Travis Knight’s “Masters of the Universe” is Hollywood’s latest attempt to murder the 1980s and capture the decade’s last gasp on camera. I recommend we all look the other way and let them, since if we don’t look the other way we’d have to look at “Masters of the Universe,” a live-action adaptation of the crappy “He-Man” toy commercials — pardon me, I mean “television series” — that doesn’t do the crappy toy commercials justice.
“Masters of the Universe” stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam. As a child, he was sent to Earth to escape the evil Skeletor, played by Jared Leto, who conquered the planet Eternia. Adam spent the last 15 years in Oklahoma City and has in no way adapted to the world around him. He still tells everyone he’s from another planet and personally knows superheroes named “Ram Man” and “Fisto.” At one point, we find out Adam has a therapist, who is presumably scouring the works of Sigmund Freud to untangle all this symbolism.
Adam can’t return to Eternia until he finds a magic sword, a sword he finally finds inside a comic book shop, wielded by a superhero statue which looks suspiciously like He-Man. He soon finds himself back in Eternia, transformed into a shirtless, pantless, macho superman who fights monsters, wrestles with daddy issues and gets very confused about the relationship between masculinity and violence. “Masters of the Universe” makes more sense as a lonely man’s mental breakdown than a sci-fi/fantasy epic.
The gag is that Adam is a fish out of water, an action hero who tries to diffuse every conflict before it comes to fisticuffs. He always tries to understand his enemy and extend an olive branch. It literally never works, not even once. Every problem in “Masters of the Universe” is solved with violence, which shouldn’t be a problem for an action movie, because a lot action movies are usually comfortable with the idea that violence is entertaining. “Masters of the Universe” claims, out loud, repeatedly, that violence is bad, but offers no evidence to support this claim. This is a film where a guy shoves a grenade in another guy’s mouth to illustrate his character development. You can’t have it both ways.
This is the place where, perhaps, a “He-Man” fan might argue it’s just a big flashy action movie so it doesn’t need to have a message. Which would be hilarious, since “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” was literally famous for shoehorning messages into every single episode. Those messages weren’t coherent either, but it’s a cop out to write an incredibly sloppy screenplay off as homage.
Besides, even as a big flashy action movie, “Masters of the Universe” falls apart. It somehow manages to look incredibly expensive and incredibly cheap at the same time. There are CG effects everywhere, but none of them look realistic or dazzling enough to compensate for their fakeness. All the locations are stock sci-fi/fantasy set dressings; they may as well be completely out of focus for all the atmosphere they contribute. The costumes are practical and evoke the original action figures, but this also means they’re shiny and chintzy, so nothing looks lived in and nothing looks cool. The original 1987 live-action “Masters of the Universe” movie, for all its many, many flaws, had a more exciting aesthetic.
Then again, the original “Masters of the Universe” movie was, to the despair of every contemporary “He-Man” fan, notoriously disrespectful of it source material. It was a pretty good “Jack Kirby’s New Gods” movie, if you switch out He-Man with Orion and Skeletor with Darkseid, but if you cared about the original characters it was a slap in the face. On the surface, it looks like Travis Knight’s adaptation cares more about the original series, but his film also makes endless apologies for everything that makes “He-Man” memorable, and calls out all the hacky flaws with an attitude of smug self-awareness, which barely qualifies as humor.
Oh yes, “Masters of the Universe” tries to be funny. It rarely succeeds. Skeletor and his sorceress co-villain Evil-Lyn, played by Alison Brie, are “Zoolander” villains who accidentally drove to the wrong soundstage. They’re not as fun as that probably makes them sound. What’s worse, a staggering number of the “jokes” — and nothing will convince me to take “jokes” out of the quotation marks — are just making fun of superhero names.
Whoever came up with the idea that superheroes in superhero movies should make fun of each other for having superhero names probably wakes up in a cold sweat every night, shrieking, “What have I done?!” It’s a tired gag in every context, but “Masters of the Universe” runs it ragged. Everyone bristles at the childish names Adam makes up for them (“Ram Man,” “Mekaneck,” “Fisto”), but none of them have real names, so they have no dignity to bruise. What really kills it, just strangles the premise dead, is that the villains in “Masters of the Universe” are really named “Skeletor” and “Evil-Lyn,” which means people in this world already had silly names to begin with, so pretending they don’t makes the film look embarrassed by its own source material, not respectful. Not at all.
There’s not much to recommend about “Masters of the Universe.” Nicholas Galitzine is perfectly cast, although he’s acting like he’s in a better, more focused movie about a hero struggling with a real inner crisis, as opposed to the dud he’s actually in. There’s a sequence towards the end, when Skeletor confronts Adam about his personal failings, which is enjoyably odd and hints that there may, somewhere in the development phase, have been a cleverer version of this script that actually tackled its themes and embraced Galitzine’s version of the character instead of hypocritically contradicting itself. But I guess they decided to make this version instead. For some reason.
Travis Knight’s “Masters of the Universe” is so blah, and so embarrassed of itself, that it could very well be the final nail in the coffin for 1980s nostalgia. We’re not scraping the bottom of the barrel anymore. We hit the bottom a while ago. Now we’re just dusting off the refuse and pretending it’s still fresh. It isn’t. By the power of Grayskull, this movie has a powerful odor. It stinks.
The post ‘Masters of the Universe’ Review: A Confused and Embarrassed Sci-Fi Fantasy Flop appeared first on TheWrap.
