The Super Mario Bros. Movie 4K 2023 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The plumber brothers Mario and Luigi open a portal to an underground city from which they must rescue the captive Princess Peach and fight their nemesis Bowser.

Review 4K Movie

There are films that are so lightweight that it's a real pain to evaluate them. The new Super Mario Brothers belongs to this category, and it's not easy to get anything out of them other than general words. Even the choice of source material and the most careful treatment of it - which is good for the game, too...conceptual for the big screen - contributes to that. So the cartoon "Super Mario Brothers" left a strange aftertaste: it seems that everything is good, but there is nothing to remember.

To begin with, evidently, is the main advantages of this highly successful picture. These include the carefully recreated atmosphere of the classic console game, which even I could appreciate, because I never had Nintendo as a kid, had another console, and my character is a blue hedgehog, not the plumber brothers. Mario's main adventures in the cartoon are like a revived playthrough with the most amazing obstacles, power-ups, racing on something unthinkable, and with a completely illogical, insanely contrived "level boss." Such emphasized non-seriousness of events determines the overall cheerfulness and positive attitude of the picture, when even the conditional mortal danger, of course, can not be. In "Super Mario Brothers" dominate bright contrasting colors, "binary" game music, ridiculous but charming characters. It's like a trip back in time, when everything was easy and understandable, and that makes it good. The cartoon takes full advantage of the viewer's nostalgia by reproducing recognizable game elements, making its simplicity not a bug, but a feature.

It may seem unbelievable, but "Super Mario Brothers" is a very feminist movie, with its protagonist replicating most of the standards inherent in strong and independent modern women. Peach is a successful ruler, a beautiful, smart, athletic woman, determined, and self-sufficient. Such and stop the horse on the gallop, and solve all the problems themselves, but will not wait for the prince on a white horse, oh, that is a wrench. Perhaps based on this alone, it is Mario who turns to the heroine for help, not she to him, so that by all accounts the main thing in "Mario Brothers" is the heroine, not the hero. In any other movie or cartoon this would be normal, modern, but more than questionable for a work where nominally the protagonists are literally put in the title, but in reality they don't play the first fiddle, often - they just sit quietly and keep their heads down while the woman decides everything. Even the final denouement does not change anything here, for it is the will of chance, rather than a necessary turn of the plot with the placement of the notorious Mario brothers in its center. By the way, that's probably why there's no hint of a love line in the picture - a woman like that needs a man equal to her, and Mario, with all due respect in this particular cartoon, does not pull that kind of thing.

There is one problem that is striking in Super Mario Brothers, and that is the conceptual incompleteness of this cartoon. On the one hand, the authors clearly juxtapose two worlds where one is always sunny and the other is dark, where one is bathed in joy and the other is only death and decay. Even musically, one is retro-pop and the other is rock. But, on the other hand, the contrast is somehow incomplete: say, we know about Peach as the chosen ruler, but we know nothing about her rival turtle. Or the basic motivation: the love-dependence of the main villain is not countered by the heroine's pure and bright feeling, emotionally nothing is countered at all. The approach to portraying the main villain as a quite gifted rock musician also seemed strange, because rockers are rebels, not villains, but that's not the case here, everything is completely black and white, so associating the tortoise-turtle with rock quite and groundlessly denigrates this musical movement. It should be noted that by framing rock in this way, the authors are not exalting pop music - yes, it is heard everywhere, but no one sings it in the frame, and this decision is very ambiguous.

The plot of Super Mario Brothers is very simple, superficial, and even primitive, which only emphasizes the authors' desire to evoke nostalgia rather than create a solid and independent work, even if it is based on something iconic. Here, roughly all the characters lack motivation, the villain does his villainy simply because he is supposed to, and the main character is guided by the most understandable fraternal feeling in the world. The elaboration of the heroes' characters, with the exception of Peach, is also very formal, and even the hooks thrown into the picture don't really work: say, as many as two characters in the picture mention their unappreciation by their parents, but in reality this is not true - one father obviously considers his great advantage, while the other character is simply not too complex about this, which destroys any emotional impact of the circumstances described. Furthermore, even if this is a consequence of the game itself, it is very difficult to perceive the clearly childlike character of Mario and his brother as applied to two mustachioed middle-aged men. Such dissonance would be unnoticeable except to children.

I suppose the perception of "Super Mario Brothers" is let down by our own expectations of something incredible and cool. It's a movie built entirely on nostalgia for a bygone nineties childhood, without trying to represent anything of value on its own. Everything about the reproduction of tradition works here: the visual style, the handling of the characters' adventures, and the musical design. But everything that makes the cartoon an independent work of art, came out strictly "three. If "Super Mario Brothers" had not had such a strong source material, it would not have been memorable against the background of much more solid works in the genre.