Masters of the Universe Review: A Cute Kids Movie When It Isn’t Trying to Be Barbie

There are two Skeletors living along the backroads of our pop culture landscape. The first is the original Saturday morning cartoon villain that many Gen-Xers and some elder Millennials remember fondly. He sneers, schemes, and otherwise slinks his way through one 30-minute Masters of the Universe adventure after another wherein, invariably, He-Man kicks his ass. The other is an internet creation spawned by those same viewers decades later. This guy is funnier, more acerbic, and basically a chaos agent snarking about whatever daily indignity his creator wants to complain about. He’s both supervillain and meme.

The modest joys and bigger foundational issues inherent in Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe movie, out this weekend, is that it attempts to be both things: the cute (and relatively ancient) kids cartoon that many young kids today don’t even have parents young enough to remember, and the post-modern comedy aware of its own silliness. And whether you like him or not, Jared Leto gets the assignment brilliantly with Skeletor, who alongside Alison Brie’s mischievous Evil-Lyn sorceress, steals much of the movie. This can include traditional Saturday morning moments where Skeletor cackles to himself endlessly about his wicked intentions, or another sequence where the flamboyant fiend—all telegraphed by Leto’s physical gestures (his face is a prosthetic skull)—enters the memories and mind of our hero Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine). Together they wind up back at Adam’s HR office on Earth where Skeletor drinks coffee and smirks about performance evaluations.

The Skeletor portion of Masters of the Universe threads this bizarre tonal needle unexpectedly well. Much of the rest of the movie, however, struggles between being the old-fashioned high-adventure ‘80s movie that Knight so clearly wants to make and the kind of safe, Marvel-ified movie (and Thor: Ragnarok to put a finer point on it) that Amazon or Mattel so clearly hope the project could turn into.

Knight is a definite nostalgist from the decade of shoulder pads and day-glo. A brilliant animator and artist, as demonstrated in his Laika film Kubo and the Two Strings, the director’s only other live-action movie is also the lone good Transformers flick: Bumblebee. Here was a big-hearted throwback to Steven Spielberg-produced Amblin entertainments of the 1980s. Granted, Spielberg produced all the Transformers movies in the 2000s as well, but if Bumblebee had gotten to the screen before Michael Bay turned that brand into something a lot more noxious and brain-dead, our modern idea of what Autobots might be different today.

One senses that Knight wishes to do the same with Masters of the Universe, another cartoon that children of the ‘80s hold dear alongside their Transformers and GI Joe. Toymaker Mattel likewise sees some overlap between a modern He-Man movie and their last plastic-to-screen transfer, Barbie. As with that Greta Gerwig-directed unicorn from three years ago, Masters of the Universe (2026) is rife with post-modern winks, nudges, and allusions to He-Man and Skeletor’s place in the real world, and how adults have grappled with their legacies as they’ve aged out of playing with dolls but not the need for the simple joy such distractions once brought.

Yet the issue for Masters of the Universe is that He-Man is not Barbie,  a brand that’s importance spans many generations, and to this day is somewhat ingrained in how young girls process femininity. He-Man belongs to more or less to one era of children who were all in elementary school when Ronald Reagan was president and Maggie Thatcher Prime Minister. And in attempting to make Masters of the Universe a self-aware, endlessly metatextual tome about growing old enough to understand the artifice of gender roles, I’m not sure the filmmakers left enough there for modern kids to understand why their dad (or his older brother) was so into He-Man in the first place.

The thing is that Knight wants to make that classic, old-fashioned He-Man movie, and he does in large swaths of Masters of the Universe. The film’s Eternia is introduced with a gloriously synth-heavy score by Daniel Pemberton, and while much of this fictional land is clearly designed in computers, proudly gaudy sets and props are also on grand display in the homeland of young Prince Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt as a kiddo). The production design has the simplicity of a child’s idea of castles and courts, armors and warriors. In brief flashes, the film even evokes something akin to The Neverending Story, but with a lot more budget and digital trickery.

However, the status quo of this lifestyle is quickly overthrown. We spend only enough time with Adam at his youngest to establish that his father King Randor (James Purefoy) thinks his son is too soft. So he commands his master-at-arms Duncan (Idris Elba) to “make a man” out of him. That education, along with that of Duncan’s daughter Teela (first Eire Farrell, but mostly Camila Mendes), is interrupted when Skeletor invades and conquers Eternia. Young Adam only escapes because his Power Sword takes him through a wormhole to Earth.

We then cut hard to modern day where Adam is now a late twentysomething adult who somehow adjusted well enough to Earth that he has a decent (if dull) job in a local firm, a sassy roommate at home, and some kind of dating life—but still not so well-adjusted that he can understand why every girl he meets practically gallops to the nearest Uber after he starts chatting about magic swords, fallen kingdoms, and a green CGI cat that can talk.

Obviously that time-jump is doing a lot of work to move this narrative along, but it cannot smooth over the tonal dissonance of a film that wants to be a gee-whiz adventure story and also a sheepish self-satire about many adults’ inability to put “childish things” away, including constructs like a regressive view of masculinity that Adam holds onto despite also being a nice Millennial boy. Or “beta,” depending on your disposition. Such discrepancies follow the rest of the movie, even as it quickly pivots back to Eternia after Mendes’ all grown-up Teela finds Adam and brings him back to his homeworld where he will embrace “The Power of Grayskull” in all its beefy, well-oiled, and tiny-loinclothed glory. Together these former childhood besties will lead an uprising against Skeletor.

When Masters of the Universe works, it works fairly well as a child fantasy. This is, again, a property originally designed to sell toys with simple wish fulfillment sequences where a nebbish young man turns into Conan the Barbarian, minus the pillaging and violence bits. In some respects, Galitzine is a better actor than the material calls for, but is more than able-bodied to be a glistening stand-in for ancient ideals of strength. He and Mendes adopt the ridiculous, form-fitting attires of the source material and credibly carry off characters who alternate between sword fights with goblins and laser-shootouts between flying aircrafts. It’s like watching supremely fit Olympic athletes doing a Star Wars-flavored Wheaties commercial. 

Truthfully, though, the villains have more fun. I’ve already mentioned Leto’s preening, effete Skeletor, but Brie is delightful in her own right as a cooing and condescending sorceress who on a certain level feels like another hat her Community character Annie Edison would wear while entering the Dreamtorium.

It’s still debatable whether children of today care about He-Man, but if the movie went all-in on attempting to win them over, there’s a sweet if jejune family entertainment here with plenty of beef and cheesecake on the side. But it sits uneasily with adult concerns that range from the interesting but undercooked—such as Adam questioning whether the concept of being a “He-Man” is too simplistic a way of looking at his own masculinity—to the outright ill-conceived—such as three Austin Powers-esque sex jokes about there being a character named Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) in this movie.

Of course post-modern fantasy that works on multiple levels also has ‘80s precedence, but The Princess Bride this is not. Instead Masters of the Universe lands closer to Thor: Love & Thunder, a shaggy comedy that wants to be all things at all times. It cannot let any of its simple, but also primal, emotional beats land for longer than seven seconds before a joke, a gag, or self-aware smirk intrudes.

There is real emotional sincerity in Knight’s approach, and half of the movie delivers on it. The other half caters more to an adult audience that perhaps needs to let go a little. Let the kids enjoy the toys, lest they become museum pieces.

Masters of the Universe opens on Friday, June 5.