“I promised to make him a man.”
“Yes, but what kind of man?”
Masters of the Universe comes out during Pride month, and good for them. A brash, boisterous, goofy, silly, and super-gay, rainbow-kaleidoscope spectacle built off of the Mattel IP that is the basis of several cartoons, comic books, toy lines, and a 1987 live action film starring Dolph Lundgren, Masters of the Universe attempts to be sparkly, explosive, and exotic but owes everything to the existence of the stellar 2017 Taika Waitit film, Thor: Ragnarok. The film leans into that influence, to the point of substituting the band Queen’s songs led by Brian May and the repeated use of the 1986 track Princes of the Universe, which was written for the Russell Mulchay film Highlander, as a thematic replacement for Led Zeppelin’s hammer-heavy ” Immigrant Song.
“There are no statues of losers.”
Masters of the Universe is a 2026 Sony and MGM release directed by Travis Knight from a screenplay written by Adam and Aaron Nee, David Callaham, and Chris Butler. Morena Baccarin leads an ensemble cast including Nicholas Galitzine, Allison Brie, Idris Elba, Jared Leto, Camilla Mendes, and featuring the vocal talents of Kristen Wig and a cameo by Dolph Lundgren.
“I’m everything you wanted me to be.”
“What did I want you to be?”
“Someone else.”
Eternia is the beating heart of the cosmos, and the Capitol City, Eternus, has come under attack by the brazen, blue villain known as Skeletor (Leto). He has come to press his claim to the Sword of Power that will unlock the mysteries of Castle Greyskull and the mystic energies therein overseen by the enigmatic Sorceress (Baccarin). As his father, King Randor’s retainers fall and fail, young Prince Adam is entrusted with the blade and catapulted to Earth. In transit, he fumbles the sword and splashes down in a lake near Oklahoma City. He grows up, he remembers it all, but no one believes him.
His roommate thinks he’s a short-bus rider, and his dates back away slowly. Adam (Galitzine) spends his days using his job’s internet to search for his lost sword until social media leads him to a Turok the Barbarian display at a local comic book shop. There, glimmering in the lights as part of the exhibit, is the magic sword he let slip through his fingers as a child. He smashes the maquette, he claims his blade, he gets arrested.
As the police transport him to booking, they get stuck in traffic. The snarl is caused by a bestial, hirsute, orange brute called Beast-Man, who is smashing his way through the cars up the interchange, heading straight for the cop SUV containing Adam and his confiscated sword.
Beast-Man proves to be too much for the cops to handle, and Adam is only saved from certain death by the “Warrior-Goddess” known as Teela (Mendes), who rescues the prince and returns Adam to his homeworld in her spaceship. Eternia is now oppressed under the ruthless heel of Skeletor, who, like Scar in Disney’s 1994 film, The Lion King, has taken over and laid waste to everything.
Can Adam discover the means to unravelling the mystery of Greyskull? Will Teela be able to gather her forces and mount an effective resistance? Can Skeletor maintain the allegiance of his henchmen by cracking the code and gaining command of the power he desperately wants? Please see Masters of the Universe to find out.
“So, you fist people?”
Masters of the Universe is a shallow and superficial sparkle pony that slides by like a ribbon-twirling ice-skater performing a routine choreographed by Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. There is a lot of stupid and a lot of inattention to details. Production design looks adequate for a Netflix show, but not much else. Everything (apart from Duncan’s armor) looks brand-spanking new. Nothing is weathered. The CG beats look like they were lifted from the 2004 Pixar film, The Incredibles. The details the staff DOES pay attention to seem borrowed (like the Bifrost transport sequence patterned from the Marvel movies). So much seems half-baked. There is no partition in the cop car. Adam isn’t handcuffed. There is more slapstick than you can shake a leg at wrapped around rainbow fireworks of gay innuendo and out-uendo. Knight’s sex-based humor is unremitting, isn’t very subtle, and makes it very difficult to determine who this movie is aimed at. Are ten-year-olds in the 21st century looking to play with action figures based on a forty-year-old IP? Are ten-year-olds going to get the saucy jokes? Do ten-year-olds even play with action figures?
Characters in the toy line had very rudimentary, goofy names like Mer-Man (who swam), Beast-Man (who controlled animals) or He-Man (who was very… manly). That naivety extended to characters named Ram-Man or Fisto. The film both leans into the sexual nature of characters who fist people and plays off of it, saying straight out in exposition that they were names given to these characters by a ten-year-old, “so it’s ok.”
Every Skeletor meme that’s ever been internetted is thrown at the wall by Jared Leto. He clearly wants to be funny and is trying very hard, but the warping, Tom Hardy-as-Bane vocal effect the film borrows and layers over his voice from Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises makes his dialogue nearly indecipherable.
There is a brief Dolph Lundgren cameo that is straight-up awesome. The man with a Master’s in chemical engineering would’ve easily made a better choice for King Randor instead of “Gym-guy with wisdom to import #2”.
Several characters have been race-swapped. Once the culture-warriors get finished bickering over the spotlight placed on the overt queerness of the entire IP (It’s Pride month. He-Man’s harness and hot pants will be evocative of things a reader or viewer may see in the next few weeks), they’ll predictably get enraged that Ram-Man, Tri-Klops, and Man-At-Arms aren’t portrayed as Caucasians. The Turok- sword thing doesn’t make a lick of sense; a mass-produced, in-store promotion would be everywhere, and the movie doesn’t do the rug-pull where the power was always in Adam all along. He just, er, jerks the sword off of a (very specific) statue.
There is this weird mix of ranged, energy weapons, and blades in Eternia, but no in-universe explanation like the Holtzman effect in Dune, and a whole lot of characters pull out knives in a ray-gun fight. Clearly, the soldiers of Eternus have never seen Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, The Untouchables.
Masters of the Universe is a sprawling, silly, strangely sexualized splash across a paint-splatter landscape where action figures batter themselves senseless. There is a mid-credit sequence setting up a possible sequel if this film makes a significant amount of money. Like a modern-day Muppet film, this movie seems to be more targeted at the adults bringing their children out for the afternoon, but the more the merrier. Just, please, viewer, for the love of Pete, leave your brains at home before you come to the theatre. You won’t need them.
Masters of the Universe is in theatres Friday, June 5th.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher 
Newsdesk