THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE" (2026)

One approaches a new Masters of the Universe film with the wary optimism of a man entering a revival meeting who has already been saved once, in 1987, and remembers the collection plate. Travis Knight’s version arrives clad in $170–200 million of shiny new armour, yet somehow contrives to look like the most expensively produced meme yet committed to celluloid.

The casting, one must concede, is mostly splendid. Nicholas Galitzine makes a perfectly serviceable Prince Adam/He-Man: broad of shoulder, square of jaw, and possessed of that slightly bewildered sincerity required when one is obliged to deliver the line “I have the power” without audible inverted commas. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is the sort of baroque, eye-rolling villainy that keeps supporting actors in caviar; one half-expects him to demand a close-up on his exposed cranium. Idris Elba brings gravitas to Man-At-Arms as if he had wandered in from a better film, while the supporting Heroic Warriors are competently represented by a roster of faces one is vaguely pleased to see again. In short, the players do what they can with the material, which is rather more than the material does with them.

Knight directs with a certain visual brio; the action sequences, particularly the set-pieces around Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain, possess a chunky, Saturday-morning-cartoon grandeur that occasionally approaches the sublime. When He-Man swings that power sword, the screen knows it has been swung. And then there is the contribution of Brian May, who has lent his guitar to Daniel Pemberton’s score. One feels the spirit of Flash Gordon nodding approvingly from the asteroid belt. When those familiar riffs crash in over a climactic battle, one is briefly transported to a purer, more innocent age of heroic nonsense. For these mercies we should be grateful.

Yet the film’s virtues are repeatedly undone by its desperate need to be liked. The humour is pure Marvel house style: quippy, self-referential, and fatally convinced of its own adorableness. One half-expects Rocket Raccoon to wander through demanding a share of the royalties. The pacing lurches like a man trying to dance at two weddings simultaneously - one on Eternia, one in a focus-grouped boardroom. And the nostalgic tone is ladled on with the subtlety of Skeletor’s Havoc Staff. The nadir arrives when the film itself stages the dreaded “Hey, ey, yeah, what’s going on?” meme, complete with dancing supporting cast. At this point one realises the picture is not merely winking at the audience; it is doing that awful modern thing of elbowing them repeatedly in the ribs while shouting “Do you get it? Do you ?, Do you get it?”. 

Compare this, unfavourably if you will, to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. Those pictures understood that the secret to making cosmic absurdity work is not to apologise for it but to commit. They balanced sarcasm with sincerity. Knight’s Masters cannot decide whether it wants to be a knowing pastiche or a sincere myth, and so ends up achieving neither. It is the cinematic equivalent of a man wearing a vintage He-Man T-shirt under an ironic Hawaiian shirt.

Even more damning is the comparison with the much-derided 1987 Cannon film. That picture was low-budget, cheesy, and corny, yes. But it had the courage of its own ridiculous convictions. It took itself relatively seriously, drew on the darker undertones of the original MOTU mini-comics, and memorably gave us Frank Langella’s towering, Shakespearean Skeletor - a performance of such lip-smacking grandeur that one almost believed the character might actually conquer the universe if only the special effects budget would allow. Langella understood that the only way to play a skull-faced tyrant is as if he were Richard III with better lighting. The new film’s Skeletor, for all Leto’s scenery-chewing, feels like a supporting act in his own origin story.

Then there is the inevitable messaging about toxic masculinity—a weary hangover from the 2023 Barbie film, as if every children’s property must now submit to the same corporate sensitivity seminar. He-Man, once the unapologetic beefcake saviour of Eternia, is now obliged to deliver lectures on emotional intelligence between sword fights. One almost longs for the days when the greatest ideological threat was simply having 'the power.'

In the end, this new Masters of the Universe is perfectly competent corporate entertainment: loud, colourful, intermittently thrilling, and hollow at the core. For He-Man and his friends to be taken seriously as a modern retro property, it must first take itself more seriously. Irony is easy. Earnestness, properly handled, is revolutionary. By the power of Grayskull, perhaps next time they will remember. 

ANTHONY HEAD (1954 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

Anthony Head, that unflappable purveyor of tweedy gravitas and instant-coffee seduction, has finally staked his last demon at the age of 71. Or perhaps he simply stepped through a hellmouth for one last research trip. Either way, British television lost its most reliably unruffled uncle figure, the man who could make demonic apocalypses feel like overdue library fines.

Head’s career was a masterclass in quiet competence dressed up as mild eccentricity. To a generation raised on American teen drama, he was Rupert Giles, the Watcher in Buffy the Vampire Slayer—a librarian who fought evil with obscure texts, sarcastic asides, and the occasional reluctant sword. Where lesser performers might have camped up the role, Head played it with the bone-dry exasperation of a man who had seen the end of the world and still worried about filing. He brought Oxbridge gravitas to a show that cheerfully mixed Valley Girl slang with ancient Sumerian prophecies, proving that a well-timed “dear lord” could deflate even the most operatic forces of darkness.

Later he popped up in Doctor Who (having lost out on the role of the Doctor himself to Paul McGann in 1996) as the sort of authority figure who made Time Lords seem vaguely irresponsible by comparison. Then came Ted Lasso, where he embodied the genteel English foil to American optimism with such precision that you half-expected him to apologise to the football for any inconvenience caused by being kicked.

Yet for all these cultured accomplishments, Head’s most culturally indelible performance may have been in those interminable 1980s Nescafé Gold Blend advertisements. There he smouldered across the fence at his neighbour with the brooding intensity of a man advertising not merely coffee, but sophisticated continental longing. If his character was as smooth, rich, and devastatingly handsome as the product he was flogging, one wonders why it required five long years—and several million jarred pauses—for him finally to get his leg over. Romance in advertising moved at the pace of a particularly cautious kettle.

Head never quite became a household name in the Hollywood sense, which suited him. He was too intelligent, too wry, too fundamentally English to surrender to the louder demands of stardom. In an age of screaming superheroes and franchise fatigue, he represented something rarer: the quiet dignity of simply turning up, glasses slightly askew, ready to catalogue the end times. The world is a touch less civilised without him.

RETURN OF THE RACK

In the long, flickering pageant of human folly that we dignify with the name of fashion, few spectacles have offered quite so much inadvertent comedy as the recent decades’ campaign to persuade us that the female form reaches its aesthetic zenith somewhere around the dimensions of a particularly undernourished gazelle. One grew used to the sight of young women striding down catwalks like elegant coat hangers, their chests as flat as the collective conscience of the industry that employed them. “Body positivity,” they called it, though the positivity seemed strangely selective. It celebrated every contour except the ones that had launched a thousand ships, or at least a respectable flotilla of calendars, since the Bronze Age. 

Enter Penny Lane - British, thirty-one, and possessing of the sort of gravity-defying proportions that make one suspect God has been reading old National Geographics and decided to have another go at the Venus de Milo, this time with arms and a sense of humour. Her appearance at the 2026 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit runway show during Miami Swim Week has, according to the excitable denizens of the internet, “ended the era of celebrating ‘mid’ models.” One hesitates to declare any cultural shift definitively over; these things have a habit of twitching like roadkill. Yet there is something undeniably refreshing, even quietly revolutionary, about the moment. 

What makes Lane’s triumph worth a longer essay than the usual froth of Instagram captions is not merely the optics—though the optics, one must admit, are formidable. It is the manner of the victory. This is no cringing concession to the male gaze, that spectral entity blamed for everything from war to the decline of the West. Quite the reverse. Lane’s story, for those who have followed it, carries the distinct tang of defiance. The modelling industry, in its infinite wisdom and love of occupational anorexia, once suggested she might like to lose weight and perhaps consider a breast reduction. One pictures the meeting: some pinched creative director waving a tape measure like a papal bull, explaining that 32GG was, aesthetically speaking, surplus to requirements. Lane, to her eternal credit, told them where they could file their unsolicited surgical advice. 

Here, then, is the sardonic pleasure of the spectacle. After years of lectures about how true empowerment lay in minimising, flattening, and apologising for secondary sexual characteristics—lest some passing gentleman experience an unauthorised thought—we witness a woman simply owning the full architectural splendour of her inheritance. The bountiful bosom returns not as a desperate sop to leering construction workers, but as an act of proprietorship. These are her breasts, thank you very much. They have been hiked, swum with, photographed in Botswana and Switzerland, and paraded down a Miami catwalk with the serene confidence of a duchess inspecting her estates. If they happen to draw the eye, that is the eye’s business, not hers. She is not dressing for the cheap seats; she is occupying them.

One savours the irony. The same cultural apparatus that spent the best part of a decade insisting that all bodies were beautiful—except, apparently, the ones that looked like classical sculpture with better tailoring—now finds itself confronted by a model who is beautiful in the most unfashionably obvious way, and who achieved it without issuing a single manifesto about decolonising the décolletage. There is something almost Austenian in the quiet subversion. While others were busy redefining beauty downwards, Lane simply refused to be edited. The result is less rebellion than restoration: a reminder that the female form, in its more generous manifestations, has always been a source of power, not merely an object of appetite. Cleopatra did not conquer with boyish hips. Titian’s women were not hiring personal trainers to shed their Rubens.

Of course, the puritans will mutter. They always do. Some will detect the dread hand of patriarchy in any appreciation of curves that cannot be hidden beneath an oversized hoodie. Others, more sophisticated, will lament the return of 'objectification,' as though a woman confidently inhabiting her own skin is somehow more objectified than one airbrushed into androgynous abstraction. Both miss the point with a precision that would be admirable were it not so predictable. What Lane represents is not a regression but a refusal. A refusal to let other people’s neuroses dictate the terms of her physicality. A refusal to treat her body as a public works project requiring constant ideological renovation. In short, a very British insistence on minding her own spectacular business.

The photographs from Miami, circulating like samizdat literature among the culturally starved, capture something beyond mere physical allure. There is poise, certainly. There is the easy athleticism of a woman who treats her body as a capable partner rather than an enemy to be starved into submission. But above all there is ownership. These are not assets deployed for approval. They are facts, presented without fanfare or apology. In an age of performative fragility, the effect is bracing, almost shocking. One half expects a health-and-safety officer to rush the stage demanding hazard tape and a trigger warning.

The era of the mid, if indeed it is ending, departs without much mourning. In its place we glimpse something older, more honest, and—dare one say it—more interesting: women deciding for themselves what parts of their anatomy they wish to celebrate, and doing so without first consulting the focus groups of ideology. Penny Lane has not brought back the big, beautiful, bouncing bosom. She has simply reminded us that it was never hers to surrender in the first place. The rest of us, male and female alike, are merely fortunate spectators at the restoration. Pass the sunscreen. The future looks rather well-endowed.