Directed by Travis Knight — Screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham.
I can’t say that I have much of a prior relationship with the 1980s Mattel toy line or the animated series that were built around it (or, for that matter, a big relationship with the 1987 live-action film adaptation). In fact, even though I’m pretty sure I saw the Dolph Lundgren film when I was young, I mostly know the characters from my father, who, still to this day, quotes Frank Langella’s Skeletor from time to time. Still, I was curious to see what a new film adaptation of the story could be like, especially given the years of development hell it went through. Well, Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe was recently released on Amazon Prime Video, so I finally got to see the film just the other day. Having now seen it, I will say that I mostly enjoyed the Bumblebee-director’s attempt at giving new life to He-Man and the many characters, but I don’t think this is a complete home run.
Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe follows Adam (played by Nicholas Galitzine), a prince from the faraway planet known as Eternia, who, when he was a child, was sent to Earth with the hope that he, and a magical sword (the Sword of Power), could avoid capture (or worse) during an attack by the evil Skeletor (played by Jared Leto) — for the uninitiated, a man with a skull for a face, hence the name — and the soldiers that do his bidding. When he arrived on Earth alone, he lost the sword, and he has, in the decades that followed, struggled to build a life for himself because he believes he has to find the sword and return to his home planet where he’s got a talking tiger friend and whatnot, which, obviously, sounds crazy to everyone on Earth. But he isn’t crazy, and when he finally finds the sword, it doesn’t take long for his old life to come back to him. Or, rather, for him to come home, with the hope that he can save his family, as well as the people he once grew up with.
The take on the story and characters that Knight went with is quite tongue-in-cheek. His sword-and-sorcery film is full of jokes and, frankly, Marvel-esque lines of dialogue that make most of the film feel like nothing is taken too seriously. In general, the comedy is quite hit-or-miss, with the film being insistent that modern corporate and therapy lingo is the right thing to have fun with inside the world of Eternia. Adam essentially becomes a little bit of a stranger-in-a-strange-land, even though he grew up there decades back. That awkward or silly type of dialogue isn’t the only thing that makes you think of Marvel. The aesthetic of the film is sometimes reminiscent of Thor: Ragnarok, and Nicholas Galitzine, whom I really liked in the film as the central hero, plays his character in a way that feels halfway between Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt’s comedic approaches to the famous Marvel type of material. Continuing down that Marvel comparison tangent, this film, not unlike the Marvel films, saddles Idris Elba with a role that doesn’t ask a lot of him. His being a former mentor who’s now a drunk is basically all there is to him.
In addition to Galitzine and Elba, I do want to mention that Camila Mendes delivers a decent performance as ‘Teela,’ who is essentially He-Man’s love interest here. There are other interesting appearances from capable actors (like Morena Baccarin or James Purefoy), as well as a cameo appearance that put a smile on my face. But, other than Galitzine, the performances that I am likely to remember the film for are turned in by Jared Leto and Alison Brie, the latter of whom plays the sorceress Evil-Lyn. Brie knows exactly what this film demands of her, so her performance is deliberately hammy in a way that got chuckles out of me (perhaps especially because of my fondness for her given her past in Community). And then there is Skeletor, who runs away with the movie. Like with Jeremy Allen White’s voice performance in The Mandalorian and Grogu, you can never tell, see, or hear that the character was played by a relatively well-known actor. There is nothing about Skeletor that makes you think of Jared Leto other than his name being in the closing credits. The voice is distorted, and Skeletor just looks like a cartoon character. But Leto plays the character with an understanding of how theatrical the character should be in his villainy for this exact tone, and he thus earns some of the film’s biggest laughs. However, to be fair, some of the comedy around him that works best works not exactly because of Leto but because they put Skeletor in Earthly clothes and situations in a hilarious sequence late in the film.
Again, I can’t say that I know a lot about the Mattel-owned franchise, but I really liked the seemingly nostalgic, meta-esque, wish-fulfillment way the narrative is built around an adult who is tired of his daily life and who wants to return to the ‘friends’ from his childhood, that he has so many drawings of, and that he came up with names for. I’m sure die-hard fans of the toy line or the animated series will feel some kind of commonality with the main character, as this film essentially makes for a way to have certain generations get to play with the characters they grew up with and, for a brief moment, imagine themselves in the cartoons they watched growing up. I imagine that audience will eat this stuff up. At the same time, as a relative outsider to the franchise, I will say that I was taken aback by just how generic the world and narrative were. There’s nothing particularly special about this, unless you have a strong prior relationship with the characters. Characters are thinly drawn, while themes and payoffs are executed poorly (I found the father-son ‘what it means to be a man’ stuff to be particularly underdeveloped).
At the end of the day, this is a slight recommendation, because I still had a pretty good time with it, and the comedy, which I opined was hit-or-miss, worked on me more often than not. At the same time, it is unevenly paced, and, frankly, given both the breezy tone and generic narrative, this film shouldn’t be anywhere close to its two-hour and twenty-minute runtime. I thought the soundtrack included clever needle drops, and that even though the sets, costumes, and visual effects sometimes don’t quite match the quality of a major blockbuster, I actually found the action on display to be quite good. A lot of the combat is filmed in a way that makes the action look clear and intelligible without too many cuts. In fact, for me, the soundtrack and the action, along with certain performances and character comedy, were what eventually made me really enjoy the film. So this is a somewhat misshapen, relatively safe, and quite generic film that nonetheless has just enough to be quite pleasant to watch.
6.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
