Masters of the Universe will be released in theaters on June 5.
By the Power of Grayskull, etc. and so forth, He-Man is back on the big screen in the form of Nicholas Galitzine, and I should say up front, I like my action-adventure bright and colorful, my fantasy high, and tongues firmly in cheek. Masters of the Universe is trying real hard to do all three.
Before I dig into former Laika front man Travis Knight’s take on the Prince of Eternia, I think the most interesting thing this movie represents doesn’t have much to do with the movie at all. There’s an interesting conversation that flairs up every now and then, and I think we’re in the middle of it again at the moment. It’s the “it’s a bad movie, but…” conversation and it goes one of two ways. “It’s a bad movie, but… it’s fun and i love it” or “it’s a bad movie, but… but nothing, it’s just bad.” Masters of the Universe is landing at a time when we seem to be having that conversation a lot.
It’s happened a handful of times now in rapid succession. There was The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, my own review included, then it was Mortal Kombat II and The Mandalorian and Grogu after that. These are movies with established brands and identities and fan bases that go back decades. Also, they are by no means great movies, but…
It’s kind of a coin flip as to whether you like them in spite of a relative lack of quality. It’s a quirk of fate, an intangible quality that has nothing to do with the actual movie at all. Maybe you’re a hardcore Nintendo fan and so long as all the characters from the games show up on screen, that’s a blast and we’re good. Or maybe you were the only kid at your school that had a Sega and you’re ride or die Team Sonic. Then you don’t have time for Mario or his Galaxy and the movie just seems bad. The point is, “it’s a bad movie, but…” has nothing to do with the movie. If it did, then it would just be a bad movie.
There’s something interesting about this particular batch of movies too, Mario, Mortal Kombat, Mando, and now Masters of the Universe — in addition to being alliterative, which I just noticed — have all been around for a long time. It’s interesting to have The Mandalorian, coming from a franchise famous for creating characters that make good toys, in such close proximity to Masters of the Universe, a franchise famous for spinning off from a successful toy line. We’re in a wave of fan service that’s more tsunami-ish than usual.
The term “fan service” gets thrown around a lot like it’s a bad thing, and I don’t think that’s always fair. If there’s an established fan base for something, by all means, give them what they want. The real challenge is making it something anybody outside of that fan base will give a damn about. But that’s one area where Masters of the Universe actually succeeds admirably, because director Travis Knight and every other creative in front of and behind the camera seems to simultaneously love He-Man and realize how stupid the whole thing is.
And while I continue putting off really talking about Masters of the Universe in this Masters of the Universe review, here’s a quick aside to say I’m very aware that not every movie has to be The Godfather, not every movie should be, nor should every movie be compared to every other movie on the same scale, least of all The Godfather. The big takeaway here is that we all bring our whole selves to the movie, even those of us who are lucky enough to review them for a living. Me and He-Man? We go way back. If my gray doesn’t give me away, I was inseparable from my He-Man toys back when he was still just on the TV after school. Dolph Lundgren’s run at the character in ’87 was probably my first experience with “it’s a bad movie, but…” I was a He-Man kid and that makes me a He-Man guy to this day and that colors my reaction to this… I’ll say it now… very not bad movie.
I wasn’t expecting much; none of the trailers were terribly inspiring. But I did hold out some hope specifically because of Travis Knight. His work with Laika, like Kubo and the Two Strings, is incredible — some of my favorite stuff, in fact. Bumblebee was a lot better than I expected it to be because he imbued that lovable yellow robot alien with some humanity, which is a thing the director honed in all those years of doing stop-motion. And one of my favorite things about this movie is that if it were animated, like most of Knight’s other work, it would’ve been the same movie.
I was a He-Man kid and that makes me a He-Man guy to this day and that colors my reaction to this… I’ll say it now… very not bad movie.
The action and physicality throughout the movie is solid. The fight scenes are vibrant and interesting. They don’t reinvent any wheels but they are just different-looking enough from the rest of action cinema’s latest offerings to make things fun. A few sequences get overly CG and start to feel a little empty, but by and large every time anybody kicks ass on screen, they really do it.
Idris Elba, in particular, as Duncan/Man-At-Arms is a character built around his fighting. It feeds into his entire arc. He’s a guy who has strongly held ideas of what it means to be a big strong man, ideas that are put to the test throughout the movie. What’s great about Duncan as well is that he’s really the one who gets to grow and change. Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam doesn’t have nearly as far to travel, and actually gets to be the catalyst for others to change more often than he’s developing himself. Adam is more of an avatar for the themes of the film — that strength and manhood isn’t about muscles as much as listening and empathy.
Adam, in his time on Earth, found his way to a career in human resources, which is a remarkably on-the-nose alter ego for this version of He-Man, but it works more than it doesn’t. He’s portrayed as a kid who hasn’t grown up at all, living in a room with walls still papered with drawings from his childhood. That’s the world he’s stuck in, which is a perfect, and frankly ballsy, metaphor for the audience movies like this are targeting.
Elsewhere in the cast, Camila Mendes as Teela doesn’t get as much to do in the action department, but she’s definitely got her moments. The rest of the heroes of Eternia each have their own action figure speciality that keep the action choreography spicy, but their real purpose is the comedy.
There’s a grinning self-awareness to this movie that is, as I said before, its biggest strength. Take the way the character names, pulled from a 50-year-old toy line, feel like a first draft. Ram-Man and Fisto and Mekaneck, Evil-Lyn — whose name is just a phonetic way to mispronounce Evelyn — they’re all, quite frankly, pretty dumb. He-Man included. But instead of making the mistake of trying to have a guy named Ram-Man earnestly talk to another guy named He-Man, Masters of the Universe takes none of it seriously. And they don’t stop there, nor should they have. Travis Knight and company make the savvy choice to not take anything else seriously either.
Travis Knight and company make the savvy choice to not take anything seriously.
There are synths and Brian May’s shredding electric guitar in the score. Alison Brie is hilarious as Evil-Lyn while Kristen Wiig voices an angry battle droid that’s been downgraded to a maid. There are sex jokes made at the expense of both Fisto and Ram-Man. Based on their names, you can imagine what low-hanging fruit those are, but the sheer joy and innocence with which they’re delivered make them the only jokes that could possibly work in those moments. It all adds up to a film that’s just this side of a proper spoof. In the way that Hot Shots loves Top Gun as much as it is making fun of it, as Spaceballs is to Star Wars, that’s what Masters of the Universe is doing to… Masters of the Universe. It’s why it’s got a leg up on every other entry in decades-old-IP that we’ve gotten this year. There’s an understanding of the source material at play with Masters of the Universe that’s as obvious as a sword-wielding barbarian in a fur loin cloth, and it’s most obvious when they’re talking about how silly Masters of the Universe is. It’s a magic trick to pull that off as legibly as Travis Knight does here.
But weirdly enough, and this is the thing that surprised me more than anything else in this movie that I very much enjoyed, the most unhinged and terrific part of the film is Jared Leto as Skeletor. The Morbius actor hasn’t had the best run in recent years — it was most likely Blade Runner 2049 when Leto was featured this prominently in a movie that wasn’t awful — but this version of Skeletor is fantastic. He’s a swaggering weirdo with near limitless power that’s only matched by his fear of losing it. There’s a sass to him as well, an almost Deadpool-like meta layer, and if he had actual eyes and we could tell where he was looking, we might have caught him looking straight into the lens. There’s even a joke about what could motivate him to do such terrible things and the answer we get is… he’s just bad. He’s got a skull for a face, so he’s bad. There’s really nothing more to it than that.
Again, like some of the low-hanging fruit in the film’s humor, there’s no new trails blazed by Skeletor’s Staff of Havoc. It’s like the scene where he laughs maniacally for too long and has to tell Evil-Lyn that he’s done and they can move on now. Instead of telling the same old jokes, they point out how these jokes are the same, and old, and manage to make that approach entertaining for the whole runtime. But peppered in the middle of that are bits that put Skeletor in new and modern situations to very funny effect. It’s a strangely fascinating way to go about it, one that keeps the pace of the film sprinting all the way to the end.
I started this by writing (probably too much) preamble about the handful of “it’s a bad movie, but…” entries to iconic franchises we’ve gotten lately. I would’ve guessed Masters of the Universe was going to be another one, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about that. This is a movie that knows exactly what it is and Travis Knight pulled it off. So no, it’s not The Godfather, it’s not Super Mario Galaxy either, but for what it is, and considering my relationship to the franchise, I think it’s pretty great.
