Super Mario Bros. is a masterpiece of adaptation.

Now, when I say that, I don’t mean that it adapted Mario faithfully, of course not. What it did do, was turn Mario into something cinematic. Hot take: Mario is antithetical to cinema. It is inherently anti-cinema as a series. It was formed in the progenitive goo of a new artistic medium. Its character designs were created out of sheer necessity; cohesion went out the window in favour of legibility, appeal, and recognisability. Mario, in its first outing, did not have a fleshed-out world. It didn’t need to, because the world was set dressing for the function of the game, the interactivity. Mario’s design and all the other designs in the game are the coat of paint on the machinations that the Nintendo Entertainment System churned out. There was the poorest excuse for a story because the impetus for the character’s actions wasn’t in the game, it was physical – it was you. Because of this, the film Super Mario Bros. and the games of the same name have completely different raison d'êtres. Films are forged for spectacle, for storytelling. Games (in their early years at least) were formed for their interactivity.

So, how do you turn something that is by its very nature against cinema into something cinematic? How do you succeed making a video game adaptation while on that horrific recrudescent capitalist wheel that churns them out? Well, it’s simple. You kill Miyamoto. You change everything about his beloved series. You let the author die, and you strip back everything but the essence of what makes these characters ‘Mario’ and ‘Luigi’. Re-interpret what everything means – what would a Mushroom Kingdom look like? Who is King Koopa and what does he want (while avoiding sexist tropes)? And on top of all that, you add in a healthy amount of film literacy.

I can pinpoint three huge influences on Super Mario Brothers. Ridley Scott, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg. So what do we have to thank each of them for in this film? Well, from Scott, there’s Blade Runner’s foggy, cyberpunk chiaroscuro and themes of what it means to be human and humanity’s destructive nature. Plus, Alien’s foul, sinewy practical effects, as well as its themes of unchecked capitalism and, again, the theme of the innate nature of destructive creatures (such as humans). We hear a human narrator say in the opening of Super Mario Bros. “…the dinosaurs continue[d] to thrive and evolve into intelligent, vicious, aggressive beings, just like us.” which offhandedly claims humans to be innately violent, as if it is a well-known fact. Then it gives us a foil, another species just like us visually, but with all the implications of our cultural perception of dinosaurs as ravenous beasts that are vicious and destructive. It shows us a parallel dimension, not too different from ours, that is a metaphor. A metaphor for the ugliest side of humanity. King Koopa is a staunch, regicidal fascist. The world is filled with blinking signs for shops trying to sell you things, visually communicating runaway consumerism and unchecked capitalist growth. There’s vice in the strip clubs and with Koopa as he drinks throughout the film. There’s avarice in the streets, as the brothers are robbed by an old woman, and then the old woman is robbed by another woman right as they arrive. Karl Marx’s worst nightmare basically. We even get hints of David Icke’s Archon aliens; a conspiracy theory about a race of lizard people sent to Earth to control humanity. By tapping into that imagery and using it as shorthand for evil and unwanted control, the film recontextualises the lizards into real things, and asks what we would do in the face of them. We see the movie take a stand against the capitalist hellhole through the character of Scapelli. He tries to destroy ancient artefacts - the fossils - just to speed up his building project and save money. The film then has King Koopa accidentally turn him into a monkey in an ostentatious visual metaphor, devolving him and showing us that him and his ideas are ideas we should have evolved beyond. As Yoda says in The Last Jedi, a similarly capitalist-critical film, “we are what we grow beyond”, and we need to grow beyond these ideas of individualism, greed and fascism presented so unfavourably here.

King Koopa also devolves people into ‘Goombas’, (keyword here being devolve) which are a thinly-veiled Nazi SS stand-in, which reinforces the fascist imagery and allegory. Through the devolution process they come to represent the idea of humanity’s natural instinct for violence and its desire for clarity and leadership, which are things fascists promise hand over fist, but rarely deliver on. The film demonstrates how a fascist rises. First, they eliminate the people in their opposition. In King Koopa’s case, he devolves the old king into a fungus culture. Second, he improves his image with propaganda, as seen with the big posters, and he supresses any negative press, which is demonstrated when Toad is arrested and devolved for singing anti-Koopa songs in the street. Thirdly, a fascist will try and expand their scope, which in King Koopa’s case, means invading the real world to ‘take their resources’ and ‘reclaim what’s ours’. Earth is seen as the dinosaur blood rite that was taken from them by the meteor. This is how he justifies the invasion to the people and makes it palatable, its also how he gets away with destroying the environment and ignoring problems in his immediate vicinity. The film tells us that humans are gullible, prone to accept the easy choices and are persuaded into violence by demagogues and fascists. But, ultimately, it gives us a hopeful message, where we overcome this innate desire and reclaim control (although admittedly it fumbles this a little by reviving the old king and implying the reinstatement of the monarchy). The film’s didactic message is to reject our nature and strive to be more brave and kind. It begs us to take its message seriously and distances itself from the light-hearted video game series it was born from by taking cues from Brecht; alienating the audience, disrupting their expectations for tone and visuals so hard that they are forced to assess the film on its own merits and by its own messages. So, the film takes cues visually from Ridley Scott, and expands upon the themes injected into his films. Is Super Mario Bros. more thematically dense than Blade Runner and Alien? Possibly.

As mentioned above, the dinosaur dimension and its inhabitants are a foil for humanity and is a reflection of the worst parts of its nature. David Lynch is well known for his non-linear films in which dreams and alternate dimensions are used as metaphors for the internal states of characters. Mulholland Drive’s disaffected failed actress, Lost Highway’s in-denial wife killer. Super Mario Bros. takes it one step further and makes the alternate reality a reflection of an entire species. It is ambitious in its desire to take on the collective unconscious’ knowledge of its own innate destructiveness. David Lynch pokes at our desires and dreams and thoughts on the micro, but this film tries to tackle it on the macro scale. We even see an intertextual reference to Lynch’s work; King Koopa is played by Dennis Hopper - a Stanislavskian method actor and a truly scary presence - who plays a similarly unhinged and maniacal man in Blue Velvet. The mise-en-scene is sufficiently dreamlike, furniture covered in spikes, as if it were trying to attack you. The cars spark endlessly as if they’re about to explode, and the police cars have big scoops on the front for ramming and destroying. A taxi even has a skeleton attached to the front, implying that the drivers are so indifferent to life that a corpse on their car isn’t even something to bother to remove. The colour palette is dark, with splashes of colour, hinting at the bright spark of goodness within us – or possibly mimicking how in nature, some creatures adorn harsh and vibrant colours to prove how poisonous they are. The Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty both exist, proving to us that we are not in a physical realm but a reflection of our own. Each element is there to reinforce the metaphor; by placing all these elements into a physical space our heroes can traverse, they can visit this metaphor and return with the knowledge and wisdom previously unafforded to them, and they see the need for goodness in the world, the need for bravery in the face of evil, specifically in the face of internal evil. It does all of this in the context of a big budget video game adaptation, too, which is the truly astounding part. Lynch would be proud.

David Cronenberg is best known for his body horror work on films like The Fly and Videodrome, but his entire oeuvre is geared towards explorations of humanity’s relationship to itself, and the body horror work is just one way of making physical what is usually abstract. Super Mario Bros. uses Cronenbergian body horror (in a much more PG fashion) to again highlight the dreamlike state of the world, and the themes. People have their heads contorted and shapeshifted into lizard heads. A king is turned into a fungus colony in a decidedly Lovecraftian ascension into omnipresence, and at the end is rebirthed from the fungus anew. Faces move and poke through stone walls. Our heroine is born from an egg, and the implication is that if Luigi and her have a child, she will have to lay an egg, and their child will be a half-breed between a human and a dinosaur. Super Mario Bros. is a horror in disguise, an existential nightmare where our heroes face bodily destruction or manipulation if captured. Iggy and Spike examine our relationship to our intelligence, and King Koopa gets more and more deranged after he is put in the De-evolver, and turns completely into a monster of his ancestry and then dissolves into amniotic fluid; a prelapsarian puddle. As if in an unhinged version of The Fly, our villain is a bad person turned worse and then destroyed by bodily distortion, by the past, by his ancestry and by his genetics. Cues from a range of Cronenberg’s films have been taken, from the thirst for violence from Videodrome to the nascent revolution and future domination of ‘evolved’ humans in Scanners. Super Mario Bros. builds a rich tapestry of thematic tissue the complexity of which cannot be understated.

Through sheer irreverence and recklessness with the source material, Super Mario Bros. demonstrates perfectly how to adapt something that is virtually unadaptable, and in the process gives us a beautiful and distilled portrait of what cinema is built on. A game with virtually no story is given a complex, poignant and metaphorical treatment when adapted to film. Where the game is focused upon honing to a sharp point its gameplay, the film gives us visual spectacle, combining cyberpunk cityscapes, brilliant practical effects for explosions, sets, and for creatures reminiscent of body horror films. A naturalistic portrayal of New York, and flashy, if sparse, computer graphics and matte paintings. Super Mario Brothers is film-literate, daring, political, and unapologetically insane. It’s simply sublime.