Film Review - Super Mario Galaxy (2026)

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the follow up to 2023’s Super Mario Brothers movie and concerns Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie) kidnapping the cosmic princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) as he wants to use her to conquer the universe and free his father Bowser (Jack Black) from imprisonment in the Mushroom Kingdom but when Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Toad (Keegan Michael-Key) go missing in the cosmic universe Mario (Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day) and Yoshi (Donald Glover) go looking for them.

Super Mario Galaxy isn’t a terrible movie but its also not a movie that is going to appeal outside of kids and Nintendo superfans either but firstly it does have some positives and the first of those is the animation it is very bright and colourful and cosmic looking blending 3 dimensional worlds with 2 dimensional looking scenes which nod back to the classic NES games and the various planets the characters go to all have a unique visual style that is very appealing to look at on a big cinema screen.

The voice cast for the most part is also pretty good too, Pratt/Day and Glover play off each other very well and Glover in particular is a highlight as Yoshi even if I suspected that his vocal performance might have been edited that way in post-production much like Frank Welker’s vocals for Soundwave were in the original Transformers Cartoon, Taylor-Joy and Michael-Key are good as well in their roles while Safdie and Black are great as the Bowsers.

But for all of that the movies storytelling is all over the place, going from one planet to the next in one story arc to the next that at times it feels like your watching a speed run of a video game instead of a movie and there are so many fast moving set piece moments in the film that some kids could end up being over stimulated while watching it and because of that it feels like none of our heroes get any kind of proper attention applied to them to make us feel invested in the journey.

And the second problem is the use of Rosalina, Brie Larson is an Academy Award Winner and self-confessed Nintendo nerd playing a fan favourite character but after the opening scene she disappears for a huge part of the film and plays only a minor role in the climax of it that it ultimately felt like a waste of her great talents as an actress and that really annoyed me.

And lastly the more I’ve thought about this movie the more I want to compare it to the Sonic the Hedgehog series which has always been the great rival of the Super Mario Brothers over the years and those films are much better than these and really should have been the template for these Mario animated films as those movies:

-    Have a proper storyline with an emotional core at the centre
-    Know when to use the fan service and when not to
-    Took their time to develop their core heroes over the course of the franchise
-    And make proper use of fan favourite characters from the games and make them feel like the centre of the story

It’s not a hard formula to copy but here it feels ignored and that might please some and give Universal and Illumination and Nintendo that short term sugar hit but it only works for that one time but it doesn’t make me want to go back to them the way I have the Sonic movies.

And so that was Super Mario Galaxy and it has its moments but its really only for kids and Nintendo super fans who will get every reference as for the rest I think it will bore them dizzingly fairly quick, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - Hoppers (2026)

Hoppers is the latest Pixar film and concerns a young college student named Mabel (Piper Curda) who is determined to save her favourite forest water glen from her hometown mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) and his determination to build a new highway bypass through that area but one night she comes across a secret experiment program called “Hopping” which transfers the consciousness of a human body into a robotic body of an animal which in Mabel’s case is a Beaver and she wants to use it to help save her Glen.

Hoppers is the most I have enjoyed a Pixar film since Elemental in 2023 and it is one of the highlights of this movie year so far, it is a more comedic film than most Pixar films but it works very well in the films favor as I laughed quite a bit throughout the film at particular in jokes, comedic gags and well delivered humorous lines.

The film also has a more pleasing animation style, a lot of the recent Pixar films have suffered from a very bland and lifeless animation style that just makes the movie feel dull to watch but here the animals are very well animated and the forest area much of the film takes place in looks good as well.

The film also balances a more serious story about environmental conservation with that comedic element well also and lastly the voice cast are good here as well, Curda and Hamm are good in their roles while Meryl Streep was a nice surprise in a small role as were Dave Franco, Sam Richardson and Bobby Monyihan.

And so that was Hoppers and it is a very enjoyable time at the movies and Pixar’s best in some years, 4 out of 5.