adventure

This is our family’s collective vote for best animated film of the last decade or so. Very fun and stands up to repeated watches.

Relatively well reviewed, and I don’t understand why. “A love letter to Hollywood’s golden era”, perhaps, but only for its first half; once the talkies arrive it decamps to fifties sci-fi and a save-the-world blob plot. The references are real enough (Muybridge’s horse, Keaton’s collapsing house front, some Lovecraft) but recognising one isn’t the same as the film doing anything with it. And the voice work is mostly phoned in. Not Jesse Eisenberg, who does well as a robot who appears for no reason. Trey Parker just does Cartman, in a children’s film, because nobody seems to have asked him not to.

Gosling carries this, as he often does. He’s the only human on screen for big stretches and never less than watchable, which the film asks a lot of. Rocky is the other triumph: from what I read, it’s roughly half puppetry, half CGI, and the two techniques together give the alien real character. The overall alien design and technology is a fine balance. Any cuter and it’s Flight of the Navigator; any weirder and it’s another Nolan bore-piece (fight me).

Tonally it just about holds. The premise is bleak, and a braver film might have leaned into that for a bigger payoff. Instead it stays small and personal, the resolution focusing on the Grace–Rocky friendship rather than the fate of humanity. Crowd-pleasing, in a specific sense that I didn’t mind.

A film about storytelling. Incredible to look at. Seems to have been an enormous labour of love; I expect my rating will rise or fall significantly upon a rewatch.

Continuing to show my son the high-concept family comedies of my youth—a genre Hollywood was unusually good at in the late eighties and early nineties, when a one-line premise could carry a whole film. This one was well-received. Some of the practical effects still hold up. The digital work does not—1989 was a year or two too early, and the seams show in every composite. Memories of watching it at the cinema with my grandmother aren’t quite enough to lift it any higher.

The sketch-to-feature problem is real (you can feel the last twenty minutes stretching), but the hit rate on individual gags is high enough to carry it. Impressively stupid, in the most complimentary sense.

Nintendo’s great gift in game design is knowing when to walk away from an idea. A mechanic is introduced, developed, twisted once, then discarded before it outstays its welcome. Some of these ideas—gravity flipping, bee suits, entire physics systems—are things another studio might base a whole game around. To Nintendo, they’re a single level. A philosophy of creative abundance: you can afford to throw away good ideas when you trust yourself to have more.

This does not translate to film. Galaxy is 99 minutes of TikToks, each scene a self-contained vignette stuffed with boss fights, power-ups, and environments from the games, stitched together with the connective tissue of a clip show. The production design is mostly gorgeous. But the introduce-develop-discard rhythm that makes a Mario game feel endlessly inventive makes a Mario movie feel exhausting. A game earns its density through play; a film needs to earn it through narrative. One rewards your attention with agency, the other just demands it.

The movie can’t decide whether it’s for people who’ve played every game or people who’ve played none. Minor characters and references arrive in two flavours: unexplained cameos that flash past like inside jokes at a party you weren’t invited to, or over-narrated introductions that grind the pace to a halt for the benefit of someone’s confused parent. The makers of Super Metroid once said they didn’t want to explain things to the player using too many words. They designed the world so you’d discover things yourself and feel like the discovery was yours. Galaxy never trusts you like that. It either assumes you already know, or it stops to make sure you do. No middle ground, and no discovery.

What it actually resembles is the nostalgia-industrial complex it was born from. Callback upon callback, each reference feeding the next. The cinematic equivalent of a “do you remember this?” Facebook post: you see the thing, you recognise the thing, you feel a brief warmth, you move on. The first movie had plenty of this too, but it largely got away with it—the novelty of seeing these characters on screen carried the weight that the story couldn’t. Galaxy doesn’t have that excuse. With that charm spent, the underlying problem is fully exposed: the film mistakes recognition for emotion, as if reminding you that Lumas exist is the same as making you care about them.

The irony is that Nintendo, in its actual games, resists this. Their whole competitive strategy is refusing incrementalism—competing on terms rivals aren’t even considering. In games, they’re fearless about throwing away what works and trying something new. This movie plays it safe in exactly the way their games don’t. A greatest-hits tour where the songs are played too fast and in the wrong order—and where the thing that made Nintendo interesting in the first place, that willingness to let a great idea go, is the one thing they couldn’t bring themselves to do here.

My son loved it.

Very strange. Pretty good! Best new Pixar film for a while.

Watched on Sunday February 15, 2026.

This looks like a PS4 game. One that I would kill to play. As it is, it’s a moving and thoughtful film.

My son’s slightly strange BTTF ranking is 3 > 2 > 1. Enjoyed watching them with him.

My son’s first viewing of the trilogy continues. He liked this one a lot.

As a kid I was mesmerised by the scene at the end where Joe Flaherty turns up with the letter. Blew my mind.

A franchise’s worth of characters can’t save the franchise

Watched it with my son, who was seeing it for the first time. He thought it was great and is excited to see the sequels over the weekend.

My son liked it. I enjoyed the gypsy jazz part.

I had exceedingly low expectations and it just about surpassed them.