For many of the 90s kids, He-Man and The Masters of the Universe is a nostalgic memory. It has a space almost equivalent to all the other superheroes, like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, etc. Since I knew how the episodes in those animated series were designed, I was curious to know how, in this advanced era of visual effects, they would create a live-action adaptation of them. But what we eventually get from Travis Knight, the man who made his live-action directorial debut with Bumblebee, is a movie that feels like its writers have not gotten the news that even Marvel is trying to reinvent. With them desperately trying to make things funnier in that Taika Waititi style, Masters of the Universe ends up looking like a cheap copy of a ditched MCU formula.
After being sent to Earth with the Sword of Power, when Eternos was attacked by Skeletor, Adam, our hero, was in search of that Sword because he lost it in transit. He was having nightmares about his Eternia life, and nobody on earth believed his story. At one point, Adam manages to find where his sword was. However, the signals from the sword trigger many people, and that changes the life of Adam dramatically. What happens after Adam recovers the Sword of Power is what we see in Masters of the Universe.
If you look at how the episodes of the animated series were designed, one can imagine that pulling off a live-action movie with a story that can connect with the audience of the new age, or even those who approach this film with nostalgia, is not going to be easy. The comic was basically about Skeletor’s repeated attempts to take control of Eternos, and for a movie to have some impact, this desire for power should be depicted in an impactful manner. The problem with Masters of the Universe is that it sort of destroys all your hopes of seeing some good writing by setting up the story in the most sloppy and hasty manner. The movie feels like watching a faluda of Superman, the first Thor movie, and a little bit of Thor Ragnarok. And there is no heft in the writing that would make us root for the good guys or even hate the bad ones.
One of the major issues I felt was the movie’s cheap production values. There is a sequence where Adam, Teela, and Duncan are fighting with Skeletor’s army, and the greenscreen feel was way too evident. And there is even a scene where Adam is moving huge rock debris to save someone, and one can clearly feel that they are made of thermocol. And even Cringer looked really odd in scenes where there was a physical interaction between the CGI character and the real ones. I mean, it’s a movie with an estimated budget of 200 million dollars, and some frames looked shoddier than some of the Malayalam movies that had a much lesser budget. The primary issue of the movie is the writing that just doesn’t know how to play with the characters. The whole story has so many generic beats, and to make it look less cliched, they are soaking it with dialogue humor, and most of it clearly exposes their lack of imagination.
Nicholas Galitzine is playing the part of your friendly neighborhood He-Man, aka Adam. The character design is very different from what we have seen in the animated series. While the guy does look bulky and worthy of carrying that sword, this always panicking, clumsy characteristic doesn’t really land smoothly. Camila Mendes as Teela doesn’t have much to do here, other than being fit to get into that sleek dress. Idris Elba, who played Heimdall in the MCU, plays a very similar role in the form of Duncan in this new universe. Jared Leto is the one who has played the part of Skeletor. I mean, the movie is clearly not using his face, and I really don’t understand why they made that character such a clown. Even in the popular until-we-meet-again memes, Skeletor had that evil texture, which was completely missing in this movie. The larger character pool of the He-Man world has very minimal scenes, as the purpose of this particular movie is to just establish the world of Eternia for us.
Towards the end of the movie, there is a moment where the He-Man name is revealed, and the setting up of that particular scene, which acknowledges the cringe tone of such a name in today’s world, was good to see. Unfortunately, it came after the audience had to sit through more than two hours of unimaginative writing. Masters of the Universe, in its totality, feels like an unsure attempt to set up a larger story world in future installments, and this was pretty much like a testing-the-waters kind of stuff to know whether the nostalgic millennials would turn up in large numbers to witness the iconic “By the power of Grayskull” in a live-action format.
