I watched Masters of the Universe (2026) in theaters. 7.5/10, C. This feels like a movie made by the kind of MOTU superfans who feel vaguely ashamed to like the franchise and so desperately make fun of the franchise to try and make themselves feel better about it.
I saw a review saying the humor would be make or break for you, and I think for me it was break.
This is the kind of movie that can't sit still with itself. For the bulk of its runtime, it's incapable of having an earnest, straightforward moment without interrupting itself with an attempt at a cheap joke. This movie never misses the chance for a cheap, obvious joke.
There are moments of earnestness in this that the movie allows itself, there's stuff to like here, but there would be a lot more if the movie wasn't desperately jangling keys in front of the audience like 'haha, he-man's a goofy franchise, isn't it? isn't? please laugh. please laugh. please. we're desperate for you to laugh.'
It's also very long and there are some issues with Skeletor's audio - his dialogue is often hard to make out. It's embarrassed by itself and is trying to be too many things at once and is tonally inconsistent as a result.
-Quick overview of plot - I'm going to use spoiler tags since it's a recent release - After Skeletor conquers Eternos, six-year old Adam is sent to Earth as an exile and is raised as Adam Glenn on Earth from there on. As an adult, he goes back, discovers the Power of Grayskull, and resolves to defeat Skeletor with Teela and Man-At-Arms, whom he remembers from his childhood.
-The movie takes advantage of its PG-13 rating, they say shit and ass and so on, there's a joke where they call Cringor a pussy.
The thing that really stuck out at me re: the tonal inconsistency was this scene where Teela is showing Adam the ruins of Eternos, they're flying over this bombed out husk of a city, and Adam asks why Skeletor would do this. And she responds with 'he's the bad guy' or something to that effect. Adam says 'but surely there's more to it than that' and Teela responds with 'he has a skull for his face, what do you expect?'
And that's kind of a big reason the movie doesn't work for me - Teela is flying over the burnt out husk of her home city, Skeletor is explicitly said to be killing people arbitrarily for his own amusement, they have him and Evil-Lyn pointlessly kill off Moss Man for shock value and a cheap joke.
And so this moment where you could build Skeletor up as a threat is wasted because the movie has to make a joke about how his name is Skeletor and he has a skull for a face. I would not be complaining if this movie had committed in either direction - if it had gone with 'shamelessly goofy He-Man' or 'we're serious now He-Man.' But it tries and fails to do both.
-What really gives this movie a ceiling of a B- for me is the fact that the characters in universe aren't actually called Ram-Man, Fisto, or Mekaneck, for example. Those were nicknames Adam gave them as a six year old because he didn't know their actual names. Man that pissed me off, dude. Have some balls, movie!
That single decision is illustrative of so much of what is wrong with this movie. It's embarrassed of itself!
It can't just have a character be called Fisto or Mekaneck. It has to have Fisto go 'uh, what did you just call me?!?' and the movie has to Surf Dracula those characters going by Fisto or Mekaneck. People will defend this movie by saying 'well, they call themselves those names by the end' but the fact that the movie thought the charade was necessary or a good idea is itself an indictment of the creative process behind it.
(Apparently no one in universe had a problem with being called 'Skeletor' or 'Evil-Lyn'. :shrug:)
-I like the idea of Sorceress choosing Adam because he was compassionate and would try to reach out to everyone, a Superman/Wonder Woman sort of deal, where he would do more with the Power of Grayskull than just punch things. But I would prefer that concept have been executed in a movie that doesn't have a ninety second sequence solely devoted to making fun of how stupid a name everyone thinks 'He-Man' is.
-There's a scene where Adam stages a prison break with his fellow warriors and he asks, smirking, raised eyebrow 'How much can you bench?' and Fisto confusedly replies 'Bench? What's bench?' because he doesn't know what that word is. Cheap, obvious joke, they couldn't resist it.
But like ten minutes later, there's a scene where Fisto and Ram-Man are fighting Skeletor's guys and Fisto's like 'ok Ram-Man, give them head!' and Ram-Man gives him an annoyed look. So what Earth slang does and doesn't exist on Eternia? I know that sounds like a strange thing to harp on, but it's emblematic of the movie's wider problem - that it throws everything else aside for the sake of dangling a cheap joke in the audience's face.
-Skeletor did look very cool in this, I have to praise the movie for that. He was very expressive.
-He-Man isn't in that movie all that often, they spend a lot of time on the (admittedly cartoon accurate) joke that Adam is pretty pathetic and so we spend most of the movie with Adam stuttering and tripping and so on. It got old for me so fast.
I'm sure I have more thoughts on this - the fact that I saw this in theaters and not at home meant I wasn't taking notes. Maybe I'll take a pen and paper to Disclosure Day next week.
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