Masters of the Universe Has Something to Say About Masculinity

There’s a maybe half-hour stretch of Masters of the Universe that takes place in the real world, and I have no idea why. It isn’t something the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon felt compelled to do. The ’80s TV show, which was conceived of as an elaborate commercial for a Mattel action-figure line, was about the adventures of Adam, a brawny pageboy’d prince who transformed into the equally brawny hero of the title when he held his special sword aloft and intoned some magic words. Adam may have been half-Earthling on his mother’s side, but that was just a biographical footnote — he was an avowed citizen of Eternia, a planet where sword and sorcery elements exist alongside sci-fi ones like fighting robots and flying ships. It’s a setting made up of a bunch of shit a kid might like, mashed up together with no concern for internal logic, and the new movie can’t help but start there, too, even though that messes up its whole premise. Masters of the Universe kicks off with an introduction to Eternia in all of its kid–safe–Frank Frazetta glory, summarizing lore about the Sword of Power and its osteal resting place, Castle Grayskull, before exploring the angst of young Prince Adam (played as a child by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), who’s small for his age and easily pushed around during weapons training. Then it flings Adam off to Oklahoma City as a refugee from the attacks of perpetual villain Skeletor (Jared Leto, allegedly), and it becomes clear that no one involved in this project has a clue how to make a tolerable product out of this aging IP.

That’s the bar everyone involved in this movie was aiming to clear, and I’m not just saying that because the “fan screening event” I attended began with a heartwarming speech from a Mattel executive about how “Masters of the Universe was one of the most important brands we wanted to bring to life” (he mentioned Travis Knight only after a long ode to their corporate producing partners). The script for the movie, which is credited to Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and Dave Callaham, feels overwhelming, like something hastily patchworked together from different passes at the story over the years, rendering some aspects repetitive and others nonsensical. Take that sojourn in Oklahoma, in which we see a grown Adam, played by Nicholas Galitzine, go on a failed date, go to his job in human resources, and go home to the apartment he shares with a roommate. There was obviously an earlier version that started here, presenting Adam as either the exiled prince of a fantastical kingdom or an office drone who made up a grandiose backstory for himself to cover up the trauma of his parents’ death. But because the movie leaves no question about our hero’s identity, the Earth interlude is not just pointless but confusing. Like, what happened when a 10-year-old dropped out of the sky with no record of previously existing? Was he adopted, and does he have any investment in the people who raised him? And why does it take him so long to find a sword that appears to have been right down the block the whole time?

It’s possible to make a real movie out of the most dire of corporate circumstances — even a toy line, the way Greta Gerwig did with Barbie, and the way that Knight himself, best known for heading up the stop-motion studio Laika, did with the improbably charming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee. But Masters of the Universe isn’t a real movie. It’s a bunch of half-realized, semi-contradictory ideas accrued over years. It takes the rough shape of a comedy without ever really landing a joke, up to and including the potentially great one that Eternia warriors “Fisto” and “Ram Man” aren’t actually named that, that those are just the childish labels given to them by Adam as a kid. It never decides whether it’s fan service for nostalgic adults who’ll get some juice out of a cameo from Dolph Lundgren, star of the notorious 1987 Masters of the Universe movie, or an action-adventure for kids (Alison Brie, as henchwoman Evil-Lyn, is the only cast member who seems consistently aware she’s in a comedy). It cast Leto as its big bad, despite his reputational baggage and the character’s computer-generated skull for a face, then excised the actor from all promotional events. What was the point of shelling out for his participation in the first place? (He does trill his “Rs” impressively, I guess.)

Its action sequences are marked by endless pratfalls as Adam sorts out his He-Man powers and also endless pratfalls as his former weapons teacher Duncan (Idris Elba) tries to recover from his years as a depressed drunk. This gives their scenes together the feel of two different drafts that were document merged incorrectly. (As Duncan’s hypercompetent daughter Teela, Camila Mendes is left to roll her eyes.) The movie never really decides whether its source material is to be mocked or to be approached with a more wry affection. Worst of all, Masters of the Universe is under the impression it has something to say about masculinity without deciding what that is, exactly. It’s not difficult to see how Knight and company arrived at this thesis, when working with a main character who transforms into a bulgy warrior in a loincloth wielding, as Skeletor himself points out, an incredibly phallic weapon. But it’s exasperatingly impossible to sort out how the movie delineates good masculinity from the toxic kind. The movie wants to free up its hypertough characters to talk about their feelings but also has a clear contempt for the HR speak it presents as the alternative. In his regular-guy garb, Adam acts humiliatingly out of place at the gym and then weird on a date with a model-beautiful woman, despite looking like a handsome if charmless actor who’s been training intensely for months. In his He-Man form, Adam makes a show of reluctance about embracing brute force, then rips his foes’ arms off and beats them to death.

Masters of the Universe ends by making fun of the blunt moral lessons the original animated series punctuated its episodes with but couldn’t come up with even a joking conclusion of its own if pressed. There’s something appropriate about the movie coming out in the wake of two horror movies from 20-something YouTubers that have been setting box-office records. Obsession and Backrooms may not be perfect, but they are both, thrillingly, the visions of their respective young auteurs, while Masters of the Universe belongs to no one — a project engineered at enormous cost from the needs of IP.