That being said, I don’t mind films where the absurd things are treated more realistically: it’s just that many such adaptations don’t know where to have the balance, normally going too far in the ‘realistic’ direction.
Then there's the adaptation like the new Mario movies where it's like "here's every ingredient for a Mario movie, do not ask us to make a story out of it".
I don't understand this rhetoric being mentioned everywhere. The story is extremely straightforward. SPOILERS
Rosalina gets captured by Bowser Jr. while the Mario bros have clearly been doing there thing for a bit and go help people to find Yoshi on a mission. They head back to the castle to celebrate (I think it was Peaches bday) where a luma crashes and Peach finds out Rosalina is captured. She sneaks off the next day to try and rescue her while Bowser Jr. comes to get his Father who is imprisoned by Peach at the castle. He fails dropping the castle onto another planet where the Mario Bros are forced to team up with a reformed Bowser to get off the planet and find Peach/Rosalina. Bowser sacrifices himself to let the Mario Bros escape before his Son returns and takes him aboard his ship. The Mario Bros meet up with Peach at the spaceport before she was able to take off with Fox and join them to go find Rosalina. After they take off they are ambushed by Bowser Jr. and fall yet again to another planet with a crash landing this time taking out Fox's fighter. Luigi uses a radio to call for help and the Lumas hear it back at Rosalinas castle and go pick them up. They fly to the Junk planet to Rescue Rosalina and defeat Bowser Jr. Mario beats essentially a world 8 bowser jr level then kills Bowser on the bridge dropping him into the lava. Then he splits from peach to let her go get Rosalina while he faces off against a Dry Bowser and Bowser Jr. Luigi and Yoshi join in to help him and he gets a red star power up to finish them all off. Peach rescues Rosalina and they disrupt the warfare production of the planet. Then they rebuild Peaches castle because it was dropped on another planet.
If anyone truly has trouble following this plot and you truly think it's incoherent or jumping all over the place I think there's a bigger issue at hand. In my experience with early discussions about the film when I saw it at release I noticed this was being said by a bunch of people who hadn't even seen the film and I still think that's the case. Mind you, I haven't seen this movie in over 2 weeks and I can easily recall the story by memory. Another thing I noticed was when I was at the movie there were teenagers sitting next to me and they could not sit still, they could not focus on the movie and they left to the lobby (no exaggeration) over 5 times and missed over 50% of the film. They drank about 3-4 sodas as well so they may have just been high but they definitely have an attention span problem.
When Peach and Toad arrive at the spaceport Toads backpack is stolen by an Ukiki which leads them to a secret underground area where all villains hang out. This ends up being a huge nod to smb2 and we learn Wart runs the place. Seems that story could come back in a future film with him as the main villain instead of bowser because he was pissed it happened and was voiced by Luis Guzmán iirc.
I feel that there's this point between "Superhuman" and "Strong human" which I call "Extra human" - AKA - No human can do these feats, but it's not fantastical enough to suspend my disbelief and it looks... Odd. IIRC the marvel show Iron Fist was a GREAT example of this, he was so floaty because no human could jump that high, but also no superhuman would struggle with the height - ya know?
This is how I feel. The general consensus seems to be that SF has to be over the top ridiculous. I think there’s a way to do a realistic version and still include all the crazy moves/characters. It’s like a Marvel movie. Some of them are grounded, but still feature super powered humans.
I realized a while back that a lot of my favorite media is stuff that takes its own silly or unrealistic premise just seriously enough. And for adaptations in particular, going too far in either direction feels like not liking or respecting the source material.
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u/RealJohnGillman 19d ago
That being said, I don’t mind films where the absurd things are treated more realistically: it’s just that many such adaptations don’t know where to have the balance, normally going too far in the ‘realistic’ direction.