“By the power of Greyskull, I have the power!”

Come on, there was only one quote I could have possibly used.

With bigger IP movies like this, I usually like to start off my reviews by talking about where I am in regard to being a fan. I am a part of Gen Z, so you can probably assume that I haven’t watched any of the original shows, and I didn’t play with the toys as a kid, and you’d be absolutely right. I simply have little to almost no knowledge of Masters of the Universe or He-Man. I only knew that He-Man was the good guy, Skeletor was the bad guy, and somehow an ancient sword played into all of this. I also want to say that my experience as a fan of IP’s does not play a role in me enjoying their movie adaptations at all, even if they are extremely accurate to their source material. For instance, I am a big fan of Super Mario, but didn’t find The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to be very good, but am also a big fan of Mortal Kombat, and actually thought that Mortal Kombat II was a really good time.

Anyways, I’m going to structure this review a little bit differently than I do most of my reviews, for a very specific reason. Most of the time, I dive into the positives, and then the more “mixed” stuff, and then the negatives. However, with Masters of the Universe, there is one negative that I feel is rather significant that I just want to get out of the way at the start, because I’m afraid that if I go into it later on, it will make this review seem a lot more negative on the movie than I am overall, whereas I actually really, really liked it.

What that negative is is simply the first forty-five minutes, which was not very good at all, and pretty much had me almost entirely convinced that I was in for a very long and tedious over two-hour movie. The opening scene establishes a lot of the emotional stakes, as well as the central threat that becomes prominent once the plot really starts going, but aside from some really stellar action, most of it was pretty corny and poorly executed. The story then moves on to Adam, He-Man’s real name if you didn’t know, on Earth before he gets back on his journey to fulfill his prophecy, and a lot of it was borderline unwatchable. It’s made known pretty early on that since coming to Earth, he has lost his sword, and the story does a pretty lackluster job at trying to get you to care about him finding it. Adam is, to put it simply, a loser at the start of this. To say the common phrase, he’s “simply living but not alive.” He has a job he hates, and does not have any self-esteem at all, and instead of the movie going for a more emotional look at this, it’s simply played for comedy. Yeah, well, the comedy bits were about as corny as they could possibly be and made for a very cringeworthy experience that, as I said, had me almost entirely convinced from the start that this was going to be a rough experience for me.

Thankfully, however, once he arrives in Eternia, the magical world of the franchise, it’s almost like the movie just flips the switch entirely and has one of the best turnarounds I’ve seen in a long time. From there until the rest of the film, it’s an absolute blast and one of the most fun experiences I’ve had in a theater all year long. What was at first a very corny adaptation became a pretty awesome one, if you ask me. The action is all top-notch, thrilling, and really plays like some of your favorite toys coming to life, which I say in the most possible way. As much as I thoroughly enjoyed Mortal Kombat II this year, I, funny enough, think the action in Masters of the Universe, particularly the hand-to-hand combat, was far superior and what that movie’s action should have been. I still like Mortal Kombat II just a hair more than this movie, but the action is definitely quite a bit better in Masters of the Universe.

And for someone who doesn’t know really hardly anything about the world of Eternia and Masters of the Universe, I think this adaptation did a really good job at establishing its world and making it feel exciting and fresh for newcomers. The visual effects, for the most part, really did bring this world to life in a very believable way and provided a very fun escape movie for the time that was spent in it. It’s a world I want to see even more of, which I’m afraid might not happen because this movie doesn’t seem to be doing exceptionally well at the box office right now.

Now, I’m going to talk about He-Man and Skeletor next, starting off with He-Man, and I want to again make it clear that this is coming from someone who wasn’t a previous fan of this IP, so I have absolutely no idea how faithful this is as an adaptation. Anyways, from what I gathered on the internet, the reception of Nicholas Galitzine portraying this character seemed to be very mixed, especially once the trailers started coming out, but I really thought he did a good job. He was very clearly having a lot of fun in the role and was also able to lead this film as its central character in a successful manner. I wasn’t a fan of his Earth stuff, as I mentioned earlier, but once he became He-Man, I really enjoyed his portrayal and found him to be a compelling, if a little cliché, main character.

Honestly, though, Skeletor might have been the standout if we were just speaking on characters. I know Jared Leto gets a lot of flak for being, well, a little weird, especially when he is on set, and while I have nothing to comment on this because I simply don’t know enough about what’s true and what’s not, he stole every scene he was in. Anyone could have obviously been in the costume, but his voice lent incredibly well to Skeletor and made for the most fun and memorable villain that I’ve seen all year. That’s not necessarily a high bar, as we have yet to get what I can imagine will have the standout villains by the end of the year (Dune: Part Three, Avengers: Doomsday, etc.), but it’s still worth mentioning nonetheless. The only gripe I had with the character is that, while I get he is a pretty silly villain in the show, I think this film’s attempts at comedic bits with him weren’t really funny at all, and made him a little less menacing than I was honestly hoping for.

Also, I’ve got to say, for someone who has never heard the Masters of the Universe theme before, every time it played, it got my blood pumping. The score might not be all that original simply because it is pulling mostly from the cartoons, but it was still definitely a standout to me and something I really liked. The last thing I’ll say here is that this movie has one of the best needle drops that I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time (and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about if you’ve seen it or eventually see it). That being said, it was almost ruined by a dumb joke, but thankfully, it picked itself back up again and made for one of the best sequences in the entire movie.

A lot of what I have to say that leans more negatively actually does have to do with the humor. The thing that puzzled me the most regarding the humor is that while this new adaptation of Masters of the Universe is definitely supposed to give fans who watched the show back when it originally aired a lot of nostalgia, it is also very clearly trying to win over some newcomers, the target audience being younger teens and maybe even younger than that. What was weird was that despite that, this film has a lot, and I mean a lot, of sexual innuendos. Yes, a lot of them will go over people’s heads, but at the same time, I think a lot of kids will be able to pick up on some of them simply because of hearing other adults who do pick up on them laughing. It was just weird to say the least, and wasn’t necessary at all. There is also a recurring joke used way too much that has to do with fisting, which is also weird because Project Hail Mary had the same joke. It’s a bit of an odd coincidence that we got two movies halfway through the year with jokes about fisting.

My main gripe with the movie in its entirety, and not just the first forty-five-ish minutes, is definitely the humor overall. It reminded me a lot of the types of jokes and humor that we get from the MCU, and that is most definitely not a compliment. Yes, there are some jokes that land here and there, but the vast majority of them don’t, and Masters of the Universe also unfortunately runs into the same problem of undermining serious moments with a joke. The humor, thankfully, isn’t Thor: Love and Thunder-level bad, but more like Shang-Chi-level bad (I like Shang-Chi, I just think it is one of the bigger examples of bad MCU humor).

Another negative that is definitely less of a negative, but still held the movie back just a bit, was its attempts at emotional moments. Despite being over two hours long, a lot of emotional stakes aren’t really set up all that well and are thus not paid off well, either. The movie also just seems to move on from these moments way too quickly, as well. It didn’t affect the movie nearly as much as the humor did, but it still could have been done significantly better.

If you are a fan of this IP or are just looking for a good time at the movies, I would highly recommend Masters of the Universe. It might not be the most deep or “high art” movie of the year, but it’s not going for that, either - it just wants its viewers to have a good time, and it does a perfectly good job at that.