He's the Man: MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

I agree with the filmmakers behind the new Masters of the Universe that there’s something a little embarrassing about adults wanting to seriously play with action figures, especially if we’re talking something as silly as 80’s cartoon hero He-Man. Put away childish things and all that. Here’s a story about a scantily clad muscle man with a big sword. He lives in the mythical kingdom of Eternia. He defends it alongside sidekicks with enormous fists or retractable necks. One’s a talking tiger. They’re constantly fighting an evil skeleton man named Skeletor who almost, but never quite, wins. I recognize it has a lot of nostalgia for people of the micro-generation for whom Saturday mornings imprinted its discount fantasy fiction, adventure serial charms. It’s all pretty silly. But if you’re going to do it, just do it. Be embarrassing and it’ll be fun. Director Travis Knight (mostly of stop-motion Laika movies) is almost there. It’s certainly better than the late-80’s live-action attempt, which spent its time in our world, hedging its bets. This one starts in a charmingly artificial CG Eternia and takes the backstory just seriously enough to get some emotive tropes going amid the phoniness. It makes some smart moves. It’s bright and fantastical. It has vibrant, colorful effects. It has an epic orchestral score including a screaming electric guitar part for Queen’s Brian May. (Flash Gordon much?) It has a stacked straight-faced supporting cast (Idris Elba, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, and so on) in cartoony costumes. It has a naive beefcake leading role (Nicholas Galitzine’s been hitting the gym) and a plot that actually wants to engage in discourse about modern masculine ideals. Poor little Prince Adam is sent to Earth for his protection, but memories of his home realm cause him to search for a portal where he’ll become the He-Man he’s meant to be. 

It’s a pretty standard hero’s journey, and the plot moves are predictable, but have a Saturday matinee appeal. And yet the movie’s held back by its embarrassment. It keeps sheepishly joking about its lore, teasing its cartoon jargon and juvenile naming conventions and toyetic tech. It also has a nervous tick in the dialogue in the back half that undercuts the boys’ adventure spirit with smarmy double- or (worse still) single-entendres out of all that. That’s too bad. It’s Mattel’s second attempt at making a movie out of a product line. Their first was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. This one nearly achieves the masculine to that film’s feminine. It’s about a fantasy world with a porous literal and ideological boundary separating it from ours. It’s about messages kids receive from these plastic figures, albeit these of muscles and violence, and from our current culture’s competing poles of toxic masculinity and bland corporate culture. (The latter teeters on the edge of cynical confusion.) And then it substitutes a false maleness of might-makes-right for a more empathetic and understanding sense of justice and duty. (It even has the male equivalent of the America Ferrera monologue.) There’s a lot to like. It was clearly not made unthinkingly. There’s craft and passion here. And it has a ripped guy in a leather skirt that shows off his massive thighs and rippling abs. And he punches a skeleton man into dust. So why’s the movie embarrassed to be exactly that? I wanted to have fun, but the movie kept shrinking from its fullest expression. 

In the Loop: PALM SPRINGS

We’ve basically been here before, but, then again, so have they. “It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might’ve heard about,” he (Andy Samberg) tells her (Cristin Milioti) the first time she joins him. Like Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, or a few of the best Star Trek episodes, though not quite in that league, Palm Springs is a story about a character reliving a day over and over and over. He’s used to it by now. (What a time for a movie about every day’s routine being exactly like the last.) We join him who-knows-how-long into this loop, on the day she eventually accidentally follows him into this temporal trap. Why are they there? It’s hand-waved immediately. Something about an earthquake, a weird orange light shining up through cracks in the desert, and a magic cave. We’ve seen other time-loop stories. We know what’s up. The two of them are lost souls careening recklessly through life, adrift on a sea of endless abyss. They meet at this wedding. It’s her sister’s (Camila Mendes). His girlfriend (Meredith Hagner) is the maid of honor. Neither lead really fits in at this party. They’d rather drink and mope, zone out and smirk sarcastically at the proceedings. They get along just fine. In fact, both performers bring big best friend energy to the film, simpatico before they know it, that rom-com fizz that feels like when you hear two acquaintances started seeing each other and you think, yeah, that seems about right. They fit right into each other's flaws, and with the trial-and-error allowances of their plight. They get up to trying new things, and taking a few big risks, each time waking up the next morning like it never happened. People in these types of stories often go wild for a while, with suicidal hedonism taking over now that they’re free of lasting consequences. I dunno, I’d be too scared that’d be the day the loop would end as suddenly as it started.

Like for Bill Murray’s cranky weatherman in Groundhog Day, there’s a clear sense Andy Siara’s screenplay is setting up this couple’s time loop as a form of moral instruction, having these characters make all kinds of mistakes until they finally figure out how to live right. Unlike that superior film’s philosophical picture of loneliness and self-improvement, this one is a cracked form of dating, as the two of them test out ways of being together, see new sides of each other, drift apart, and reunite under the umbrella of the high concept. It doesn’t exactly pile on the details like better stories of this ilk, taking little pleasure in the small repetitive details, to the point where side characters are mostly one-note toss-offs, no matter how nice it is to see Peter Gallagher. And, ignoring most farcical potential, there’s much more that could be wrung out of its complications. Though it does zig into some surprisingly open-minded and relaxed ideas about what they might experiment with, the movie's never as clever as its premise demands. But director Max Barbakow, in his feature debut, gives it such brightly-lit Instagram-filtered shine and low-key mood, a chill vibe even when escalating into comic sex and violence or spiraling into some dark implications of what it means to live trapped in this situation. It draws humor out of how casual Samberg can be about this—his own first reactions to his repetition having happened long ago. And it gets a tad serious as it allows Milioti to question her options. Does she really care about him, or is he the only other person who can understand their main problem? The movie is somehow light on its feet about bleak sci-fi concerns, a quirky rom-com arc polishing a Black Mirror loop-de-loop nightmare. If you see it, consider how tricky an initially-antagonistic role for J.K. Simmons is, burdened with its biggest swings and smallest emotional turns, and how he balances between over-the-top cartoony actions and sensitive despair. That’s pretty much the key to the movie right there, humble little character surprises in pleasantly predictable genre packagings.