Unlike a lot of the other nerd shit that has blessed and plagued our screens for the last 20 years or so, Travis Knight’s semi-charmingly derivative “Masters of the Universe” stands out because it’s based on a toy that was created to sell fantasy rather than the other way around. Desperate to catch up with the rest of its industry after missing out on “Star Wars,” Mattel conceived of He-Man as a chance to cover all the remaining bases at once — a deliberately generic “sword and planet” franchise that had the power to combine sorcery with sci-fi and anything else that might sell to pre-teen boys.
If the IP soon resulted in iconic characters of its own, that’s only because it was molded with the kind of cartoon earnestness that could never survive postmodernism; its hero was a guy named He-Man for fuck’s sake, and his arch-nemesis was a cackling skull with a cool staff and a six-pack.
Self-aware but palpably sincere in its love for this stuff, Knight’s take — a beefier and more plastic adaptation than the 1987 version starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella — embraces the fact that “Masters of the Universe” is just a giddy hodgepodge of other things that people already love at a deeper level. Here, the reference points have been updated to reflect the blockbuster ecosystem that made a $200 million He-Man movie seem like a viable idea, which it might well have been had it come out 10 years ago. “Star Wars” is still in there, of course, with a garnish of “Lord of the Rings” for good measure, but Marvel now casts a much larger shadow than either of those classic touchstones, with the adventures of Peter Quill being a particularly obvious template for this ’80s-inflected story about a “regular guy” who’s thrust into the middle of a winking cosmic war.
But the single biggest influence on this “Masters of the Universe,” and the single biggest reason for its existence, isn’t a steroidal action movie about men being awesome — it’s a decidedly feminine meta-comedy about men being pathetic. Hoping to capitalize on the boom of irreverent CGI glop-fests that it now lays to rest (releasing this film in 2026 is roughly akin to what it would have been like had Mattel first introduced the He-Man toys to market in, say, 1998), Knight’s wet sponge of a blockbuster might settle for being the last “Guardians of the Galaxy,” but it strenuously aspires to be the next “Barbie.”
To a certain extent, that approach makes sense for a piece of IP that’s always needed to draft off something in order to feel like itself. The problem is that being “the next ‘Barbie’” effectively requires “Masters of the Universe” to be the first “Ken,” and this movie — fun as it is that Laika CEO and “Bumblebee” director Knight continues to parlay his stop-motion talents into a brilliantly toyetic blockbuster side hustle — has no real interest in doing anything new. Novelty has never been what Gen X-ers like Knight loved about planet Eternia, but an old-fashioned He-Man could never survive in the 21st century; his movie is at its best when it embraces the postmodern mode forced upon it, but that embrace comes at the expense of creating a He-Man strong enough to stand on his own two feet.
The movie’s lighthearted tone, which Knight controls with the assiduousness of a stop-motion figure, is on full display from the opening voiceover of Chris Butler, David Callaham, and Aaron and Adam Nee’s script, in which Eternian prince Adam Glenn (a goofy and winning Nicholas Galitzine) does his best to explain the basic facts of his upbringing. Namely, that he was raised in a fortress known as Castle Grayskull, which was home to the Sword of Power, an awesome weapon whose fated bearer would “use it awesomely” when the time came to defend his people.
Alas, Adam was only a 10-year-old runt when the evil Skeletor rocked up to steal the blade (the baddie is played by Jared Leto, seen here in his most “that was Jared Leto?” performance since playing the Hatbox Ghost in “Haunted Mansion”), and so the small princeling was forced to flee Eternia through a portal with the blade at his side. Adam landed in Oklahoma City, the Sword of Power fell out of the sky somewhere else in the American Midwest, and our hero has been searching for it ever since in the hope that he might one day return home, vanquish Skeletor, and maybe even save his parents.
The only problem with Adam’s origin story is that he refuses to lie about it. His rom-com-obsessed roommate Hussein (Christian Vunipola) has learned to roll with it, but his Hinge dates… not so much. The same goes for his passive-aggressive boss (Sasheer Zamata) at his soft boy job in an HR department, who threatens to fire Adam if he keeps posting “have you seen my sword?” to internet message boards on company time. But someone has seen his sword, and it isn’t long before Adam — now 25 — is reunited with the ancient weapon, as well as the friends and enemies who’ve been searching for it ever since Skeletor usurped control of his father’s throne.
“This world is no place for the weak,” Adam is cautioned as a child on Eternia, but strength — or at least brawn — doesn’t seem to wield the same power in his adopted homeland of Earth. Pipsqueaks like Adam, whose rippling muscles and Kylo Ren-sized wingspan the first act of this movie hilariously tries to hide under a loose pink button-down shirt from Beta Gap, are valued for their ability to solve their problems with words instead of violence. Sort of. Adam feels weak, and somewhat embarrasses himself in front of [redacted actor making an inevitable nostalgia cameo], but that’s only because a part of him still believes that real power can only be measured by the weights of a bench press. Lucky for Adam, a magic sword is about to swole him all the way up — just in time for him to learn that having big muscles isn’t nearly as important as having really, REALLY big muscles. Biceps that glisten and thighs so thick that even a fabulous jerk like Skeletor can’t help but call them “gorgeous.”
OK, so maybe “Masters of the Universe” doesn’t really commit to the idea that softness is the new strength (it would rather offer “both” as a viable option than milk that paradigm for better jokes), but it’s Adam’s nascent self-belief that allows him to lead the charge against Skeletor after he arrives back on Eternia — the nascent self-belief that comes from suddenly transforming into himbo Thor. Where Barbie was forced to reconsider Barbieland’s values after paying a visit to the real world, Adam is forced to uphold the real world’s values after being zapped back to a fantasyland whose greatest warriors have been utterly demoralized by their insufficient physical force.
Warriors like his former military instructor Duncan, now a drunk who’d rather sleep in his own vomit than try to escape from Skeletor’s jail (he’s played by Idris Elba, enjoyably riffing on his performance in the “Thor” movies with a déjà vu that works in the context of a movie this derivative). And Duncan’s badass daughter Teela (a commanding Camila Mendes, totally understanding the assignment), who still believes in Adam even though she lived to emasculate him as a child. Their party will swell to include a rusty old robot voiced by Kristen Wiig, a talking green tiger who doesn’t do anything and generally sucks doing it, and a handful of downtrodden warriors who Knight uses to amusingly puerile comic effect, highlighted by Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson’s “Fisto,” who rediscovers his love for “fisting” things.
The characters in “Masters of the Universe” are considerably more fun than the vast CGI world around them, or the weirdly compact adventure that takes them through it (how this movie is 141 minutes long is an even greater mystery than why this movie is 141 minutes long). Despite the prologue teasing us with a planet composed of the coolest shit from every fantasy story you’ve ever read or watched, the film’s locations are limited to an underground base, a Pandoran forest, a dingy lair, and Castle Grayskull itself, all bursting with color but too digital to believe in. The action is likewise well-staged and crystal-clear, but also tired and weightless in a way that works against its cartoon logic as often as it leans into it. Knight is a lot better at this than most of his contemporaries, but tactility can be difficult to fake for someone who usually doesn’t have to.
By contrast, “Masters of the Universe” pops whenever it defers to its characters. Galitzine isn’t the comedic tour de force that Gosling was in the “Barbie” movie, but he’s sweet and vacuous in a way that beautifully suits a story about a blond idiot trying to wrestle Olympus away from a power-mad skeleton, and you believe that he finds real value in all of Adam’s different kinds of strength. Leto could have benefited from sharper material, but he makes an absolute meal of the dialogue he’s given; his abject lack of a backstory enhances the goofiness of his lust, and the Harryhausen-inspired skull CGI that replaces the actor’s face strikes just the right balance between menacing and goofy — par for the course in a movie that settles for a clear seriocomic tone in lieu of a stronger purpose.
Meanwhile, Alison Brie walks away from it all as the clear MVP, giving a wonderfully skeptical henchwoman performance as the dark sorceress Evil-Lyn (spoiler alert: she’s a bad guy), who always seems to be looking for a way to sneak out of this story while the men beat each other senseless. Like everything else that works here, Brie’s performance wrests the last scraps of freshness from a mode of filmmaking this movie knows is played out, but doesn’t have the particular strength to reinvent. Of course, “Masters of the Universe” is — and always was — nothing we haven’t seen before. Knight’s trouble is reconciling that fact with his movie’s dim awareness that “Masters of the Universe” is also something we may never see again.
Grade: C+
Amazon MGM Studios will release “Masters of the Universe” in theaters on Friday, June 5.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
