Super Mario Bros.

Rest in peace, Bob Hoskins.

Alright, so I knew going into this one that it was really, really bad. I was very prepared for a bad movie, I assure you. But I expected, say, a bad kids movie. I expected to smile a little bit at a few references to Super Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom and maybe roll my eyes at some plot inconsistencies. I did not expect woefully bad science fiction with such minimal awareness of the Super Mario franchise. I knew this movie would not be good. I didn't know it would not be fun. Since it serves no one's interest for me to ramble on and on with nerd rage over something that happened twenty years ago, I'll just leave a few observations in bullet point format and move on with my life afterward.

The following are all unfaithful adaptation decisions made by the movie:

• Mario is depicted by a man in his fifties, and Luigi by a man in his twenties. While they were still ostensibly brothers, and while the duo have always had ambiguous ages, they have always been depicted as being relatively the same age. (Games that came after 1993 would depict the two as being babies simultaneously.) It was just a werid creative liberty to take, to turn Mario and Luigi into essentially an uncle-and-nephew type of pairing - not quite father-son, but certainly mentor-apprentice in some way.
• Although the brothers don their overalls and signature red and green shirts and hats late in the movie, Mario spends more than half of the movie in an olive green jacket and Luigi spends the same amount of time in a maroon sweatshirt. What a senseless oversight.
• Here's one where two wrongs inadvertently make a right. The movie's damsel in distress isn't Princess Toadstool (which is what Princess Peach was called back then), but Princess Daisy, instead. Furthermore, it's Luigi who's interested in saving her and in the same process courting her. Yes, Luigi and Daisy is technically a canonical pairing, but in Daisy's only appearances prior to 1993 she had only been another princess saved by Mario; if you want to give this movie credit for predicting or even creating the Daisy-Luigi pairing, fine, but the Daisy in this movie had blonde hair and was clearly just Princess Toadstool with a different name and the opposite brother as a love interest. Whatever.
• King Koopa - not Bowser, even though that had become the character's canonical name long before 1993 - was not an oafish snapping turtle with a spiky shell, but instead a human descendent of a Tyrannosaurus rex. His only reptilian feature was a long, pointy tongue.
• Goombas were not little walking mushroom things, but instead massive creatures with human bodies and tiny little heads. They were heavily armed with guns. You can find pictures of them all over the Internet. It's almost unbelievable.
• Toad existed, nominally, at least. Toad was a Goomba with a harmonica. Nice to see him get name-checked, I guess?
• Yoshi also existed. Yoshi was a small velociraptor-like pet of Koopa's. Again, why make the reference only to completely butcher everything about the character? (This movie came out two weeks before Jurassic Park, which really highlights the night-and-day difference in the quality of the dinosaurs.)
• The movie didn't take place in the Mushroom Kingdom or in Subcon, but instead in Dinohattan, which is Manhattan in an alternate dimension where the entire planet, outside this city, is a giant desert.

The following are examples of terrible science in a science fiction movie that didn't have to be a science fiction movie at all:

• Dinohattan exists in an alternate dimension that was made into an alternate dimension when a meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago. In our world, mammals thrived and went on to evolve into humans, but in the other world, dinosaurs thrived and went on to evolve into humans. Like, the exact same humans, except one of them has a pointy tongue.
• These dino-humans are somehow more technologically advanced than real humans despite the complete absence of oceans or any discernible biosphere outside of Dinohattan.
• The dino-humans have created an "un-evolving" ray or some other horseshit that essentially turns you into a different animal from further up your own evolutionary tree. This thing is used to make Princess Daisy's father - the king - into a sentient sprawling mess of fungus. It is later used to make King Koopa into a puddle of goo.
• The gun is used on a human being at one point, and he turns into a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are not evolutionary ancestors of human beings, and this was well known even back in 1993.
• Some female bad guy gets shocked by a bunch of electricity and immediately becomes a fossilized skeleton embedded within a rock wall.

Here are some more cringe-worthy elements of the film. There are plenty to choose from, but these stuck out:

• Plot hole! If you are going to turn the king into sentient fungus, why not just take the extra step and turn him all the way into a puddle of amoeba goo? That's what happens to Koopa, so we know it's what the technology can do.
• The entire reason Koopa kidnaps Princess Daisy, through an inter-dimensional rift, is so he can obtain a meteor fragment necklace she owns, which will allow Koopa to reopen an inter-dimensional rift, ostensibly to take over our own dimension, even though he's already running the show in his own dystopian universe. Also, how did his henchman get to Daisy in the first place, in another dimension, if the only way to cross dimensions is to use the necklace that Daisy had with her? It just doesn't make any sense! And this is the basic, basic plot!
• Koopa lives atop the "Koopa Towers" a partially destroyed and burnt-out looking World Trade Center. Yeesh.
• There's a scene where Mario and Luigi get arrested in Dinohattan and sent to jail. The officer booking them does so from behind a desk, and throughout the scene, a woman standing on the desk is just digging her heel into the officer's neck and shoulder. It's completely ignored by every character on screen and never referenced again, and it appears to serve no other purpose than to garner a "WTF?" reaction from audiences, as if the absurdity of the movie has not yet registered for some. Consider the target audience, and know that the film was rated PG.

You know what? Just watch the thing on YouTube. Skip around and find whatever bits and pieces are enough to satisfy whatever craving you had to see this film.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGGS0YozIgk)