The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Even setting aside the Famicom-era nostalgia and a licensed song selection that leans heavily on the dwindling decades of the twentieth century, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a still a feature dripping with throwback thinking. Specifically, the film makes it its business to explain (or attempt to bring some kind of logical order to) the deliberately surreal flourishes that 8-bit video games are built out of. Matthew Fogel's screenplay is pointedly pre-Marvel then, in the sense that it doesn't trust the audience to not get caught up on the minor details that power this technicolour fantasy. So not only is Mario's beloved Brooklyn a building site riddling with rising platforms and gloomy pipes - the film even adopts the flat two-dimensional perspective of a buzzing CRT television when Mario begins hurdling through one set of hazards - but the mushroom power-ups, that we know Mario will soon have to gobble up, are given an apprehensive dimension. In this way Chris Pratt's pixelated plumber is given an opportunity to overcome the minor fears associated with dinnertime fussiness - a note that may well have some resonance with the film's intended audience of children - as well as the more obvious peril associated with an enormous, fire-breathing dinosaur.