The film was extremely intense in speed and at the same time quite thin in its actual plot. My uncle described it as a “James Bond movie” in the way he described the pace. I could keep up with the turns and at the same time it felt like nothing could really breathe. It was “bang-on” – something had to happen, and then something else had to happen. An Easter egg here, an Easter egg there, scenes with tons of Easter eggs that require you to basically pause the screen.
Having played the Mario games myself since Super Mario Bros 1 on Nintendo (but I think it sucks, SMB2-3 is much better in the NES generation I think) there was plenty of eye candy and Easter eggs to look out for.
One thing I was a little disappointed about was that many different worlds shown in the trailer (Bob-omb Field from SMB64, the desert land from SMO) were only parts of a very short montage. Even the dashing Yoshis were only around for a few seconds in the entire movie’s roughly 90 minutes!
A fun surprise (as I avoided everything after the 3 official trailers) was to see Diddy & Dixie Kong and next to them was probably Chunky Kong? It was also fun to see blue shells act like blue shells!
One thing I noticed was that very little was explained and justified. Nothing more was said than that there are “powerups” but not why there are the “powerups” they exist. Nothing was said about why Kong has vehicles and instead it was shown that they can cause damage to vehicles by a Kong driving Mario, Toad & Peaches to Cranky Kong throwing banana peels onto the track which another Kong then drove over and crashed and exploded in the air !
Regarding the voices, it was a nice gesture overall that Charles Martinet did the voice of Mario’s dad as well as the dude who was standing and playing “Jump Man” inside the “Punch-out Pizzeria”! (references anyone? )
The sequel I think will include Rosalina considering the blue Luman that was in the movie a lot and Peaches talk about “there are many galaxies out there”.
All in all, I think the film is a lovely nostalgia trip along Mario’s upbringing and at the same time as a film of all the other films I’ve seen, it’s really nothing to hang on the Christmas tree in terms of the plot.
On the other hand, I didn’t count on a touching story like the Arcane series, for example. I was expecting a delicious “could-have-been-fanmade” nostalgia trip and that’s what I got!
etc.
WKL.
