Why don't you write your way out of this trap, book fuck?

My big takeaway from Nolan's Odyssey is that the ancient Greeks never thought to invent windows. Or paintings. Or art of any sort. At least three times, we visit a palace, a temple, and find it to be a great big cement room, very dark on the inside, lit only by torches and braziers (they haven't invented candles either). No sculptures, no frescos, no mosaics. Odysseus's palace looks much like Menelaus' palace looks much like a temple where Telemachus is ambushed and almost dies. Just a bunch of big blocky rooms that must get pretty stuffy, considering there are no windows. And brother, you'd better believe that if they don't have windows, they don't have skylights either. The budget for all those braziers and torches must be enormous.

Told in Nolan's now-signature fragmented structure... which made sense to liven up the semi-boring life of Oppenheimer, but here feels rambling... the movie progresses in montages rather than scenes. We rarely stay in a moment for any amount of time, instead flashing back to Odysseus buying a puppy

or taking the grown puppy on a hunt

or taking a break from the hunt to eat a sandwich

or packing that sandwich but forgetting to put coffee in his thermos

If you think that's annoying, well, that's every scene. We'll go from Odysseus fighting the Cyclops to Telemachus paying a visit to Menelaus to a flashback to the siege of Troy. The movie both assumes a baseline familiarity with the Odyssey and the Iliad for any of this to make sense, and hands out clunky exposition as the characters need their own society to be explained to them. At one point, Penelope needs Odysseus to explain the concept of sacrifice to her; wait, wouldn't she know?

Speaking of Penelope, she's abysmally characterized, yelling at her son in every scene they have together and getting an embarrassing girlboss moment where she cries "Empty throne? I've been sitting on this empty throne for twenty years!" Yeah, since you bring it up, lady, you've sucked at it. There are suitors everywhere and they're fucking the place up.

In fact, all of the female characters are faintly ridiculous. Helen has been maimed by Menelaus to pay her back for, you know, that whole Trojan War thing, but she also openly mocks him--you wonder why Menelaus, the asshole tyrant/abusive husband, doesn't get haul off and smack her one. Circe is turned into an arch-feminist who transforms Odysseus's men because they would've raped her; Odysseus doesn't overcome her so much as make puppy-dog eyes at her and go "Please? Please can I have my men back? Pretty please?" While Circe, who actually does rape Odysseus, isn't given a comeuppance--she's more characterized like the shaman in Widow's Bay, giving Odysseus lotus for years until he's 'ready' to stop being date-raped. How can you be less woke on rape than a 3000 year old poem?

Odysseus doesn't fare much better. As you might expect, Nolan characterizes him less as a daring hero and more of a Boomer full of manpain, which his adventures serve as therapy for. But he can't seem to decide what Odysseus's flaw actually is. Is it that he's too much of a dick, like when he pointlessly shoots the Cyclops after they've already overcome it? Or is he too much of a nice guy, like when he refuses to let all of his men die even though the gods have decreed it? Finally Nolan lands on him having PTSD, just like Ralph Fiennes' take in The Return, but he adds a risible version of the "aliens are really future humans" thing from Interstellar. Yes, Greece is an ahistorical, multiethnic empire full of Indians and Asians, but it's also in danger of collapsing from the Sea People. The attempted combination of anachronism and a foray into serious historical fiction is laughable.

I'm sure you've read the cope where the woefully miscast Helen of Troy and Sinon are only in the movie for a few minutes. But Odysseus' crew--who are in eighty percent of the thing--are as diverse as an eighties street gang and it's impossible to take seriously. And this is a movie that very, very much wants to be taken seriously.

Also, the Sinon character is super important to the narrative, to the point where Odysseus's final vengeance on Robert Pattinson revolves around him going "This is for Sinon!" And every time they bring up the character, you're reminded that this is the they/them character played by tiny, weird-looking "Elliot Page." It's like a version of Black Panther where T'Challa's dad is Gary Coleman.

Yeah, he wouldn't be in the movie that much, but try watching Killmonger going on about his dad being killed without snickering at the thought of Gary Coleman committing murder. I'm sorry, it makes the whole thing a joke.

Travis Scott is there too, playing a bard who supposedly sings about the Trojan War, but his 'performance' is just banging a stick and saying short, declarative sentences like "A man! A war! A thought! A plan!" Entertaining stuff.

That's really the problem in a nutshell. It's just not much fun. Troy, for all its faults, had a real cinematic scope and beautiful look. The actors, with their accents and their archaic language, felt like they were playing characters. You could buy that Eric Bana was the noble Hector or that Brad Pitt was the glorious Achilles.

Everyone in Odyssey... except for Robert Pattinson, who I'd be willing to bet decided to make his villain character a shitty little pussyboy with no direction at all from Nolan... is just there. Tom Holland's doing his usual Tom Holland performance. Ditto for Jon Bernthal. Ditto for Matt Damon. (And you KNOW Zendaya is just squinting like she always does.)

They emote some and look very serious, but you never buy that they're these ancient people in a world of gods and monsters, no matter how much they go on about "Zeus's law!" Between the modern accents and stupid-looking costumes, you would almost think that during the Pandemic, everyone decided to get together on Zoom and read through Homer's epic as a fun little time-waster, wearing whatever they could throw on that looked "classical."

Except that probably would've been better. At the very least, it wouldn't have cost three hundred million dollars.

Even Clash of the Titans... even the remake of Clash of the Titans... felt like it wanted to have fun with some colorful characters and gnarly monsters. Liam Neeson as Zeus. That's hard to argue with.

The Odyssey... ehhhhh. Nolan makes a go at putting some horror into Odysseus's encounter with the Cyclops, but it's hard to find it too scary when this Cyclops can't talk and pretty much goes to sleep immediately after doing anything.

After that, it's just variations on a theme. Odysseus goes somewhere, some of his crew get taken out by monsters, he feels bad about it, move on. The Giants are just there. The Sirens are barely seen. Scylla and Charybdis show up as a whirlpool and some tentacles that honestly look like shit. Like, literal shit. None of them make much of an impression. Nolan doesn't manage to make a meal out of any of this. The entire Odyssey in The Odyssey is honestly a bit of a slog.

Things liven up a little when Odysseus gets home, because it's hard to fuck up an action hero coming in and getting revenge on a bunch of assholes. Even there, though, the whole thing hinges on "Zeus's law!", the rule that you have to treat guests nicely, which here is shown to be pretty much the central tenet of Greek/Indian/black/Asian civilization.

But I guess Nolan figured that Odysseus killing all those assholes is a bit mean. If he were a real hero, he would just ask them to leave and let them go! So the Zeus's Law thing somehow ends up that he can't tell them to leave? (As explained, you wonder how this Zeus's Law shit isn't being abused by dickheads in every single kingdom of ancient Greece/India/Africa/Asia.) So Odysseus is in this fix where, even if he's king again, he can't get these guys to go except by killing them, and if he does that, then he's also going to be in trouble, because these suitors are rich guys with powerful families. (Wouldn't rich guys with powerful families have stuff to do besides hang out in Ithaca for years, trying to get Penelope to marry them? I guess not.)

So you think Odysseus... being freaking ODYSSEUS... is going to have some clever ruse to kill all these guys without getting in trouble for it, or at least get rid of them. No, not really. He just kills them all and goes "so long, suckers!" with Penelope. See, it's also come out that Greek/Indian (you get the idea) civilization is pretty much collapsing because the Trojan Horse broke Zeus's Law (you should take a shot every time Zeus's Law is said) and now no one is taking this Zeus's Law shit seriously, so now everyone is going to war with each other, and that's the Sea People. Because no one went to war before the Trojan War, I guess. And I thought Zeus's Law was bad because it let these suitors cause all these problems? No?

So, since civilization is over and the Dark Ages are starting (citation needed), Odysseus and Penelope are putting Tom Holland in charge and peacing out. Good luck with the collapse of civilization, kid! Have fun!

Very Boomer of them. They don't quite sail off on a cruise ship, but...

None of this is very entertaining and it's not very edifying either, since we're not getting any accurate portrayal of Homer's Odyssey, just Nolan's 'update' of it and a bunch of stock aesops on the horrors of war and how women are great even when they hold you prisoner and rape you. I'm kinda at a loss as to what this brings to the table. You won't see this and get any sort of accurate idea of how the Greeks visualized the world or what happened in Homer's Odyssey, and it's not much fun on its own merits.

It's three hours long. You sit there a long time. You see a bunch of stars who wanted to work with Nolan. I guess it's kinda fun that Nolan is big enough to have, like, the guy who played Barsad in The Dark Knight Rises show up as just a guy with no lines in Odysseus's crew. And you're like, hey, he was the main dude in The Collector and here he just, I don't know, picks up a pen or something. Sort of like when Chadwick Boseman showed up in Psych before he got famous, but since Nolan's a big deal, this is him showing up to pick up a pen after he got famous.

It's amusing. I don't know if it's really fun.

So, Red Sonja. It's actually kinda fun--very much of a piece with the cheesy eighties fantasy films like Deathstalker or Beastmaster. Some good production value and actual actors (Philip Winchester! Rhona Mitra! Strike Back reunion!) sharing space with MST3K-worthy editing and special effects. Largely, it's just weird.

Like Red Sonja herself. You think she'd be a savage barbarian, but they make her go all in on being this nature-loving heroine, pretty much a Disney princess, who is like aghast at people abusing animals. "You use and slaughter animals!" she accuses the villain during the litany of his sins. It's like... honey... it's the Hyborean Age. Beyond Meat isn't exactly a thing at this point in prehistory.

(They have her hunting animals, but then saying a little Avatar prayer over them. Like, does that really make much of a difference? If you shot an arrow into my neck, I don't think I'd care much if you thanked me for my meat.)

Or the hair. They start her off as a redhead, then at the finale they make her really a redhead, and you're like... oh. We really needed to Surf Dracula her having red hair?

Or the armor. The villains try to embarrass her by making her wear a chainmail bikini in gladiatorial games, with the script jibing about how little it protects her (not that the villains wearing full armor ever seems to do them much good). Then she gets some real armor by being nice to the armorer (the script also makes a weirdly big deal about Sonja being super compassionate, like she's Wonder Woman). And it covers, like, ten percent more of her body.

It's like they wrote the script thinking they were going to put her in the chainmail bikini for one scene as a mythology gag and then they'd give her a real costume, but someone said "Fuck, guys, it's Red Sonja, she needs to be in a chainmail bikini," so instead they just put her in a different chainmail bikini and didn't rewrite the part where she's supposedly asking for and getting practical armor.

At one point, the villain sets fire to the forest Red Sonja is hiding out in to smoke her out, then he sends his men into the burning forest to get her. While it's on fire.

The villain is Robert Sheehan and boy, let me tell you, it is a sight to see Matilda Lutz underplaying everything (clearly a graduate of the Gal Gadot School of Acting) while Sheehan overplays everything. If you raised a child on Eddie Redmayne's performance in Jupiter Rising, the result would probably be a lot like "Emperor Draygan."

Clearly a man who knows that the more sniveling and fey your fantasy movie villain is, the better. Look at this guy!

There's a bit where the obligatory Miniboss Villainess Who Is Super Into The Main Villain asks him "Why have we never shared a bed?" and I swear to God, he turns around just like this

iWh

Imagine a Sex And The City character becoming an evil overlord and you're about there. I don't know what movie he thinks he's in... some kind of atheist relationship drama involving cyclops?... but you wish A24 had picked it up instead of burying it in a barbarian revenge film.

Like, his complaint is that the gods didn't intervene to help him when he was enslaved as a boy, and then the gods do intervene when Sonja is mortally wounded and he's won fair and square, so yeah! Valid! If the gods had just intervened during the opening scene instead of the third act, everyone would've been so much better off!

"Yo new girl, where you at?" - Airk, Willow (2022)

With the impending release of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey comes news that he's having the characters speak in contemporary English ("My dad is coming home." / "LET'S GO!") rather than the more formal tone usually associated with fantasy and historical fiction.

Quoting the director:

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times ahead of “The Odyssey” theatrical release this month, Nolan said that as the film’s screenwriter, he wanted to prioritize “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people.” This is why the characters in Nolan’s “Odyssey” speak in contemporary English dialogue and not Homer’s words. “I was maybe being naïve, it might bite me on the ass, but I wanted an earthy narrative. To me it was a no-brainer,” Nolan said of his decision.

That's the pro argument. You want modern audiences to relate to these ancient characters, so what better way than to have them talk and act (and look) like modern characters? Well, there's always doing research, finding out how people behaved in the time period, and then using artistry to show that, in their way, these people are feeling the same emotions and having the same thoughts as humans throughout history.

But that's hard and you can just have the characters talking about hashtags and listening to the Ramones so we know what they're feeling. Or to have a joke, because it's a lot easier to just write a Twitter bon mot than to come up with something an 18th-century person might say which would also amuse modern audiences.

"But hey," you might say. "The characters in The Odyssey would really be speaking archaic Greek, not English at all. And they'd probably talk casually with each other and use slang. So isn't having them say 'what up, pops?' exactly the same as them saying 'how bodes the evening, Father?'"

One, no. History was frequently a lot more formal than modern times, when people go shopping in pajamas. You'd get arrested for that in Victorian times. They'd think you were streaking if you weren't wearing a shift, stays, petticoat, and bodice. So it's plausible to have characters talking in a heightened, Shakespearean register. Even if it weren't, you could argue just as meaningfully that "real people" shouldn't zing each other with awesome one-liners

They should go "uh" and "ummm" like mumblecore or Robert Altman characters after a stroke. But that's no FUN!

And that's pretty much my second argument. You can be as pedantic as you want and say it's not really accurate, but it's more fun to hear fantasy characters talking in poetic English (or at least like an American who's read books outside the romantasy genre) than it is to hear them talking like they're from Brooklyn.

One helps me invest in the story. The other takes me out and makes me think of how clever the director thinks he's being. It's just dumb when these directors are trying way too hard to seem contemporary, like they're embarrassed to be making a period piece.

If you watch that clip all the way through, you'll see Muslims setting up an ambush with an arrow bazooka. Sorry, I think that's dumb. I think just having a historically accurate Crusade sequence would be way better than pretending bows were M7 rifles.

I mean, fuck, they're practically wearing plate carriers!

Supergirl reminded me a lot of Charlie's Angels. Not in terms of being good--it's really horribly mid, outright bad depending on who you're asking--but Charlie's Angels did a delicate balancing act, combining action, humor, and sex appeal to end up with something that appealed to both men and women and even young girls.

Supergirl... does not do that.

At times, it seems like it's trying to capture a male audience, with a story that seems very nearly too violent and gross and dark for girls and the spotlighted presence of Lobo, DC's Wolverine, who brings with him a ton of "I was inserted in reshoots" energy for a character that I'm pretty sure was written in all along.

(It's literally dark, too--half the movie takes place in some underlit, neon-soaked dive like this is a John Wick spin-off. At one point, we visit Krem's dank dungeon and it's lit about as well as every other room the characters have been in!)

They even do away with Supergirl's costume for the most part, having her dress up in a trenchcoat like some Angsty 90s Image Antihero

Whoa-oh! She's using spray paint! This girl has no regard for the law!

But they don't go all the way with that, either. Milly Alcock's Supergirl is utterly asexual and kinda funny-looking besides. She drinks to excess, but only alcohol (and she's legal! 23! Not even barely legal!). No sex or drugs for her; she just dances to old rock songs and does shots!

Then there's the villains, cinema's first all-white Muslim grooming gang. They're tattooed like the Romulans Eric Bana led in Star Trek, dress like the cast of the Road Warrior, and talk like Cousin Balki. They love to spend their free time sharpening knives and having wrestling matches; you can really feel the first-time (you can tell) writer nodding to herself as she waits for all the thinkpieces on toxic masculinity she's lined up.

Members of an all-male race (note to evolution: WTF?), they're a species of mass rapists who perpetuate their race by kidnapping young girls and... yeah. yeah.

This is not me being snide here. This is the stated text of the movie. Supergirl spends the whole movie fighting a gang of child fuckers. (Between this, the big sister/little sister partnership, and the climax revolving around a crashing airship, someone's been watching Black Widow.)

The Alien movies are hard-R and even they're tasteful enough to keep this kinda thing subtext. And to only focus on adults, for that matter.

Heck, even the look of the villains seems like it might be a bit much for any young children in the audience.

Compare the villain from Superman. He's a bit imposing, but along the same lines as any member of COBRA.

And I wasn't wild about Masters of the Universe, but the bad guys there were all kinda colorful and fun. Skeletor was a living skull, obviously, but he gave a big hammy performance that made him more fun to watch than frightening.

He's just a big goof! He's not going to give anyone nightmares.

And these guys look intimidating, but like... you know... a cartoon come to life. Not an episode of Criminal Minds where they solve the case with semen.

Anyway, even if you're adult, there's not a whole lot to recommend here. Despite this supposedly being a space opera, just about every planet that's visited immediately turns into another ripoff of the Star Wars cantina. At one point they go to a planet devastated by nuclear war that has now been overtaken by alien scavengers who are basically stripping it for parts. And you think hey, that sounds interesting.

Then they immediately go to another fucking bar full of skeevy aliens. (This is another way in which the movie is weirdly no fun and anti-male. Just about every alien they meet is a date rapist or Seth Rogen. Why does Supergirl love spending time off of Earth if these freaky-looking assholes are the only company she can find?)

The writing is, frankly, amateurish. It boomerangs between the usual MCU snark and straining attempts at profundity that sound like no conversation anyone has ever had.

At one point, sidekick Ruthiye tells Supergirl that "You're not nice but you're kind. You're not perfect but you're good." Wow, gee, anything else you want to tell me in the audience about how I should see the characters? Maybe pass on some stock tips if you've got any?

By the end... spoiler alert... they've committed to this "killing rots your soul" theme. Along with the child trafficking and "drinking to numb yourself to grief" plots, just so many applicable lessons for the children in the audience, yeah. So Kara convinces Ruthiye not to takes her revenge, then kills Krem herself... can't she just hand him over to the Green Lanterns to imprison? Nevermind.

She kills him in cold blood and despite this seeming like it would cement her as an antihero--because apparently she's already so broken as a person that she might as well have people's deaths on her conscience now--after that she's all chipper and playing with Krypto and reuniting with Superman. So is she just a sociopath who takes advantage of her irrevocably shattered psyche to kill people who need to die? Is she superhero Dexter?

And isn't "oh, Superman is naive, but I'm the cynical one who makes the hard choices!" the dynamic between him and Batman? Haven't they messed up that partnership by making it the same as the relationship he has with Supergirl? And how experienced and worldwise an adventurer is a 23-year-old who day-drinks constantly? Kara spends the whole movie fronting like she's Han Solo--isn't she basically just a rich bitch who uses her ability to become a goddess under yellow sunlight as a cudgel the same way Blair Waldorf would use her wealth and connections? In fact, Blair's probably more imposing. She could at least start a whisper campaign. If it can't be taken on with heatvision, Arctic breath, or superstrength, Kara's licked.

There are flashbacks throughout the movie to Kara's childhood on Argo City and how she first comes to Earth and meets Superman. That and Lobo's brief appearances are the only time the narrative really comes to life. The characters have no chemistry because everyone is just a different shade of jaded and stoic. Lobo's interactions with Ruthiye are a bit closer to working because you can buy that Lobo is as grizzled as he comes across and not Kara the sorority girl throwing a snit because they're out of pumpkin spice.

I couldn't help thinking that a movie that centered on Kara trying to adapt to life on Earth while living in the shadow of the most famous man alive would've been way better than this attempt at high drama. And a movie about Lobo and Ruthiye going out for revenge and bounties might not be art, but it could be dumb fun. It'd probably be more moving for Lobo to not want Ruthiye to be a killer than for Kara to do this confused "being a killer is bad, but also I'm going to be a killer, and it's cool and badass."

Also, the whole thing where Krem is going around killing whole families, including children, and generally doing an impression of a Russian soldier in Germany, but Kara is obsessed with saving her poisoned dog... yeah, I like dogs too, but it makes her look totally insane. Yeah, John Wick is killing hundreds of people over a puppy, but those guys know how absurd it is, they don't let things become too heavy. I feel like James Gunn's version of that is John Wick visiting a concentration camp and killing a few of the guards while still groaning about his dog.

That's the whole thing in a nutshell, it's this nutzo lack of proportions and forethought. "Saving my poisoned dog" would be a great motivation for a character in a lighthearted family movie. It is a fucking weird plot point to share space with a storyline about children being raped and murdered.

You just want to shake the bitch and go "Hey, lady! Little girls are getting molested here! Shuddup about the mutt already!"

So, wait, at the exact same time, this character is a beloved folk hero and there are hundreds of people out to kill him to get revenge for their murdered loved ones?

"Okay, Colman Domingo, I've stolen terabytes of video evidence documenting the existence of aliens. Now how about I release it on the internet?"

"No, that would never work! That's the last thing you should do! Anything but that!"

"Why not?"

"..."

"You do have a reason why not?"

"Yes. A very good reason. However, no one in this movie can just give a straight answer when asked a direct question, so, uh... 'you'd never believe me!' 'The answer belongs to the whole world.'"

"Christ, that is annoying, isn't it? And here I thought 'the government is covering up aliens' was an incredibly hard concept to grasp. Okay, what do you want me to do with all these videos?"

"We're going to take it to one local news station and from there, transmit it to the whole world."

"But won't the bad guys just track us there and shut down the broadcast?"

"Oh, they'll try a little, but then they'll inexplicably give up."

"Probably because they'll figure they can just claim that all the video evidence is faked or AI. Say, how will we be able to convince people that the videos aren't all fake?"

"Not to worry. We have a real live alien with us and he'll vouch for their authenticity."

"Wait."

"Waiting."

"You have a real live alien?"

"Yeah. I freed him a while ago and he's been hanging out with us ever since."

"So why do you want me to bother with a bunch of AVI files? Isn't an alien LITERALLY living proof of everything?"

"Well..."

"For that matter, the aliens want us to do this, right? Well, why do they need our help to reveal themselves to the world? Can't they just park a flying saucer in the middle of Times Square? They're superadvanced beings, why do they need us to risk our lives? For that matter, why did they need to traumatize the hell out of a small child twenty-five years ago just so he'll grow up to help them now? The government has aliens held prisoner, being experimented on, and they're just... hanging back? Why don't they use their dumb alien powers to put everyone to sleep for a few minutes, get their people back, and then fly through Cleveland if they're so set on revealing themselves? Why do these fuckers actually want and why have they picked such a convoluted and insane way of getting it?"

"Listen, son, I don't have all the answers. But I'm Colman Domingo and maybe if I just emote very hard and have a lot of gravitas, you'll buy that this plot holds together and isn't just a bunch of hokum vaguely admonishing the audience to be nice. Empathy. EMPATHY. Empathy is the most important evolutionary trait! Listen to how HARD I'm ACTING! THAT'S how IMPORTANT it is! EMPATHY, I mean!"

"Isn't it a bit rich for a director who specializes in movies about gorily killing Nazis to suddenly talk about how great compassion is?"

One is that in this world of total hedonism, material wealth, and even critical acclaim, everyone finds true happiness in starting families, being friends, and expressing themselves artistically.

That's one. The other is that by the end of the film, the character Dirk Diggler is actually able to give a decent, naturalistic performance as an actor. But no one cares because it's in the same scene where he whips his big dick out.

That is possibly the most obviously cursed Cursed Artifact of all time. If it were any more blatantly evil, Graham Platner would tattoo it on his chest.

The problem with having a drug-dealing youth pastor in your movie is that I'm just going to want the movie to be about a drug-dealing youth pastor instead of a bunch of normies. Obviously. Dafne Keen is a lesbian fresh out of rehab? Who cares, someone is dealing drugs and being a youth pastor!

Maddeningly, this movie does the Final Destination thing of saying you can get out of the Death Whistle situation by killing someone else, but when someone tries to do the obvious thing and kill the most odious scumbag they can find (who is, again, a drug-dealing youth pastor), the other characters object to it because murder is wrong. So he dies horribly and then Pastor Drug Dealer gets killed anyway in the most contrived way imaginable where he basically kills himself just so the main girls can get out of trouble while keeping their hands clean. Bogus! And then the survivors are all happy and in love like they didn't get their friend killed just to survive themselves by doing what he was trying to do in the first place.

Lucky for the movie that only one person in the cast is fated to die of old age so it's not just characters being killed by old people for two hours.

That is the most nonsensical "it's not over yet!" twist ending since The Descent Part 2. Ha ha, why would she or anyone else do that?

Okay, let’s start off being nice. Jared Leto gives a really good performance in this. Like, if you dialed down the explicitly comedic bits (like him telling his henchmen how they should do an evil laugh), you’d have a really good Doctor Doom. This is probably a better Doom than we’re going to get from RDJ. And there’s no part where he takes the ‘mask’ off or goes back to having a Jared Leto face either, not even a flashback. They give you skull all the way.

And I’ve seen a few comments that I think were reaching too hard about how this movie is inappropriate for a family audience. I don’t think that’s the case. There’s a little swearing and some Animaniacs style jokes meant to go over the head of the children where they kid about Fisto fisting people or Skeletor being a little too obsessed with He-Man, but it’s pretty par for the course. If anything, the movie’s saying that evil weirdos like Skeletor and Evil-Lyn are attracted to the same sex, while the good guys are all part of loving nuclear families like Adam and his parents or Teela and her dad. So, if anything, on that account, it’s pretty based.

Now I do like the subgenre. That Star Wars, Jack Kirby techno fantasy, where people switch between laser guns and swords indiscriminately and use magic and starships at the same time. Where everyone has on-the-nose names like Scott Free or Darkseid. And that is almost entirely done right. The production design is great, the art direction is great. Even the action scenes are great. Far better, for instance, than we got from Wonder Woman, where two movies gave us one Greek god and a fully transformed catgirl for five minutes (and an ‘invisible jet’ that was just a normal jet, turned invisible). All the ingredients are here, but the script is hammered ass.

Masters of the Universe starts off with Prince Adam narrating his backstory. He makes constant jokey asides like swearing he's not high and saying “yeah, that's what they went with” on the name Sword of Power (that they think is too big a buy-in for audiences? That needs a lampshade hung on it? The Lord of the Rings centers on the Rings of Power; you don’t see Frodo rolling his eyes and saying to Gandalf “No, really, what are they called?”).

Then at the end of this ‘setup’, it's revealed he's telling all this to a blind date who asked him where he's from.

That could be funny… if the movie had bothered to play it straight for just a little bit before breaking the tension with a laugh. But it never does. It never gives He-Man any hype moments or aura without immediately undercutting him with a joke. It makes jokes DURING the action and then again AFTER the action so that there’s never any mood or tension except “well, that just happened.”

It goes far beyond how jokey Star Trek 09 or the MCU are with their characters. It's pretty much Austin Powers. Only straight up turning this thing into a full-on Zucker Brothers parody would actually improve it… at least then we'd be spared this movie's piss-poor attempts at having a theme or speaking to modern masculinity or whatever the hell it's doing.

To spoil, at the end, Adam is told… in a total rip of Thor: Ragnarok’s God of Hammers bit, I mean it is shameless… that his real power isn't brute strength, it's compassion and empathy. So he asks Skeletor if they can't talk things out. (Never mind that we've been told by Skeletor himself that he's killed “thousands” of innocent people.)

Anyway, Skeletor tells Adam that he's evil and likes it. They go back to fighting. Adam beats Skeletor with brute strength, Skeletor tries to negotiate, only now Adam says the time for talk is over and executes him.

That was… that's the theme of your movie? Adam offers empathy for ten seconds and it makes no difference and accomplishes nothing? Even Fire & Ice at least had the heroes choose to spare the villain's henchmen. 

And this isn't even played as a joke. It's the one time they actually do proper setup for a joke and then have an actual punchline, only they play it dead serious. We're really meant to come away from this thinking about how great and not useless empathy and compassion are, but the movie does nothing to dramatize it. It's your theme, movie! What do you mean you yourself are portraying Adam's life lesson as pointless?

The whole movie’s like that. Mindless and half-baked. Okay, so Adam is a sensitive boy who doesn’t want to fight, he wants to dance! How does he like going from Eternia, where everyone has to be a badass warrior to survive, to Earth, where he can just work in HR? Oh, he hates it. (And never mind how he grew up on Earth, what friendships or family he might have there—he just has a roommate who’s embarrassed to watch rom-coms. In 2026! That is so a reheated 90s bit.)

Alright, so Adam hates being on Earth and wants to go to Eternia. But then he gets to Eternia and he’s constantly relying on stuff from his HR job and trying to dialogue with Skeletor’s men or do team-building exercises. Okay, so was he actually really invested in his HR job and believing in it? Because I thought the movie was showing us that he thought HR was just a stupid waste of time he had to put up with until he could find the Sword of Power and go home?

You can see this same thoughtlessness everywhere and it ends up making this one of the most tonally confused movies I’ve ever seen. MOTU doesn’t seem to have any idea what it actually is. Is it about Adam, a normal Earth-type person, going to this weird place and playing the straight man to all the weirdness on Eternia? Or is Adam embodying all the weirdness of Earth and taking it to Eternia, where the comparatively normal people there are shocked by what a weirdo he is? Is Adam the comic relief? Or Man At Arms? Or Roboto? Skeletor?

Every character, except maybe Teela, passes the idiot ball back and forth enough times for this to count as a Knicks game. At one point, Skeletor says “You are nothing but worms to me!” and Man-At-Arms says “He just called us butt worms!”

By no means do I want to praise Thor: Ragnarok, but at least that decided that Thor was the big retard that everyone else was playing off of. They didn’t make every character a retard for the sake of having every other line be someone ‘comedically’ misunderstanding something entirely fucking obvious.

Before someone accuses me of larping, I'll admit, I'm not a fan of He-Man. I didn't watch it growing up, I don't care what they change so long as it ends up a good movie. Although I do think it's weird that they race-swapped Teela and Man At Arms, who are father and daughter, and changed them into different races. 

(And speaking of woke, it’s hard not to notice that all the male characters are shitty dads, villains, joke characters with silly names, Cringer (who gets called a pussy), or Adam, who’s a Retard. While the female characters—Teela, the Sorceress, Adam’s mom, Roboto, even Evil-Lyn—get to be taken completely seriously and have no character flaws besides being fed up with their goofy male counterparts.)

It's more than just the jokes, although those are abhorrent… especially after the director talked so much about how his movie was going to be sincere and reject cynicism. It's the most cynical thing imaginable! You know the Taserface bit from Guardians of the Galaxy? They do that with every character outside the core cast. This character is named Ram Man, isn't that dumb? This character is named Fisto, isn't that dumb? This character is named Mechaneck, isn't that dumb?

If you think these characters are so dumb, why did you include them? Just include characters you think are cool and make them cool! Don't feature dumb characters just to goof about how dumb they are! That's like a Spider-Man movie featuring the Hypno Hustler and Big Wheel then joking about how lame Spidey’s enemies are! You're the one spotlighting the dumb ones!

It’s also that the storyline has no verve, no grace. It seems entirely assembled of every cliché you would expect from a summer blockbuster from twenty years ago. (Including the sensitive son with an overbearing and strict dad, which seems so Gen X, doesn’t it?) A MadLibs with He-Man nouns put in it instead of MCU or DC Comics ones.

Here’s the doofy hero being recruited by the hypercompetent female lead, just like in every movie from The Matrix to The LEGO Movie. Here’s him unlocking his power. Here’s things going well for him for a little bit. Here’s him suffering a bad setback. Here’s him learning a lesson from it and rallying for a big battle in the third act. Here’s all the friends he’s made along the way helping him out in various ways during the big battle. Here’s one last showdown with the villain while his girlfriend beats up the evil guy’s girlfriend.

It’s all just so… obvious. And I know it’s not like a He-Man movie is ever going to be some A21 drama. It’s just that director Travis Knight has—with his Laika movies and Bumblebee—proven that he can take these conventional stories and approach them from an offbeat angle that is still surprisingly fitting. Bumblebee being a small movie about a young woman getting over her father’s death? That works. It’s not immediately what you’d expect from a Transformers movie.

With MOTU, it feels like Knight has been beaten down by Amazon’s demands for a big four-quadrant blockbuster to spearhead a new-old franchise for them and Mattel. Like eventually he just gave up, checked off the boxes to have both a big to-do about the importance of empathy AND Skeletor being a card-carrying villain who gets killed by He-Man at the end.

And finally he just decided okay, I’m going to memberberry out as hard as I can for the epilogue, because they’ve never going to bring me back. So here’s everyone in their canon costumes, here’s Cringer in battle armor, here’s Orko, and fuck it, here’s She-Ra too. There’s never going to be another of these, so here’s everything you would’ve gotten from a big dumb He-Man trilogy that I will never make because I’ll be in director jail.

Which is a little refreshing, in the same way it’s novel to see someone burn a mountain of money instead of spend it… but you can kinda see the movie Knight wanted to make. Maybe something about how young men are oppressed by HR departments and fat female cops and fears of not living up to their potential because of cataclysmic events beyond their control.