Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 54

Super Mario Galaxy (2026)

Princess Peach travels to distant galaxies to save Rosalina, who has been captured by Bowser Jr.

Notice something interesting about the summary there? No mention of Mario. Reading the rather bland IMDB summary will make you think it’s another Mario adventure, but he ends up more of a bit player here. In a way, how it ends up in Galaxy makes some sense. If you get kidnapped and imprisoned like Rosalina did, you’d want to contact someone powerful, not a handyman from another universe you probably had never heard of. Rosalina has two more motivations to boot (spoilers!): Peach is Rosalina’s younger sister and like the Wonder Twins they’re more powerful together. Sure, why not?

Everything else in the movie is just there for the visuals and nostalgia: Mario, Luigi, Toad—the other Toads, whatever they’re called—Yoshi, King Frog and Birdo. Interestingly, there’s near zero character development, though there are some seeds planted. There’s hints of a romantic relationship between Mario and Peach that goes nowhere. There’s jealousy on Toad’s part because so much is paid attention to the new guy, Yoshi. Bowser let his son down, and Bowser Jr. tries mighty hard to please his dad by building a G-Rated Death Star. Finally, there’s Peach and Rosalina: Peach could have had feelings of abandonment when she finds out Rosalina forced her into the Mushroom Kingdom when she was a wee lass, and Rosalina could have struggled with the maybe decades-long guilt she felt after doing that. Why not have Peach rescue Rosalina somewhere in the middle of the second act and have the two of them figure out how to reconcile that?

It’s all spectacle and the Do-the-Thing A Plot. Peach is way overpowered and only struggles with finding out the next slice of information on how to Do the Thing. In later action scenes, I preconcluded any battle involving Peach will turn out in her favor. Peach ex machina.

But besides all of this, if we’re talking about a story supposedly based on the Super Mario Galaxy game, why wasn’t there an exploration of Rosalina’s past with the star children? Their wonderfully written backstory is already established in the two Galaxy games, so why pass up an opportunity to put more detail into that? What hellish Medieval clampdowns did the Universal execs impose on the writers to make them abandon these ideas?

A Quiet Place: Day One

A terminally-ill cancer patient is stuck in New York City when an alien invasion begins.

Cloverfield meets Children of Men (director Michael Sarnoski cited Children as an influence). A character-driven, escort mission story. The title may have deceived some folks, me included, since “day one” implies an origin story for the invasion or the aliens. But Day One is a story that simply happens right at the invasion’s beginning: the aliens just show up (crash) and start wreaking havoc. I’m a sucker for any kind of story that takes place at the beginning of an apocalypse, so I didn’t mind.

The idea of the protagonist seeking out her favorite pizza place instead of escaping an alien invasion is an interesting premise. It sets the story up to take a good look on how priorities shift when we know our end is near. Unfortunately, the protagonist’s, Sam’s, arc barely has a curve. She only has a series of Do the Things to make it to Patsy’s, the pizza place: get food, walk, get meds, don’t make noise so the aliens don’t tear you apart. The deuterragonist, Eric, has a slightly curvier arc, but barely so in comparison, because he learns to face his fears of water? Or being underwater? It’s hard to say, but it’s something like that. Sam just has the Big Sad about her cancer and the pizza and her dad, and Eric has the Big Sad about his parents in England and his career. There wasn’t a change of anything, just griping. For a character-driven movie, not even an appearance of a tragic character flaw, much less a resolution of one, is a fatal error.

There was a decent setup for Sam to advance as a person, because sacrifices herself so Eric can escape on the boat. But we already knew she was on her way out because of her cancer, and we know she was resigned to her fate from her “shit” poem in the opening scene. She didn’t lose much. What if we gave her a choice? What if she had to choose between going to Patsy’s for her stupid pizza, and helping Eric get onto the boat? That doesn’t seem like enough: giving up pizza for someone else’s life isn’t quite an equal exchange to most people. What if her mission was, for instance, to scatter her father’s ashes in front of the club he used to perform in, as part of his final wishes? That might have more of an impact. Still very much not an equal trade in most people’s eyes but there’d be a big emotional beat when Sam chooses Eric over her deceased father. Again, the narrative pieces were all present, but they weren’t put together.

Speaking of the Cloverfield universe, 10 Cloverfield Lane, not quite a character-driven story,had a subtle but profound character arc in a similar setting. Michelle chose to address her guilt head on, for failing to help someone in physical trouble in her past, by tur ning towards a dangerous route (literally, in her car) to purposefully help others.

Also, speaking of…something else: are America’s armed forces that dumb to not take advantage of their intel on the aliens’ weakness? Everyone knows they were attracted to noise, and there’s even a scene where the military helicopters fly around NYC airspace and make announcements about getting to the boats for safety, while the aliens try to get at them. Why not have air support do this but more so, and continuously, while people safely make their way to the boats? Fire guns into the air, play Metallica over a PA system, whatever. Heck, take a boat into the middle of the Hudson and just shootoff some firewroks, and the aliens will jump out and drown. There’s low cost, low risk solutions right in front of you, Colonel Klink. Get to it.

Under the Skin (2013)

A being posing as an attractive woman captures and holds men in her otherwordly prison.

Watch it for free on Tubi, at least for now. Annihilation meets No Country For Old Men, maybe? I reference Country because the protagonist, The Female, is much like Chigurh in that she (it, really) is driven by a search for fundamental meaning. Chugurh knows that he needs someone to break the cycle of random variables he consistently enounters; he can’t find meaning within that “pattern” of randomness. The Female has no idea what’s she searching for but more learning as she’s going. Also, both characters are amoral, sociopathic serial killers, but that’s a surface-level similarity.

Great opening scene and filmwork all around, but this whole thing went nowhere because it was simply a very unconventional, arthouse, film, however well-made it was. The only reason it pinged popular consciousness was because of Scarlet Johansson.

Of course, whenever there’s a woman protagonist the feminist retards need to honk their butts about it, in reading some reviews. The only thing feminist about the protagonist is she…drives by herself? Otherwise, she exhibits a near-zero level of autonomy and instead runs on dumbly catatonic instinct, except for the times where she interacts verbally—rather well, admittedly, for an alien entity not knowing anything else about human behavior—with her victims. Even then, there’s very little an attractive woman needs to do or say to lure a normal man into doing…whatever. The Female even has a male handler. I guess if you’re dumb enough susceptible enough to believe in absurdities like “equality,” you’re also susceptible to siding with a demonic serial killer over the (spoiler!) would-be rapist that kills the cosmic horror entity. Maybe it’s all just the power of the camera and cinematic editing.