I don’t think anyone could have predicted the incredible success of the Super Mario Bros. movies. We knew it was going to be big, but we didn’t know that the biggest man of all time was going to be a five-day opening. Super Mario is on pace to easily surpass Warcraft as the highest-grossing video game movie of all time, and if it can keep up the momentum, Frozen and Soulless Pictures are on the way. You might even be able to try a realistic remake of The Lion King. .
Super Mario has been a huge success, and it’s no surprise that viewers love it. It’s a fast-paced crowd pleaser, with nostalgic allusions, some thrilling action moments, and Jack Black singing a silly song. I’m doing a decent job as a plumber. Please don’t tell anyone what I said.
Audiences can’t say enough good things about it, but there’s one bit of praise that I take issue with: audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, social media reactions, and even colleagues. If you look at the comments from, the most commonly heard opinion is that the Super Mario Bros. Movie works because it feels like a video game. Setting aside my feelings about how well the film performs – the box office numbers clearly prove it does – I’ll take a few issues from this perspective. , I don’t think Super Mario “feels like a video game,” but do you know what the movie is? John Wick: Chapter 4.
The Super Mario Bros. movies are certainly full of video game elements. You’ll be there with Mario, Bowser, Princess Peach, Goomba, Bowser, and all the other nasty little guys enslaved by King Bowser. The adventure takes our hero to the Mushroom Kingdom and Jungle Kingdom – more like the world of Mario Kart than the game Kong Island, but I’ll slide this in. They use power-ups Then jump on the green pipe to move and drive Rainbow his load. All the Mario game iconography is there, but does it “feel” like a video game, or is it only the movies that make you feel real Mario?
There’s nothing about the narrative structure, scene composition, or shot choices that makes Super Mario different from every other computer-animated film of the last decade. It does not play in 2D side-scrolling or third-person view. The scene is set up like a level that Mario has to complete before moving on. Other than power-ups, there are no plot devices that frame what happens in the video game. I don’t think I would make the same claim if I didn’t have prior knowledge of Mario games. Aspects associated with video games – heroes on quests, villains to defeat, special skills to master – are also associated with Kung Fu Panda, and no one has ever compared it to a video game.
The scene that best describes what it’s like to play Mario is the training montage in which Peach teaches Mario how to use power-ups, but it still leans far more toward movie conventions than video game conventions. I’m here. It’s a time-distorting montage, not a single level that you play over and over until you master it. This is Rocky territory, not Nintendo. Also, Mario does so many things in this sequence that he never does in the game. When he reaches empty block pillars, he charges and crashes through them. He skips the top of Bullet Bills. His power glides around corners. At one point, he thinks he’s won and goes into slow motion while robbing Peach, but he has his head devoured by a robotic piranha plant. He does all this to the tune of Bonnie Tyler’s I Need a Hero. Sorry, this is not about Mario. This is not a video game thing. It’s a movie story.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is video game movie hell. Unlike the Mario movies, John Wick’s story is structured like a series of video game levels. After a set piece intro in the desert that teaches Wick how to move and shoot (every game requires a tutorial, even Forkel), the game begins in Osaka Continental. Mix shooters with tight melee combat and seamlessly switch between combat styles. All combat encounters are shown with long, uninterrupted shots from a fixed camera position, either over Wick’s shoulder, or placed on a flat surface with his opponent like in a fighting game.
Each mission has different enemies. Osaka Continental hurls countless assassins at him with swords, followed by a segment of cover shooters, and finally pits him against a high table representative in a bulletproof suit. You need to adjust your playstyle for each type. Later missions feature smaller enemies that absorb melee attacks, enemies wearing bulletproof masks, and a handful of mini-bosses, including those fighting dogs.
There’s a lot of gameplay variety, even between missions. There’s an entire battle that takes place in the middle of the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which begins as a driving mission and turns into an extended combat encounter in which Wick must dodge cars during the fight. A level that everyone will be talking about for years to come, a top-down shooter mission pulled straight from Hotline Miami. Wick wields a shotgun filled with incendiary ammunition. It’s an ammunition type that should have been invented for video games, systematically eliminating all enemies in an apartment, then using walls and corners as cover to blast targets with Dragon Breath, turning them into ragdolls. . across the room. The entire sequence is one unbroken shot of him from a bird’s eye view. It’s the most direct video game sequence since Doom’s first-person shooter scene.
You can practically feel pressing Square to reload as Wick moves from cover to cover, lining up faceless thugs with a target reticle and advancing through each battle. Eliminate people, but it’s easy to tell when a particular stunt performer is repeated. John Wick and Super Mario, obviously he represents two very different kinds of video games, but only John Wick successfully approximates what it’s like to play a game. .I don’t hold a grudge against Mario movie fans, but if they TRUE I think it feels like a video game – and because it feels like what you have to say.