I saw Masters of the Universe in a cinema in June and again at home last week, and it is better at home. Odd thing to say about a film that cost $170 million. This one is built out of colour rather than scale, and colour is what survives the trip to a living room.
A world built by somebody who wanted out of this one
Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) has only ever known peace, which is why Duncan (Idris Elba), his father's Man-At-Arms, cannot teach him to fight. Then Skeletor (Jared Leto) takes the capital, Adam's parents are captured, and the Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) shoves the boy through a portal to Earth. He arrives without the Sword of Power and spends the next fifteen years in an Oklahoma City human resources department.
That job is the joke the whole film rests on. Eternia is plainly a place invented by somebody bored sick of ordinary life, who wanted a castle, a sword, a talking tiger and a version of himself that people looked at. So the film parks its hero in the most beige work on Earth and lets him ache for it.
Then it sends him to a collectibles shop, into a room of enthusiasts who mock him for wrestling with the display and are thrilled by him at once, because part of each of them wants the thing on the plinth to be real. One offers him a wizard staff instead. One tells him he cannot do that, sir, then asks whether he is single.
Why is everyone named like that?
Because a child named them. Young Adam could not process losing his home, so he labelled everything in it, holding the place together by naming it. Fifteen years on those labels are stuck to grown adults who have to answer to them.
Fisto punches things. Ram-Man leads with his head. The film runs a long, straight-faced line of innuendo off exactly that, and it lands because Adam is innocent of every syllable of it. He was a child.
The muddle runs further than the warriors. The villain wears a grey skull for a face and lives in Snake Mountain, while the castle the heroes are sworn to is the one called Grayskull.
Loud enough to actually see
Most big fantasy now gets graded into a blue-brown soup. The DC films do it, the Harry Potter films did it for a decade, and half the time you cannot tell what you are looking at. This is the opposite, and a punchy, legible palette is its own small pleasure.
The effects are less reliable. The aerial chase out of the ruined capital carries real weight, then a shot of Adam and Teela (Camila Mendes) riding the tiger looks unfinished, and the gap between the two is wide enough to notice.
Jared Leto is having the best time
His Skeletor tells jokes, laughs hardest at his own, then snaps at the room for laughing along.
Alison Brie gives Evil-Lyn an agenda she never states out loud, which keeps her interesting long after the plot stops needing her. Morena Baccarin plays the Sorceress with sweeping hands and a permanent air of pronouncement, too much by any normal measure and exactly right for a woman who lives alone in a magic castle. Sasheer Zamata, as Adam's manager on Earth, gets her laughs by being the least confrontational person in the room.
Given these names and these costumes, all of this should be ridiculous. Holding that line for two hours is the hardest thing the film does.
One content note. The innuendo does not let up. Nothing is explicit and the PG-13 is fair, but a parent putting this on for a seven-year-old should know the adults will be catching things the child will not.
This is a 3, a GLOWING. Nothing is buried underneath it, the middle drifts, and the effects are uneven enough to pull you out of the good scenes. It is also warm, properly funny, and fond of the daft toy line it came from rather than embarrassed by it. Watch it at home, which is where it works and where it now lives.
The sword breaks, and the film hands over its one real idea. Skeletor (Jared Leto) shatters the Sword of Power, stabs Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) and torments him inside his own memories of Earth, and the Sorceress arrives to tell him the power was never in the blade. It is the beat everything has been building towards. It is also lifted wholesale.
The Wonder Woman comparison is unavoidable once it lands. Diana believed the God Killer sword held the power until it broke and she learned it was her. Adam gets the identical revelation, down to the shattered weapon and roughly the same costume silhouette. Take the sword off He-Man and you very nearly have Wonder Man.
Fifteen years in human resources turn out to be the punchline. Adam offers Skeletor a negotiated settlement, and the film cuts to the tiger staring at him as though he has lost his mind. Everyone else is wearing the same face. Skeletor declines on the grounds that he enjoys being the villain, which is the most honest line anybody says.
Skeletor's best joke is a one-word inversion. He orders his forces to kill whoever approaches, pauses, then adds women and children first. The gag is that the phrase normally means the opposite, and the timing of the pause is what sells it.
The buttworms exchange is the film's comic register in four seconds. Skeletor means worms, as an insult. Duncan (Idris Elba) asks out loud whether he means the other kind. Nobody in the scene acknowledges it and the film moves straight on, which is why it works.
Fisto shouts encouragement at Ram-Man mid-battle, and it is simultaneously an accurate description of the man's fighting technique and the filthiest line in a PG-13 film this year.
Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley) stands blank through Adam's big rallying speech. It reads two ways at once, either as a woman fifteen years into captivity who cannot summon the moment, or as a deliberate puncturing of the hero speech happening beside her. Both are funny, and the film seems content either way.
The tiger with somebody's head in his mouth is the biggest laugh of the final battle, mostly because he looks genuinely about to bite down.
What happens in the credits scenes?
There are three.
First, almost immediately: Orko, a wizard who never appears in the film proper, turns to camera and delivers the moral. A nod to the cartoon, where He-Man himself did the end-of-episode lesson.
Mid-credits: Adora, Adam's long-lost twin sister, stands on a clifftop holding a second Sword of Power while a soldier warns her of a coming threat. She-Ra, in other words. She is played by Lauren Saliu, and the director has said this is where a sequel would go.
After everything: Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) slips back into Grayskull, lifts Skeletor's skull off the floor, and his laugh plays over black.
Is there going to be a sequel?
Around $113 million worldwide against a $170 million budget, so it lost money theatrically. It then went to number one on Prime Video globally within days of the streaming drop, and the studio's public position is that the film is a subscriber-driver rather than a box office asset. Trade coverage has it in development. Nothing is confirmed.
Bright Bulbs
- Eternia feels lived in before any dialogue explains it. The design work carries the exposition so the script does not have to.
- Daniel Pemberton's score, with Brian May on guitar. The opening Eternia cue manages soothing and rousing at the same time.
- The cartoon's Battle Cat was a timid, permanently damp thing. This one reads as an actual predator, and you would want him on your side.
Dull Bulbs
- The reunion between Adam and Teela plays well and then the film idles around it. A good scene with very little happening either side.
- Cringer is barely in the film. The armoured Battle Cat turns up with almost no screen time left to use him.
Cast
- Nicholas Galitzine as Adam Glenn / He-Man
- Camila Mendes as Teela
- Jared Leto as Skeletor
- Idris Elba as Duncan / Man-At-Arms
- Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn
- Morena Baccarin as The Sorceress
- James Purefoy as King Randor
- Charlotte Riley as Queen Marlena
- Kristen Wiig as Roboto
- Sasheer Zamata as Suzie
- Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson as Fisto
- Jon Xue Zhang as Ram-Man
- Sam C. Wilson as Trap Jaw
- Christian Vunipola as Hussein