I saw the new Masters of The Universe movie on opening night and unfortunately have a decent amount of thoughts on it. Since it is tracking to bomb, I figured why not take part in its uneventful coming and going by taking my uninformed opinions and putting them here on our site, that is also tracking to bomb in viewership this weekend.
To get it out of the way immediately, I think this movie is good! I’m not interested in writing the one serious film essay I’ll write this year so I can dogpile on a movie that literally only I’ve seen. Also, I really didn’t want to see it. This was a real “keep my image alive” moment, as I’ve ironically been cheering this movie for months, never even considering that it would actually release into theaters one day and then I would have to put my money where my mouth is.
I learned moments before leaving to go that it is well over two hours long (horrible!) and that it has Idris Elba in it (yay!). With those aspects canceling out and bringing me back to neutral I finally let my desire to be taken unseriously win out, and bought a ticket, because I think we all understand that if I don’t go see the 200 million dollar movie with a skeleton wizard in it I am a fraud.
This movie isn’t at all what I thought I was signing up for. There’s a section early in (or maybe it’s like an hour in, it’s impossible to know because when the buff toy movie is 2.5 hours long, time doesn’t function properly) where He-Man, or Adam, is on Earth (our Earth!) and has to escape the clutches of a large fantasy monster while 4 Non Blonde’s What’s Up plays. I thought the entire movie would be… that.
I thought I was signing up for a late 90’s adaptation romp, where the heroes of Eternia bounce around New York saying things like “phone? You mean the magic dialogue device,” but in actuality the time spent on Earth is painlessly short and this thing is actually much more of a 2010’s franchise misstep than it is a retro family adventure.
This is good and bad. It’s good because it means we actually do all the He-Man stuff, or at least I assume we did because I have never seen any of these shows. All the weird guys are here (plus one woman!) and the movie plays out sort of like a late stage Marvel film or 2017 attempt to kickstart a Mattel universe. I can’t imagine a big fan of these characters not having a grand time.
It’s bad because it somehow, despite clearly being a product that finally made it to theaters due to the success of Barbie, it still has all the trappings of what drives me insane about those late 2010’s movies. It’s too adult for children. It isn’t “dark” per-se, but characters are killed on screen in a variety of ways, toss around a big spread of cuss words, and engage in conversations that are just not suitable for the five to eight year-olds you would want to become obsessed with this type of thing.
It also mocks itself and it’s ridiculous world in that meta way that became the norm sometime around the Evan and 2011’s and is only now finally finding its way back out of big budget IP films that require a pretty big buy in to take seriously. Every character’s name is mocked relentlessly, the rules of the magic are overanalyzed, etc. I saw this movie in a pretty crowded opening night theater and am not hyperbolizing when I say that 95% of the jokes fell to complete silence. The biggest, and kind of only, laughs in the movie were Skeletor earnestly playing evil villain.
I can’t help but wonder if taking this material and playing it completely straight would go further for making it more successful dramatically, and also make it much funnier by proxy. To come back to Barbie as a comp, that film is far more successful because it understands it’s world and rules are silly, but it isn’t embarrassed by them. It doesn’t try to distance itself or put guards up that say “hey, we know, isn’t it crazy we made this movie.”
I find this movie to be a fascinating follow-up to that one in part because it is also a Mattel produced adaptation of… toys, but also because we are now getting to see how that movie’s success will infiltrate future attempts at this type of IP movie (if there are more, again, this thing is gonna hemorrhage money). Nearly every man in this film is brash and misguided, with the heart of the film being the basically the only woman in it, Teela, Warrior Goddess, played by the actress Veronica Lodge.
That is, until Adam becomes He-Man and learns that to be the ideal man and leader, he has to be willing to talk to people about their differences AND punch them so hard buildings shake. I’m not remotely qualified to attempt this next sentence but here goes: If Barbie is about women wanting to be taken seriously and have a space in our world, instead of being relegated to their own idealic, but less “serious” one, then Masters is maybe about how men want to ditch this world as soon as possible to instead get to be the biggest and coolest guy in one that’s all big and cool guys.
Both movies also love Pink clothes and abs.