Travis Knight’s live-action swing at He-Man is a mediocre movie with a couple of genuinely good ideas buried inside it, and that combination is more frustrating than a flat-out bad film would have been. You can see the movie this could have been in flashes \u2014 it just rarely commits to it.
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Let’s start with what works. The production design is a real strength: Eternia looks like the toy line and cartoon come to life, all bold color and oversized silhouettes, without tipping into the washed-out grimdark look that sank the 1987 version. And Skeletor is, against my own expectations, the film’s best creative decision. Jared Leto plays him with a fully committed, campy theatricality \u2014 a skull-faced menace who’s never handed a tragic backstory or a sympathetic motivation, because he doesn’t need one. He’s evil because he’s evil, and the film is smart enough to let a side character just say so out loud instead of manufacturing pathos for him. It’s a rare case of a modern blockbuster resisting the urge to humanize its villain into mush, and it gives the character a cartoonish menace with just enough physical presence and voice work to feel like a real threat rather than a punchline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything else, though, is where the film falls apart. The decision to open on Earth \u2014 with adult Adam grinding through a dead-end HR job, pining for a sword he lost as a kid, treated by everyone around him as a delusional loser \u2014 is a miscalculation from the first scene. Nobody bought a ticket to Masters of the Universe to watch a mopey guy get talked down to in a cubicle. It delays Eternia, delays the actual mythology, and front-loads the film with a fish-out-of-water comedy that has nothing to do with what makes this property appealing in the first place. It’s not hard to see why a chunk of the built-in fanbase simply checked out before the movie even got to the parts they were promised in the trailers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That Earth-bound framing is also where the deeper problem starts: this is a franchise that was built, unapologetically, for young boys \u2014 a power fantasy about becoming the strongest man in the universe \u2014 and the film seems almost embarrassed by that premise. Prince Adam is written as a bumbling, dependent doofus who needs Teela to rescue and reassure him at every turn, right up through his arrival back on Eternia. There’s a version of “reluctant hero finds his confidence” that works, but this Adam never quite earns his transformation; he’s a punchline first and a hero second, and the shift from one to the other doesn’t land. Man-At-Arms suffers a similar fate, reduced to a broken-down, drunken has-been rather than the steady, competent mentor figure the character has always represented. Watching two of the story’s central male figures get systematically diminished \u2014 one played for bumbling laughs, the other for pity \u2014 undercuts the entire point of a story about growing into strength and responsibility. If you strip out the aspirational core of “the most powerful man in the universe” and replace it with self-deprecating irony at every turn, you’re left with a movie that doesn’t seem to trust its own premise, or the audience it was originally made for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result is a film that looks the part and gets its villain right, surrounded by a story that keeps undercutting itself. It’s watchable, occasionally fun, and forgettable \u2014 a movie made by people who clearly love the aesthetic of Masters of the Universe but seem uncertain, or even a little embarrassed, about what the story was actually supposed to be for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Travis Knight’s live-action swing at He-Man is a mediocre movie with a couple of genuinely good ideas buried inside it, and that combination is more frustrating than a flat-out bad film would have been. You can see the movie this could have been in flashes \u2014 it just rarely commits to it. Let’s start with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n