I’ve never been a huge “Masters of the Universe” person. My biggest connection to the Mattel media franchise is the parody video that features He-Man singing a disco-ified, if strangely operatic, version of the 4 Non Blondes song “What’s Up.”
If you’ve never seen this video – well, you should stop reading this and watch it. It perfectly captures the aspects of He-Man that have made him a queer icon since his inception in 1982. The video encapsulates everything a piece of media adapted from “Masters of the Universe” should be – a little unserious, campy, and happy to play into the character’s queer undertones. To its credit, “Masters of the Universe, the new He-Man adaptation from director Travis Knight, tries to match that tone.
The film tells the origin story of He-Man – also known as Adam (Nicholas Galitzine), the prince of the planet Eternia – and his quest to save his planet and defeat the supervillain Skeletor (Jared Leto). And what works best about “Masters of the Universe” is, to be blunt, the vibes. Stuffed into its far too long runtime of roughly two hours and 20 minutes is a boatload of playful, lightly crude humor – including plenty of jokes about He-Man’s huge, glorious sword (wink, wink).
But, where “Masters of the Universe” fails – and where so many franchise films of late often fail – is blending its humor with its earnestness. That blend works in He-Man himself, with a lot of credit to Galitzine’s himbo-extraordinaire performance. But the film’s structure and pacing are too uneven, the script too bursting-at-the-seams to create emotional moments the audience can really wrap its arms around.
After an interminable prologue in which we see Skeletor’s conquest of Eternia, Adam (played as a young boy by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) takes the mighty Sword of Power and jets off for Earth with a promise to one day use the sword to return. Fifteen years later, Adam has lost the sword, is working in Human Resources, and is telling anyone who will listen that he is from an alien planet and needs to find a magic sword that will get him back home – like, now. Fortunately, it doesn’t take him too long to do so, finding the sword and teaming up with his old friend Teela (Camila Mendes) to travel back home and take on Skeletor and his minions.
The film’s prologue sets up a number of issues with the story of “Masters of the Universe,” but let’s start with the good. The successes of the film hinge on the movie’s willingness to lean into how absurdly goofy all of this is. The humor doesn’t feel like all the Marvel-ified quips we’ve gotten in so much franchise entertainment over the years, but rather specific to He-Man and the world Knight is trying to bring to life. “Masters of the Universe” doesn’t back down from He-Man’s sexually charged reputation in pop culture. The pun “ream job” – as in, to yell at someone for a long period of time – makes an appearance, as do a boatload of other sex jokes. In another movie, it might feel like overkill. But “Masters of the Universe” is exactly the type of movie where we should watch the main character accidentally wrestle himself into a compromising position with a giant fantasy barbarian-esque mannequin. It just makes sense!
Galitzine’s ability to play both hero and the butt of the joke is the balance that “Masters of the Universe” gets right. Despite his looks (the movie does quite a hilarious job of trying to dowdy him up when he’s not He-Man, with ill-fitting shirts and a truly awful haircut), his performance carries a potent sense of self-consciousness, sweetness, and daffy charm. He sits at a rare intersection where he physically looks like he can hold his own in a fight, but he has the energy of a baby bunny – the guy who wants to prove to everyone that throwing punches isn’t always the best way to solve a problem, but also has no problem throwing them if he’s forced into a corner.
So, the humor works. But the prologue that kicks off the film starts “Masters of the Universe” down a path of more than a few confused emotional arcs. A successful version of this type of prologue can be found in 2017’s “Wonder Woman,” and I can only guess that Knight was trying to achieve something along those lines; introducing us to our hero as a precocious, cheeky child who doesn’t fit in for whatever reason (here, it’s because Adam is small for his age and would rather talk through his feelings than fight about them), and helping us form emotional attachments to the characters who our hero cares about most.
But something just feels off. The prologue sets up important relationships that the rest of the film leaves to the wayside. Adam appears to be close with his mother (Charlotte Riley) as a kid, but their later reunion in the film barely registers as a blip. His father, the king (James Purefoy), is cold and unyielding, our first introduction to him in a scene where he challenges his young son to a sword fight and promptly knocks him on the ground. In the moments that follow this one, however, the king suddenly feels warm and loving.
Then, there’s Duncan (Idris Elba), the king’s right-hand man who trained Adam as a boy – and, perhaps, the worst casualty of the prologue’s failings. As a trainer, Duncan is a tough-love kind of guy. But he’s also fair, and it’s clear from the jump how much he cares about Adam. He’s the one who, after the king knocks Adam down, tries to build Adam back up in the wake of his father’s disappointment – the one who tells him that the most important thing he can do when he falls is stand back up again.
When Adam and Duncan reunite for the first time in 15 years, we meet Duncan as a man who’s fallen into drink because of his inability to protect the kingdom. Inexplicably, Adam tries to remind Duncan who he is by introducing himself as the kid that Duncan used to beat up and degrade all the time – a description that feels completely alien to the interaction we saw between them at the beginning of the film, and detracts from any sorrow Adam might feel at seeing Duncan fall so far. Adam apparently already had negative feelings about the man, so it doesn’t feel like anything has changed. There’s no real emotional journey to take us on.
This is just one of the many emotional beats that “Masters of the Universe” tries to hit that feels genuinely baffling. It’s one thing to get the humor and the energy of the He-Man universe right, but relying on that humor to carry the audience through the heartwarming moments the film clearly wants to create is where it loses its steam.
“Masters of the Universe” opens in theaters this weekend.
