Spoilers obviously yah dork!
Guys we have to talk about it somewhere. Let’s talk about it here.
The Super Mario Bros Movie is a sincere fantasy film draped in Mario through a modern lens.
While the movie is far from perfect (I hate that the film ends on a “that’s so random joke”- the kind of dead humor absent from the rest of the film.), I was shocked by how good it was without coming across wink-winky. So often modern movies feel they must wink-winky at the audience to get the audience to play along with the silliness. I guess this is considered bathos because it takes the listener out of the story to laugh at the story from outside the story. I don’t like that. I like to stay in the story. Mario leaves you in the story.
It’s able to pull this off by contextualizing all of Mario as fantasy. It doesn’t need to wink-winky at the audience about how silly a piranha plant is- this is just a completely different realm. Everything is different here so there is no real need to point. And sometimes Mario the character naturally points. It doesn’t ever laugh at Mario as an idea. The movie thinks Mario as an idea is super cool fantasy stuff.
That rules.
It is a lot for the Mario movie to carry though. How can a Mario movie hold something as heavy as fantasy? Well, by lightening it up! The movie accomplishes this by making Mario the B story to Luigi’s A story. Mario doesn’t have to change because Luigi is changing and Mario’s surroundings change. So while a story is there (Luigi gets brave), the actual story is a meta story.
This movie is about how being a person who likes Mario makes you rock.
The Lego movie does this too and I loved it in the Lego movie too. I know it is a classic move by a company to tell a story explaining how your thing rocks because it gives the audience permission to like the company. Of course I like them. They made that thing that rocks! This is obviously manipulative, but hey, I think Mario rocks. I agree with the movie.
I have more to say but it was great. Happy I saw it opening night.
