princess Peach indomitable and able to fend for itself does not break the foundations of the world of Mario. Peach still needs him to fix it biggest challengeand the guessed idea of ​​making him save his brother Luigi instead of the “damsel in distress” sends a highest poetic sense: for the ultimate goal of taking down a bigger enemy, difficult to defeat alone, a cooperation of multiple skills and personalities is required, even “difficult” ones like Donkey Kong (whose rivalry with Mario is here a subtle metaphor of the videogame history of two).
I did not exit the screening of Super Mario Bros. – The Movie convinced that I have seen an extraordinary work of animation, but I have rarely seen one like this in the cinema serene and nonchalant vindication of what the traditional video game means and can give, of what a video game is. It will certainly have a milder value for those who cannot go beyond the purely cinematic dimension, however… you had to remove your hands from the joypad, observe Mario from the outside, to understand what it really means to control it.