[4.7/10] The Super Mario Bros. Movie may be the least adventurous film I’ve ever seen. It isn’t bad, per se. But it is utterly generic and painfully, mind-numbingly safe. It exists to arrange a bevy of familiar Mario elements into something vaguely resembling a story, spackle in some off-the-shelf heroics, and then hope to bathe the audience in enough fanservice that no one will realize this whole endeavor is creatively bankrupt.
Well, it worked. At the halfway mark, it’s the most financially successful film of 2023, and has set all manner of box office records. So damn us all, I guess.
It’s a shame because that sort of performance doesn’t just mean we’re destined to get sequels and spin-offs of this until the heat death of the universe. (See also: Mario’s Illumination stablemates, the Minions.) But it also means we’ll see a flood of more films like this one: unimaginative, deep as a thimble, and content to ply the viewer with little more than what they already know and like.
I want to be charitable here. Like the vast majority of red-blooded young men of the last forty years, I grew up on Mario in all his forms: from 8-bit sprites to HD juggernauts to colorful typing instructors. Generously, you could excuse The Super Mario Bros. movie as a film for very young children, full of color and light and spectacle to keep their attention, without anything meant to challenge them or go above their heads. As a shiny diversion that is all frosting and no cake, the movie is fine -- perfectly suitable to entertain a moppet for ninety minutes or so.
The problem is that kids’ movies, even ones fit for very young children, don’t have to be this devoid of genuine creativity. The classic eras of Disney, the high points of Pixar, and the best outings from Dreamworks all matched stunning artistic achievement with unassuming depth, creating profound works that were nonetheless accessible to younger audiences. The Super Mario Bros. movie has none of the same ambition; instead resigning itself to moving recognizable cartoon action figures around a series of familiar playsets for an hour and a half and then calling it a day.
The best and worst part of the movie is its sheer volume of pandering fanservice. Almost every recognizable element of the Mario universe -- the main characters, the allies, the baddies, the setting, the power-ups, the songs, the races, the platforming, the moves, the musical stings, the catchphrases -- is packed into the film’s runtime. There is next to nothing original here. Just an assemblage of recognizable pieces awkwardly strung together at a quick enough pace so the audience doesn’t have to go more than thirty seconds without being able to say, “Hey, I remember that thing!”
It is the polar opposite of the much-maligned live action Mario film from 1993. (Despite borrowing the earlier movie’s “Two Italian plumbers from Brooklyn get inadvertently transported to the world of the games” premise.) Whereas that film departed from the source material in ways that were both bold and utterly baffling, its modern day counterpart is a cinematic glass of warm milk served in the same glass fans have been drinking from since 1981. Instead of moving away from the look, feel, or components of the video games even in a little bit, The Super Mario Bros. Movie plays it embarrassingly safe, reassuring fans that everything they like and recognize from the various Nintendo Entertainment Systems is here and faithfully recreated, no matter how uninspired the ultimate rendering may be.
Some of that might be forgivable is the parts of the movie that are, well, a movie weren’t so excruciatingly generic. Mario himself is a standard-issue hero guy. Peach is a stock action girl. Donkey Kong is the usual semi-friendly rival. The shopworn “save the world” plot is buttressed by nothing but a heap of feeble fetch quests. The celebrity voice-casting is almost uniformly uninspired. Their performances range from tonally miscalibrated and god-awful. And every character is paper thin. There is no story beat too hackneyed, no joke too tepid, no needle drop too played out,, and no moment too shallow to warrant anything but immediate conclusion in this bland, big screen ricecake.
The movie is not without some charms. Jack Black elevates the material, as usual, bringing a Dr. Evil-esque mix of bluster and harmlessness in his role as Bowser. His dynamic with his poor underling is stock but amusing. The nihilistic Luma is the movie’s most peculiar inclusion, but also its funniest. The writers and animators do find some mildly clever excuses to shoehorn Mario’s platforming prowess from the games into the film. And visually, there’s a bit of panache in Mario and DK’s speedy pursuit, a confrontation with a giant-sized Bullet Bill, and the final superstar showdown between the Mario Bros. and Bowser.
Aside from those uptempo moments there, The Super Mario Bros. movie is, at best, nothing to write home about from a visual standpoint. The film’s stylists want to retain the cartoony look of the original characters, but have them move and emote in realistic ways, which lends the film an odd uncanniness the whole way through. The character and world designs are almost exclusively gussied up versions of the ones from the games. And the attempt to blend real world textures with an exaggerated world comes off mismatched.
The writing is no better. If you squint, you can make out the faintest of arcs in Mario and DK impressing their dads, Luigi discovering his courage, and the titular siblings finding strength in working together. But the plot progression and character beats are as threadbare as anything else in the movie. By and large, the narrative here is a mere skeleton to hang Mario references onto, which I guess means it serves its purpose.
That’s the best you can say for The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It is a gentle, unchallenging, spectacle-and-nostalgia delivery mechanism more than it’s an actual film. In an era when fans have revolted when franchises dare to take chances, to depart from expectations, to offer genuine surprises and have the temerity to move things forward; this movie is composed of nothing but simple, easily-digestible pablum that asks absolutely nothing of its audience and barely asks anything more from its creators.
In that, it succeeded. Rather than give myself over to existential rhapsodies like the film’s Luma, I don’t want to gaze up at Lakitu and declare that the sky is falling. One need only look at the runaway success of Across the Spider-Verse to have hope that there’s still room for gorgeous, inventive, and above all ambitious animated films at the multiplex. But The Super Mario Bros. movie is still a sad reminder that, with the right name and iconography in tow, a movie doesn’t have to be creative, or even good, to enjoy beaucoup success at the cinema.
Dune was an amazing visual and audial experience, and it definitely captured the vibe of Dune very well, but it lacked almost all of the depth of the book, from the lore, to the characters, and especially the plot. They cut out a huge chunk of the plot in the book, almost all of the political intrigue, and that resulted in it feeling incredibly rushed and the decisions of the characters often seemed odd and unexplained. For example, in the book, House Atreides know that House Harkonnen is planning a trap, they know the Emperor has turned on them, and they know to expect the Sardauker. They also strongly suspect there's a spy among them, and the drama surrounding this is incredibly interesting, and acted as a brilliant build-up to Doctor Yueh's betrayal. Alas, all of this was cut, and the film suffered for it.
Another fairly major gripe I had was the portrayal of Lady Jessica. In the book, she was an incredibly powerful character and was feared and respected by all. She was calm, collected, intelligent, and strong. In the film, she comes across as a mentally unstable mess, constantly crying and having mental breakdowns, and very little of her Bene Gesserit power was shown.
I had mixed reactions to the other characters. Paul and Leto Atreides were great, but Rabban Harkonnen felt very odd and not like a Harkonnen at all. Thufir Hawat was also disappointing, first they made him fat when he's supposed to still be strong (albeit ageing) warrior, but then they removed any mention of him being a Mentat and cut most of his scenes from the book.
And let's not forget to mention they cut my favourite scene from the book, which featured a dinner party and acted as very important character development for Paul, as well as showcasing the political situation on Arrakis as well as the extent of the Bene Gesserit powers.
In general, it felt like this film was less of an adaptation of the story and more of an illustration of it - omitting much of the plot, lore, and character development, and replacing it with beautiful visuals and music. Overall however, despite my disappointments at the various cuts and changes, and although I will continue to wonder what could have been achieved if the story had been split into 3 films instead of 2, this remains a fairly faithful adaptation of a book which is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen, and as a result I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the sequel.
TL:DR Watch Alien, then Aliens, then play Alien: Isolation, then watch the assembly cut of Alien 3. You're done after that.
I've thought of a lot of different ways I could open this review, but I'm going to do something simple... and start with a checklist; a list of questions for a typical audience member.
Do you want a suspenseful slow-burn gripping horror movie? If you answered yes, you're not going to get it at all.
Do you want a memorable and unique action thriller with new and exciting ways to show suspenseful gripping warfare? If you answered yes, you're not going to get that either.
Do you want memorable and interesting characters that go through arcs, have interesting personalities, and you eventually become really attached to them? If you answered yes, you're looking in the wrong fucking place, boyo.
Do you want a philosophical interesting study of human nature that chronicles the creation of a deadly species; one study that makes you question the existence of mankind? If you answered yes, you'll get a very shallow and uninteresting concept like that doesn't go anywhere, but it's kind of there.
Do you want a shitty lackluster horror movie that relies on tons of jump-scares, no tension or suspense, absolutely retarded humans that don't act like real people, sprinkles of exposition and pseudo-intellectual dialogue about creation, absolutely atrocious looking CGI, and constant copycat recreations of stuff that happened in the original Alien? If you answered yes, THEN THIS IS THE MOVIE FOR YOU!
Alien: Covenant is really an anomaly of a movie for me. I've never been so confused at the choices made by a director and a screenwriter, while I was watching the movie. I really want to know what was going through their heads. I want to ask them this one question: "What was the goal of this movie?"
As a horror movie, it fails on every front imaginable. You know that movie "The Cabin in the Woods"? The movie where the scientists release toxins into a typical horror movie cabin to cloud the visitors' judgement, and that explains why so many horror movie characters make really stupid decisions? Yeah, imagine that concept, but it was done for serious. The absolute baffling and obviously illogical choices some of these characters make, actually make me roll my head in utter disbelief at how stupid these colonists are. They don't wear helmets when going onto an alien planet, they don't follow any sort of protocol, they don't follow any code, they decide to poke everything they see, and generally act like incompetent children. The fact these people were given the task to colonize another world and be responsible for the lives of over 2,000 colonists is unbelievable. I don't buy it for a fucking second.
Continued from the last paragraph, there's this one scene about 1/3 into the movie, where one the passengers gets infected with this kind of bionic metal floating thing and instantly becomes sick. He's dragged back to the space shuttle that's landed on the planet and is put into the medical room. Girl 1 gets locked into the room with Infected 1. Girl 2, who was already on the space shuttle, locks them both in and refuses to open the door. Infected 1 starts to shake rapidly and something starts to pop out his back, blood flying everywhere. Girl 1, for some fucking reason, decides to hug Infected 1 like the dumb shit she is. The little xenomorph pops out Infected 1's back in a little blood sac, and proceeds to attack Girl 1. Meanwhile, Girl 2 is acting like frantic spaz and goes and grabs a shotgun. She opens back up the room and walks slowly to Girl 1, who's being ripped apart by the alien. She then slips on the pool of blood like a fucking idiot and accidentally fires the gun. She gets up and tries to scramble out of the room, and then gets her foot caught in door, crippling it, again, like a complete idiot. The alien chases her out of the room into the cargo bay of the shuttle, where she proceeds to just shoot wildly until she fires at a gas canister, blowing up the entire space shuttle, stranding all the other passengers on the planet.
Now, when it comes to logic in movies, I'm not harsh on it at all. I'm actually an advocate for suspending disbelief and just accepting that sometimes, people do dumb shit when they're scared. Yes it's true, people when they're clouded by emotions, will act incoherently or stupidly. I firmly believe that in movies and I know people will write characters like that to make them more believable But this... this scene, was so fucking infuriating to watch. Was it supposed to be silly? Was it supposed to be scary? What was the point of this scene? I was watching a really pathetic human acting like a complete moron acting crazy, until she decides to shoot a gas canister. The entire sequence was really just sad to watch, and not in a good scary way.
And even as an action sequence, it's not thrilling or intense either. I wasn't riveted or on the edge of my seat as the events before me unfolded. I knew exactly what was going to happen, with the xenomorph poping out Infected 1's back, but this raises me to a big point that I want to bring up, one of the fundamental biggest problems I had with the movie, besides the fact it's not scary:
The xenomorphs themselves are not scary at all. I'm actually amazed people are giving this movie a pass, rating it with like a 3/5 or higher. I just don't believe that in the slightest. When I think of Alien, I think of claustrophobic terrifying corridor encounters with a deadly and unknown hostile life-form that could kill you in an instant. This nail-biting and tension-filled wait for the thing to go away. Ridley Scott, with this movie, effectively ruins what makes the Alien scary. I have NO problem with Scott trying to explore the mythos of the alien universe, and even explain where the xenomorphs came from. I don't particularly like it, I think it ruins the mystery of the alien, but I can appreciate Scott trying to do something different. But the way the aliens are showcased in this movie, don't make them out to be the terrifying monsters that lurk in the shadow, waiting to strike and then pounce back into the darkness, just ready to sneak up on you. They're now just generic movie monsters now, not exhibiting any of the familiar traits or behaviors of xenomorphs from the original trilogy. Instead of hiding and lurking in the shadows like a deadly creature, these fuckers are running out in the open, just attack humans aimlessly. I felt like I was watching a Friday the 13th movie, but if Jason Vorhees was just skinned over with a alien suit. When I see a xenomorph just come up behind a naked couple in the shower, I don't think of alien, I think of Shylock cliche horror from other movies that are terrible, especially the Friday the 13th sequels. When I see a xenomorph attack a fucking security camera for no reason, other than to give the audience a little laugh, that doesn't feel like Alien. I'm not saying the movie has to be the same as the original, hell, far from it. I want them to do stuff that's different, but you have to understand the rules and behaviors of the world you're exploring first. It's like Ridley Scott forgot the movie he was trying to make.
Another two problems I have with the xenomorphs, are the visual effects and the animation. It's sad to me to think that human suits from over 40 years still look better than CGI from this year. I don't know who was in charge of creating the digital effects for this movie, I don't know if they were rushed or something, but effects for the aliens was fucking terrible. Not once was I convinced in the whole movie, that what I was looking at was a real alien that posed a threat to the humans. The glossy and horribly modeled xenomorph models looked like they were from a low budget experiment project, not a big budgeted blockbuster. But even with the awkward and awful looking models, I felt the animations were all wrong. Thank about what a xenomorph is: It's an alien that infects it's host and then takes the form of the host it infected. 100% verifiably based on what we've seen in the alien universe thus far, when a facehugger infects a human, the resulting xenomorph looks and moves like a human. It stands upright and walks like a human. When a facehugger infects an animal, let's say a dog, the resulting xenomorph movies on all-fours and acts like a dog. We saw this in both Alien and in Alien 3. But for some reason in Alien: Covenant, when the facehugger takes over the human captain, the resulting xenomorph moves more like an animal... running on all-fours. Which, if you think about it doesn't make any sense, based on what we've seen. Yes, Ridley Scott could just be rectonning Alien 3 because "most fans didn't like it," but this animation fundamentally undermines what the term "xenoMORPH" stands for. The embryo morphs into the lifeform it's taken over. It takes the physical traits from it's host. But besides that glaring error in the choice of animation, the actual digital movement of the xenomorph model looked really fake and stupid. The way it ran down corridors and up and down ladders was not convincing in the slightest.
And even when the horror doesn't work, the action doesn't work either. You'd think they'd be able to get one of these elements right, but nope. Because there's no tension in the air and xenomorphs are just running out in the open like deer or whatever, there's no reason for me to get invested in the close-encounters action that's happening. Sure, some people shoot some guns and there's a part at the end where newcomer-captain Daniels is dangling off a space shuttle, but none of the action feels new and fresh. In fact, most of it feels extremely anti-climactic. It feels kind of tact on, like Ridley Scott was making one movie and realized, "Oh yeah, I have to make this a little exciting for audience members. I'll just throw in an action scene here and there. That'll shut them up." None of it feels earned. It just feels like it happens for the sake of happening, and Scott doesn't try to do anything unique with the direction. I was thoroughly bored in every 2 action scenes. The xenomorph just follows the heroes out onto the second space shuttle that comes down, and chases them like a generic bad guy. What happened to the alien sneaking up and avoiding detection, luring the victims into a false sense of security?
The climax of this jumbled mess was literally a carbon copy of the ending from both Alien and Aliens. New-captain Daniels and Danny McBride's character lure the xenomorph into the cargo bay back on the main ship, and then blow the fucker out into space. Same shit again. Nothing original or done differently. I'm really getting sick of it.
Okay, now will all my grievances out of the way, all of my anger hopefully vented, there is one thing critics and audiences are trying to give this movie credit for, or even justifying their reason for the movie earning a fucking 3 stars or higher. Michael Fassbender. He's the center of the movie. He's the core of what this movie's about. The very first scene is his character David, from Prometheus, having a discussion with his creator. This gets them into a talk about what it's like to create, and where humanity will go. Is the role of humans to die off and make way for the next creation from father? Ridley Scott tries to use Fassbender as a tool to try to talk philosophically about life and death, and the horrors of creation. There's a back and forth sequence in the middle of the movie where David and Walter, another synthetic android that looks like David, have a conversation how David has followed in his fathers footsteps, and experimented to create his own life, effectively building the alien xenomorphs. Yes, the synthetic David actually created the xenomorphs, which, I'm okay with the writers doing something interesting like that, but... it doesn't go anywhere or try to answer real serious questions. It just brings up some empty blanket questions about creation and why it's horrific, but never does anything with it. In one scene with the original captain from the colonist crew, he gets taken over by a facehugger, and later, when the xenomorph chestbursts out of his stomach, sad piano and violin music plays, trying to poise some kind of greater question about the xenomorph. To me personally, it doesn't do anything other than just make the aliens not scary anymore. It actually makes me not scared of the xenomorphs anymore. Now they just seem like toys a man came up with, which is fine idea... if the man who created them was actually scary. Michael Fassbender does a decent job with the material he has, and he's a fine actor, but in no way is he intimidating, and I don't believe for a second that he created the xenomorphs. Also, this raises the question, what about the alien queen in the movie 'Aliens'? Where did she come from? The xenomorphs aren't a race like previously thought? Why isn't this explained? Oh, I have to wait until the NEXT sequel to learn that. Goddamn it.
When it tries to be smart, it doesn't work. When it tries to be scary, it doesn't work. When it tries to be action-packed, it doesn't work. When it tries to add depth to the characters, it doesn't work. I didn't like really anything this movie had to offer. I thought some of the music was decent and Michael Fassbender's performance was alright, but that's not enough to save a movie like this. When I think about Covenant, then I think about Alien, it just makes me sad. The original Alien was a groundbreaking masterpiece that worked because it was filled with tension. Ridley Scott is now just using the Alien franchise to try to act pretentious, calling Alien: Covenant a "thinking man's Alien movie." Oh, bite me, Ridley. Your movie isn't smart in any way. It's terribly paced, horribly focused, not scary, not interesting, and not worthy anyone's time.
This is the Attack of the Clones of the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott is now George Lucas, trying to claim ultimate ownership of the franchise. It's quite sad. Very disappointed in this disaster.
