Here are my thoughts after watching it:
Okay, so the Mario movie is…a Mario movie! It’s pretty much exactly what I had anticipated—it neither exceeded nor failed to meet my expectations. It’s a fun movie that most Mario fans will probably enjoy, but it doesn’t try to cater much to non-fans at all so don’t expect that. It’s very much a movie made for the fans (and kids), staying pleasantly faithful to the games in many ways while still making concessions to simplify/generalize things here and there for a broader audience and to fit a movie narrative, as you’d expect from a Hollywood production. I think most people—assuming they’re already interested in Mario and have played Mario games before—will probably enjoy the movie even more than I did, because I knew going in that I would definitely have nitpicks with the choice of using Hollywood actors and some licensed music.
Ultimately, I personally think the movie would have been a better movie to me—the wider audience may not agree, though, I know—if they ditched the licensed music and kept the voices from the games where possible. But the voices were…fine. They work, but they’re nothing special. Same with the few licensed music scenes; they’re relatively inoffensive, but they would have been much better if they used existing Nintendo music instead—which they DO do A LOT elsewhere in the movie, thankfully! But that just makes it weirder when they DON’T do stuff like that. I feel like Nintendo probably got their way with a lot of the movie’s creative direction, and it shows, but there were likely some things that Illumination demanded of the production, like the voice actors and licensed music. Some of the humor was also…eh, could’ve done without.
It’s weird because parts of the movie definitely feel like a deliberate attempt to appeal to a broader audience, but at its core it’s a movie that relies on the viewer already having the context for many things from being familiar with the games, otherwise they’ll be lost on you. So, like, there are a LOT of cool things in the movie for fans of the games to recognize, and that’s really where the movie shines best. It references the actual games in ways that you wouldn’t expect from a Hollywood movie, and it certainly beats the Sonic movies in that regard. It’s a video game movie adaptation that actually takes pride in its source material and doesn’t shy away from being largely true to that, nor does it try to twist that into something drastically different in an effort to win over lapsed or non-fans, for shock value, or whatever.
No, this is a Super Mario movie through and through, not some bastardization of the franchise for the sake of being edgy or otherwise “different” like the ’93 movie was. Nintendo was heavily involved in this production and it absolutely shows. I only wish that was even MORE true, because the parts I had the most issue with were the parts that seemed the most “off-brand” for Mario/Nintendo, which are probably the parts that were more on the Illumination side of things. But it could have been a lot worse, so I’m glad it was as decent as it turned out to be. The characters and plot are…about as complex as they are in the games—which is to say not very much at all, but I honestly prefer that to whatever alternative because there’s WAY more potential for things to get weird and bad if they were to go really wild with the plot and all.
Like I said, the movie doesn’t try to be something it isn’t or shouldn’t be—it’s not trying to make Mario into some grand story with deep characters, it’s just a fun movie for fans and embraces what the games are rather than trying to make something “better” by throwing them out. There are plenty of changes, of course, and as you’d expect not everything is true to the games, but much of it is, and that’s just SO nice to see. It’s nothing particularly special as a movie in general, but as a Hollywood adaptation of Mario? You probably can’t get much better. So yeah, definitely go see it if you like Mario! It’s neat and you’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit! Just don’t go in expecting something that it isn’t, and brace yourself for the typical Hollywood stuff that was thrown in. Also, STAY UNTIL THE VERY END!! After ALL the credits!!
tl;dr—The Mario movie is best to me when it’s fully embracing the games, which is does a LOT, but it’s so close to going all the way that it’s awkward in the areas where it doesn’t. Also, there are SO many references! And it’s not just “nostalgia”—there’s VERY recent stuff, too!
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