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 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. 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 get it?”.
Compare this, unfavourably, to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy and the better Thor films. 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 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 mini-comics, and 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 navigate 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 a perfectly competent corporate entertainment: loud, colourful, intermittently thrilling, and hollow at the core. For He-Man and his franchise 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.