I must confess that I was really excited for MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. My childhood had its share of dumb cartoons and toys, but those spring-loaded muscle dudes were the ones that power-punched deepest into my brain. I don’t have strong opinions about the Eternian canon or whatever, it’s not holy scripture. It’s more like an incredible mural that I invest my own meaning into. The character designs and concepts, and also the overall aesthetic of fantasy barbarian paintings mixed with cyborgs and colorful vehicles shaped like spiders and sharks and buzzsaws and shit… it just makes me happy to think about it. I mean, there’s a castle with a giant skull on the front of it, and they gave that to the good guy! Even though by all rights the bad guy should’ve had it because he is a skull!

My attachment to Masters of the Universe isn’t about childhood nostalgia – it’s about a very specific, timeless vibe that came out of Mattel artists brainstorming crazy toy gimmicks, and the studio that made Fat Albert reverse engineering a cartoon out of them, together stumbling across one of the most potent mixes of stupid and awesome ever formulated. So I’ve had many years of anticipation as one movie adaptation after another has been dunked in the Evil Horde Development Slime Pit. I didn’t expect the world. I just figured I would get a kick out of whatever they came up with because even if it was bad it would be a modern movie where, like, Trap Jaw fights Ram Man. It would make me chuckle, at least.

Then a dangerous thing happened: they actually made the movie, and with a director that seemed likely to do a good job. Travis Knight is the head of the stop motion studio Laika, director of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, and he also did BUMBLEBEE, the one actually good Transformers movie, the one that opens by capturing the Cybertronian cartoon shit Michael Bay was never interested in, then turns into a new thing, a heartfelt ‘80s-set teen movie IRON GIANT with a very likable Hailee Steinfeld befriending the titular alien robot Volkswagen. We can get into Knight’s peculiar background later, but his movies so far have been really good.

I was concerned when I read a plot summary that sounded like a GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY rip off (this He-Man grew up on Earth), but the trailers made the concept look okay, gave me that excitement of seeing Mekaneck and shit in live action, and when there started being good buzz from people not invested like me I thought holy shit, what if this is really good?

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE has a great cast, an amazing theme song by Daniel Pemberton featuring Brian May on guitar, it’s well designed, has some big cool sets and colorful costumes, gives me the joy of putting these ridiculous characters in live action, giving them cool super-powered fights. It’s so much of what I wanted. But I think they fucked it up pretty badly.

It jumps right into Adam (Nicholas Galitzine, THE CRAFT: LEGACY) narrating quirkily about his childhood on Eternia. A magical place of palaces and volcanoes and griffins and talking tigers. He’s a nice goofy kid (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt as the young version) who happens to be the prince, son of King Randor (James Purefoy, JOHN CARTER), and he’s unenthusiastic about the combat training he has to do under the macho but warm Duncan, a.k.a. Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba, THE SUICIDE SQUAD). One day the kingdom is attacked by the skull-faced sorcerer Skeletor (Jared Leto, URBAN LEGEND), who seeks the Sword of Power, forged by the ethereal Sorceress (Morena Baccarin, THE WRECKING CREW) as a vessel for The Power of Grayskull that can make a person god-like to defend Eternia (or, if the person is Skeletor, to conquer it).

Being from Earth, and therefore knowing about Superman, Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley, LONDON HAS FALLEN) has The Sorceress send little Adam and the sword through a portal to hide out here on her home planet. (Good rainbow colored portal work in this movie.) But he’s a clutz so he loses grip of the sword and now it’s 15 years later and he’s still looking for it.

It turns out he’s not telling this story to us, but to a horrified young woman he’s on a date with, causing her to ditch him. I hate this kind of joke that makes no sense for the character or story, only for the joke, and I’m afraid this is one of the better ones. Not one person on earth will want the earth section of the movie to be longer, yet it’s just not long enough to flesh out the idea. We only get cartoonish broadstrokes of a life – a wacky roommate (Christian Vunipola, MIGUEL WANTS TO FIGHT), a wacky job, drawing pictures of Eternia and posting on the internet that he’s looking for this sword. Some random nerd tips him off that it’s in a nearby comic shop, which leads to a bunch of nonsensical shtick that you would think everyone on set would’ve agreed just was not working and needed to be cut. But they kept it – even the joke about how a guy makes a video of him yanking the sword away from a statue and it looks like the statue is buttfucking him.

Thankfully when he holds aloft his mighty sword it sends a signal across the universe so while he’s stuck in traffic he gets attacked by Beast Man (a fun animated monster) and rescued by Teela (Camila Mendes, PALM SPRINGS), his childhood friend, and Duncan’s daughter, now a “warrior goddess.” Though I’m mixed on the comedy of Adam being bad at running and fighting at this point, I did think the battle in broad daylight on American streets somewhat justified bringing the story to earth.

Teela brings Adam back to Eternia, which is now in ruins. They find Duncan in jail, now a washed up drunk, and escape with a robot voiced by Kristen Wiig (WHIP IT) to meet up with the rebels, some of them regular humans like Dian (Christiaan Bettridge), some action figures like Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, ATOMIC BLONDE), Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang), Mekaneck (James Wilkinson) and Moss Man (Stephen Adentan). Unfortunately there’s a joke that (with the exception of Moss Man for some reason) these are not their actual names, but just the descriptions ten year old Adam had when he remembered them, and they get mad when he calls them that. It’s weird how this can be an incredibly loving adaptation but also remind us of that era when the X-Men had to wear black leather to be in a movie.

There are some battles where Adam is a doofus, then he does manage to use the Power of Grayskull to get his fabulous secret powers (I was surprised when his muscles grew since I didn’t realize they were pretending he wasn’t buff under his shirt). He tries to avoid fighting but has to rip off Trap Jaw (Sam C. Wilson’s) cannon arm and massacre a bunch of dudes. They have Galitzine doing all this comical awkwardness, but he’s also good when he’s just a sincere sweetheart, and he’s perfect when he takes control as He-Man. I enjoyed the fight scenes (stunt coordinator/second unit director: Liang Yang, THE EQUALIZER 3), which had me thinking of Mortal Kombat a bit with all their gimmicky super-powered violence, and surprised me since I never thought of my chunky action figures being so fast and agile. Also it’s been a while since we’ve seen a Conan-esque muscleman swinging a sword around like that.

In my experience most of society does not want to see Leto in movies anymore, and it’s weird that he’s still getting these roles, but for what it’s worth none of us would have any idea who it was if we hadn’t read it. He’s kind of doing Frank Langella, with his voice lowered, and the face is entirely animated. I assumed it wasn’t him under the muscle suit, but some say otherwise. Other than a few unfortunate comedy attempts the character works. Alison Brie (SCREAM 4) is great as his companion Evil-Lyn. She plays it as camp but is actually funny because it’s not bits, it’s just staying true to the character who sucks up to Skeletor but will betray him at the drop of a hat. She even does a cowardly exit in the tradition of Charlize in PROMETHEUS and that lady in ON DEADLY GROUND.

Despite the Earth part I generally like the story, which is credited to Aaron Nee & Adam Nee (THE LOST CITY) and Alex Litvak (THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THEY WILL KILL YOU) & Michael Finch (JOHN WICK 4), screenplay by Chris Butler (PARANORMAN) and the Nees & Dave Callaham (THE EXPENDABLES, MORTAL KOMBAT, SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS). Unfortunately it just can’t stop itself from undermining just about everything with jokes, very few of them more than mildly chuckle-able.

I would’ve preferred them going full on macho – a 300 or CONAN THE BARBARIAN or CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK or HIGHLANDER type of feel, treating it with operatic seriousness. It would’ve been quite a bit cooler and immeasurably funnier. I went in knowing, accepting, and forgiving that that wasn’t the approach they chose, but my mercy does not extend to how consistently bad and intrusive the jokes are. Over and over again Knight does that joke where the actor and the music and the cinematography amp us up for something awesome that’s about to happen and then whoops, blammo, fart, the sky sled flies backwards and crashes or the magic spell didn’t work and the music stops and Skeletor’s goons give each other wacky looks. The exact same joke that was played out back when Joss Whedon was still allowed to show his face. Even in the last act, when it seems like we’re past all that shit, all the heroes get hyped up to go into battle and they strut in slow motion to (speaking of HIGHLANDER) “Princes of the Universe,” but it stops to do a joke about they all start choking on the cool looking atmospheric smoke. There are at least five times more implied record scratches in this movie than should be legal. Jesus christ, Travis, let us get into a groove!

And the worst part is how many of the jokes have the subtext of “Isn’t this stupid, though?” I know that Knight loves Masters of the Universe because he went through the trouble to build all this and dress everybody up and everything. But every five minutes he seems to get embarrassed and say “Ha ha, we all agree this is dumb though, right? What kind of name is Ram-Man?”

Get this: Nobody says the name “He-Man” until the very end, when he admits sheepishly that it was a name he made up as a kid, and his friends all laugh at him and say it’s stupid.

“Who are you?”
“I’m Batman.”
(Music stops. Awkward pause.)
“Pssshhh… seriously? That’s what you settled on? ‘Batman’!?”
“Well I mean— it’’s just— hey, come on, guys!”

I’ve heard it argued, mostly by fellow Gen-Xers, that it’s sad for my generation to be trying to force our nostalgia on the youths by making movies like this. On one hand, maybe, on the other hand, I am to this day grateful that Hollywood incorrectly assumed everybody wanted movies about Dick Tracy and The Phantom and The Shadow and all that. They didn’t force it on me – I was willing. And you could put SPEED RACER in that category too. I guess most of those movies didn’t really win over as many young people as they’d hoped, but I bet they would’ve done even worse if they had this “it’s stupid, right? How would he know what evil lurks in the heart of men?” approach.

Knight is one of the most unusual nepo babies I know of. He’s the son of Nike CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck in AIR), and when he got interested in animation his dad bought him Wil Vinton Studios to turn into Laika. That sounds like the most spoiled little weiner ever, but by all accounts he turned out to be a great animator, and I love 2 of the 3 movies he’s directed. He also has another one called WILDWOOD coming out this year and it looks amazing. So I wonder if there’s a parallel to Prince Adam, who everybody thinks is a doofus and he at least doesn’t get a chip on his shoulder about it but he keeps trying and eventually turns out to be awesome. But that’s about it. Not much depth detected.

There is an attempt to go further than nostalgia, to say a little something about different types of masculinity. I’m sure they got the idea from BARBIE’s much celebrated gender commentary, but I think it makes sense when adapting a cartoon specifically designed for boys and based on a focus group’s findings that said they were obsessed with the idea of “power.” It’s not required, but it could be a bonus.

They made it a whole motif. In the prologue young Adam doesn’t like training to fight, and isn’t good at it. Man-at-Arms “promised to make a man out of him” but goes too easy on him for the tastes of King Randor, who roughly spars with his son, knocks him to the dirt and tells him there’s no room for weakness. Fifteen years later when he’s living on Earth, Adam works with very sensitive people in human resources, he has gender non-conforming co-workers, he has a name plate with his pronouns, his roommate tries to hide that he gets emotional watching romcoms. Adam goes to the gym but doesn’t know what he’s doing, and also wears a cat t-shirt. The score turns into “Boys Don’t Cry” by The Cure. When he returns to Eternia he can’t fight, and even when he can he tries to avoid it. And he’s contrasted with macho Duncan, who struggles to get used to the idea that Adam talks about his emotions. Ultimately the Sorceress explains that previous men in his role as Guardian only used brute force, but she chose him specifically for his empathy and ability to talk things through, which is actually very in line with the original character and the p.s.a.s he would do at the end of some episodes.

I like the idea of exploring this theme, but they don’t have the discipline to commit to it. They only treat his human resources job as comedy; both the dressing down he gets from his boss (SNL 2014-2017 cast member Sasheer Zamata) and his attempt to use his job skills on Trap Jaw are portrayed as insincere, passive aggressive, buzzword-y bullshit. There’s no indication that Adam believes in the job or is good at it, we don’t ever see it resolve anything, we only are asked to laugh at it, so the Sorceress’s description of Adam as a peacemaker feels unearned.

They also cop out on the one part of the movie I found emotionally effective. After young Adam is knocked down and humiliated by his father, Man-at-Arms gets him to stand up, tells him his dad will respect him when he turns around and sees him back on his feet “like a man.” But Randor just keeps walking, never turns back around. Harsh. Heartbreaking. Fuck King Randor.

Then when reunited with grown up Adam, Randor is all ‘No son, I wasn’t disappointed in you, I was just worried about you.’ I don’t think he should’ve gotten away with that. ‘Oh no, I didn’t fail, I didn’t hurt you, you just misunderstood.’

If Randor was wearing Nikes or those sunglasses Affleck had on in the movie I would have to wonder if maybe Adam isn’t as in touch with his emotions as we’re being told.

Anyway, they got pretty close. I sat there watching this movie and being frustrated because a really good MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE I would’ve loved is visible in the distance, just past the swamps and volcanoes. It feels to me like in all those years of rewrites they either almost got there or (more likely) did get there but kept second guessing and ended up here. I wish they would’ve had faith in the straight fantasy movie elements and not felt the need for all the self-deprecation. It coulda been something.

But that was it. That was probly our last shot at a He-Man movie, Gen-X. Is it too late to try Thundercats?

P.S. SUPER SPOILER NERD SHIT I LIKED: Teela in general, but also the pandering of giving her the more accurate costume at the end. Zoar. He-Man riding Battlecat to the original theme song at the very end (making me think “why didn’t you do this earlier?”). The stingers in the credits, as obvious as they were. Seeing Dolph (but not his actual part, which made no sense at all). Zodac’s name being used as a deity. Spikor being used as a weapon. Probly other stuff.