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.
