The movie is good, I enjoyed it a lot more then I thought I would. It was surprising how well Mario is portrayed. He has flaws to overcome but he is resilient and is motivated by wanting to protect his little brother, in the end he becomes a hero and saves everyone. On the other side we have Peach, she is just perfect, does everything good all her life, effortless throws Mario to the ground and makes fun of him being short the first time she meets him, she is loved by everyone and she can fight better then anyone and even saves Mario at least once. She defeats Bowser and fights a good portion of his army on her own and only lost by sheer bad luck. Her saving grace is that she does not act as a mean girl boss and and seems to like Mario.
From a movie point of view Mario should not have mattered since Peach could have defeated everyone anyway and the fact that Mario is allowed to fight Bowser at the end seems extremely forced and more like something Nintendo demanded. Makes no sense for Peach not fighting him since she was stronger and better then Mario.
Even Donkey Kong is a more interesting and better written character then Peach. In fact Peach is the worse written character in the movie. You can remove most of the scenes with Peach and the movie plays about the same, almost like there were 2 story lines, one centered on Peach and one on Mario.
So it just looks like they wanted a girl boss movie but Nintendo said no and demanded Mario to be the hero of the movie so we got this strange mix of great and woke.
It also made me think, the argument I've seen online is "imagine if a girl goes to see Mario and Peach does nothing for the entire movie?". The obvious answer is that there can be a middle ground and the girl have flaws and even allow Mario to save her once or twice and also be a great and powerful character in her own right. But more importantly where was the same argument for Elsa or Brave or most other girl centered cartoons? Even How to train your dragon had to have a strong female character and that was the last good cartoon I remember seeing in a cinema that I liked.
I don't think you can really do Princess Peach justice in a mainstream movie; she's a weird character.
Granted there are many weird characters in the Mario world, but Peach raises questions even if you suspend your disbelief. Like, sure, there's a family of talking apes but imagine if the head of the family was a normal looking human.
Peach is the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, which is composed entirely of mushroom people. The only other characters who are human are the Mario Bros. and they come from the human world. So...where did she come from and why is she the undisputed ruler? There are many toads in the games that fill leadership roles, but they all defer to a human princess for...reasons? And they all seem to age and die while she remains the same eternally?
And then there's her powers. Even in Mario 2, which was the first time she was playable, she had the unique ability of limited flight. But in Super Princess Peach for the DS, a standalone Peach game, she has INSANE powers compared to anyone else in the series: full flight, invicibility, destructive fire, and the ability to create life. Note as well that none of of these powers are due to collecting power-ups, like stars or fire flowers; they're inherent abilities that require pickups to power them.
But, despite that, she keeps getting captured and the only ones who can save her, despite her blindly loyal army of mushrooms, are a couple plumbers with above average jumping ability? Hmmm...
I posit that Peach isn't just the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, but it's god and, likely, creator. She created the Kingdom at her pleasure and may have created Bowser so that she could pit mortals against him for her amusement; when he's "defeated" by being plunged into lava, she simply resurects him when she's ready to go again. All of the original power-ups are abilities that she inherently possesses; she places them strategically to make things more interesting. Her ingratitude at being "saved" is a meme; it's because her rescue signals her game coming to an end.
Once you understand this, her character makes much more sense.
But good luck capturing that character with today's lazy and cowardly movie studios.
The best we can hope for is the SMB3 cartoon version; capable and courageous, but targetting due to her inherent value as a princess, rather than any specific weakness.
No one created Peach as some form of god. That sounds like a crazy fan-theory we used to get back when fandoms belonged to geeks. The game series started with Mario saving Peach so the fact that somehow a game starting Peach that came after that makes you go ??? on why she would need saving means you are brain damaged and should stop drinking / smoking weed.
She is a character in a game series that started as a 2d platformer and then evolved in different direction without much thought. I've never played Super Princes Peach, never even met anyone who played it, seems strange that any guy wanted to play that. But anyway, the movie was not Peach it was Mario, Peach being perfect at everything is stupid, even if you wanted her to be powerful you can give her flaws and make her character likable, she is not un-likable but she is by far the least interesting and most immersion breaking of the entire movie. More then that if you think that anyone tried to portray Peach as some game fidelity character rather then a feminist trope then I have a bridge to sell you.
The problem is that, unlike Mario or even Donkey Kong, she has no actual background for them to pull from. She has just always kinda been there and no history ever stuck for long. So they dodge going into it (to avoid contradiction) but still need it for characterization. Like, its glaringly noticable how hard they avoid talking about her background at all beyond a 10 second flashback that tells you literally nothing.
Which means they couldn't justify how she was so good at anything, but also still needed her to be to be the "experienced mentor" to Mario who is now the complete new guy to the world.