Masters Of The Universe Achieves The Impossible

If you were to take a time-traveling child from 1985 and show them the 1987 film Masters of the Universe after said hypothetical child watched the new 2026 Masters of the Universe, said child would have to conclude that the 1987 movie was made later, and as an attempt to reboot the franchise as a darker and grittier fantasy epic. Because, as much as director Travis Knight makes sure that the new Masters film winks and jokes about the colorful and hyperbolic cartoon roots of the 1980s He-Man phenomenon, the truth is, a child with no knowledge of nostalgia or the nature of visual effects would view the new film as a straight-up, big-kid movie version of the 1983 cartoon. This is a tonal paradox that shouldn’t work at all, but somehow holds together. Just like a broken magical object can, for some reason, reconstitute itself, the triumph of the new Masters of the Universe is that its magic simply works through sheer force of will, rather than any logic or reason.

Then again, trying to make sense of the fantasy world of Eternia has never really been the right approach when rebooting He-Man. As much as one might appreciate the lore and world-building of the 2002 reboot animated series, or Kevin Smith’s more recent earnest attempts with the Netflix series Masters of the Universe: Revelation, one of the key things that Knight’s film seems to understand is that you have to make the silliness the entire point. At the same time, Masters of the Universe has a ton of heart, and might be one of the best feel-good summer blockbusters in years. It also provides a counterpoint to the notion that sword-and-sorcery fantasy has to seem realistic to be compelling. The beauty of Masters of the Universe isn’t just that it captures the tone and feeling of the Filmation cartoon, but that it also brings to life the lush fantasy art, originally from William George and Rudy Obrero, that adorned the toy boxes. Masters of the Universe is a colorful romp that puts even the wildest Guardians of the Galaxy film to shame.

Without spoiling the bigger twists, the basic premise of Masters of the Universe is already in the trailers: Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine), a child of the planet Eternia, is sent to Earth by his parents, King Randor (James Purefoy) and Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley) — the latter of whom, we’re reminded briefly, is originally from Earth. (She was an Earth astronaut who found her way to Eternia in the cartoon! Canon points already!)

Once he’s sent to Earth, the movie takes its biggest swing, which is trying to convince us that somebody who looks like Nicholas Galitzine is a big dork who has a hard time fitting into the humdrum life of office work. Galitzine does a bit of what Christopher Reeve did in the classic 1978 Superman, but also, in a sense, seems aligned with what David Corenswet pulled off last year with his Man of Steel: Play the character as sweet and likable in all guises. In one early scene, after Galitzine steals the lost power sword from a nerdy collectible shop, an employee of the store calls after him: “Are you single?” This is the power of Galitzine’s turn as Adam; you want to be more like him, or have someone like him in your life.

There are four credited screenwriters on Masters of the Universe: Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham, as well as story credits for Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, so we may never know whose idea of this bunch it was to make the exiled Prince Adam a human resources supervisor on Earth. But as superhero day jobs go, this has got to be one of the funnier ideas in the film. You may ask yourself, why would I want He-Man to be an HR person in real life, and the answer is, it just works. If there’s a deeper message to the movie, it's that He-Man can kick a lot of ass, but as he puts it so well in the climax, “I just prefer not to.”

Unlike the 1987 film, which also made an extended jaunt to Earth for pretty much the entire movie, this Masters knows that we have to get Adam and the power sword back to Eternia as soon as possible. The plotting of the film becomes a bit wonky at times, as the initial transformation that Adam has into He-Man is played for laughs for a bit, until he suddenly finds his footing. Does it hurt Adam to punch something really hard when he’s in his He-Man guise? Depends on what kind of joke the movie feels like making at any given moment. How does the transformation work? Why do his clothes come back when he’s “Adam” again? The cartoon never bothered to explain things like that, and this film is content to lampshade anything and everything that doesn’t make sense, and then make a quick joke. Or sometimes, a very long joke. Seriously, this movie never met a self-referential joke it didn’t love, and honestly, with a character like He-Man, this was probably the best approach.

You might say that all this joking around distracts from the fun, childlike adventure feeling that this movie should capture, right? Is this just He-Man with a bunch of raunchy jokes and innuendos? Yes and no. At the risk of taking the time-traveling 1980s child idea too far, the thing about all the jokes in Masters of the Universe is that they wouldn’t be understood by contemporary kids right away. How long did it take many of us, who saw Ghostbusters as children, to understand that it was a comedy? This is the kind of trick that Masters pulls off in nearly every scene: It has it both ways. Skeletor (played by an annoyingly good Jared Leto) is both ruthless and terrifying and also really, really silly. Adam is super-powerful and brave and hot, and also a total dork. The contradiction is the point of the movie, which it pushes to the breaking point, very, very often. The bravery of the movie is that it simply doesn’t care if you think it's going too far. It’s going to keep going.

If there’s one weakness that Masters of the Universe has is that it perhaps has too many emotional arcs happening at the same time, two of which deal with disappointing father figures: Adam struggles with his father’s judgment of him as a child, and Teela (Camila Mendes) struggles with the heroic, badass Man-At Arms (Idris Elba) turning into a depressed drunkard. Do both of these nearly identical storylines work in this movie? If you throw Skeletor in the mix as a really irresponsible surrogate parent to his various minions, suddenly, Masters of the Universe has a lot of daddy issues.

But the idea of navigating your childhood hopes and fears, and incorporating those things into your adult life, is also — somewhat appropriately for a movie based on an old cartoon — at the heart of the film. Not everyone who goes to see Masters of the Universe will have grown up with He-Man, but this film will make you wish that you did. And, at the same time, it’ll make you feel grateful that he’s back and quite literally, better than ever.

Masters of the Universe opens in theaters June 5.