After years of going through the Hollywood grind, most commonly known as development hell, the new Masters of the Universe movie has finally made it to the big screen and its certainly worth seeing in theatre–as long as you don’t take it too seriously.
Directed by Travis Knight (Bumblebee, Kubo and the Two Strings) and starring Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You), Jared Leto and Camila Mendes (Riverdale), Masters of the Universe can probably be classified best as a campy, silly and self-aware homage to the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon of the same name.
In the movie, Galitzine takes on the role of Adam Glenn, the long-lost prince from the planet Eternia. When an evil warlord, Skeletor (Leto) invades Eternia’s capital city with his army, 10-year-old Prince Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) is whisked away to Earth by the Sorceress (Morena Baccarin, Deadpool, Deadpool 2), charged with protecting the planet’s greatest weapon, the Sword of Power. However, as expected of a plot in a Hollywood blockbuster, plans go awry when Adam and the sword are promptly separated even before setting foot on our planet.
During Adam’s time away, the once beautiful Eternia becomes a war-torn wasteland, ruled over by Skeletor with the help of his followers, Evil-Lyn (Allison Brie, Together, Community), Trap Jaw (Sam C. Wilson, House of the Dragon) and Tri-Klops (Kojo Attah, The Beekeeper, Wrath of Man).
Though it takes him 15 years, Adam is eventually reunited with the lost relic, putting him back on the path to becoming the hero that the citizens of Eternia so desperately need, albeit with assistance from allies like the royal family Man-At-Arms, Duncan (Idris Elba, Thor: Ragnarok), his daughter Teela (Mendes), Malcom/Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, I Remember You), Krass/Ram Man (Jon Xue Zhang, Rupture) and Roboto (Kristen Wigg, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, Bridesmaids).
What works for this movie is that it makes no apologies for how ridiculous the premise and the characters are. Self-deprecating jokes and not-so-subtle adult humour litter the film, such as an exchange between Fisto and Ram Man that may be too suggestive to include in this article. Even the film’s lead characters did not come out of the movie unscathed from self-imposed mockery.
Galitzine, for his part, plays the boy scout-like Adam exceptionally well, capturing much of the same tone and likeness of his cartoon counterpart. Just as his animated doppelganger, Galitzine’s He-Man is empathetic, kind and self-sacrificing, with a strong moral compass that never seemed to waiver during his 15 years away from home. It’s this child-like trust in the inherent good of the world that sets him at odds with not only his Earthling peers, but also his Eternian brethren.
But for as good as Galitzine is in his role, a strong argument could be made that Leto’s Skeletor nearly outshines his goody-two-shoes counterpart. While Leto portrays Skeletor as a villain with immense power and a thirst for violence, there’s a sense of duality present, too. Although he has more magical prowess than almost anyone else on Eternia, Skeletor is a deeply insecure dictator with extremely thin skin. Audiences may find his incessant desire for praise, obedience and adulation as being remarkably familiar to some contemporary political figures. If it can be said that Leto dropped the ball with his rendition of The Joker in Suicide Squad, it would be fair to say he picked the ball back up and made a slam dunk with his performance.
For audiences with no prior knowledge of the franchise, Masters of the Universe will likely be perceived as a decent movie with excellent special effects and an incredible feature soundtrack that includes songs from Queen, The Cure and 4 Non Blondes. But for elder millennials like me, the movie acts as something of a love-letter to a bygone simpler time, harkening back to the days when we’d sit crossed legged on the floor with large bowls of sugary-sweet, extremely unhealthy cereal as our favourite cartoons played on the silver screen. Here’s hoping that the movie performs well enough at the box office to warrant the sequel promised by the three cutscenes (sidenote: you may want to stay for at least the first two).