I did not care for it. I was baffled by the creative choices that were made and supremely frustrated by how far it strayed from its source material.
At the time, of course, I didn't understand movie budgets, which I imagine explains why so much of it was set on Earth rather than Eternia, and why there were new characters like Blade and Karg* serving as Skeletor's henchmen rather than, say, Mer-Man or Trap Jaw.
I also didn't understand the idea of audience or address, and thus had the studio made the argument that maybe that He-Man movie wasn't meant for me, a He-Man fan, I wouldn't have been convinced.
The new Masters of the Universe movie sure looks an awful lot more like what 10-year-old me would have appreciated in 1987. I saw a Monday afternoon matinee of it though and, to my surprise, the main audience did not seem to be middle-aged men who were fans of the franchise in their youth (although there is a lot in here for them, including Dolph Lundgren and most of the musical choices, outside of the one made due to Internet tomfoolery). Nor did it seem made for the next most obvious audience, today's 10-year-old boys.
So, what is the audience? Well, last week I asked a twenty-something co-worker who sees lots of movies if she was going to see this one, and she said yes, and was quite excited. I asked if she had seen any of the past cartoons, of which there have been a few since the 1980s original, and she said no, but she knew and was interested in the franchise from its memes.
I suppose that's who they were going for here.
The movie, quite oddly, seems to awkwardly attempt to both embrace and parody the source material, most of the comedic elements taking the form of the movie trying to preemptively laugh at itself. There's a, well, not serious, but at least sincere movie in here somewhere, but it is drenched in irony, so that no reference to the toys are cartoon can ever be made without a wink, nod or elbow to the ribs, to make sure that we know that they know how silly this stuff might seem, or that there's a more adult, sexual meaning to a particular character name or the villain's interest in the hero and so on.
It's fairly exhausting, and seemed, at least to me, more as embarrassment than deconstruction.
In an Eternia that looks like Middle Earth by way of Marvel Studios' Asgard, 10-year-old Prince Adam is shunted off-world while the kingdom's heroic defenders attempt to thwart an invasion by Skeletor's army. On Earth, Adam grows up (off-screen) to be something of a man-child, and, once he is finally reunited with the magic sword, he embarks on a hero's journey with comrades Teela, Duncan/Man-At-Arms and an off-model Roboto (who looks more Star Wars than Masters of the Universe).
The story that unfolds is basically a power fantasy for little boys and/or man-children, one of the film's few clever conceits being how integral Adam's background in the Human Resources field serves him in a war between good and evil for the sake of the universe.
Jared Leto's Skeletor seems imported almost directly from the cartoon—in fact, with a CGI face, he essentially still is a cartoon character—and much of his dialogue, from his alliterative insults to his maniacal laugh, sure sound like things I would have heard as a little kid watching the, in retrospect, quite shoddily made cartoon. (I thought this Skeletor's voice was far too deep, though, and it took me a while to warm to all the bass in his voice; he might not have a face, but he certainly still has vocal cords.)
This film certainly makes better use of the catalog of characters available than the 1987 film did although, somewhat frustratingly, while there are dozens of faceless, nameless extras among the armies of good and evil, there are relatively few "name" character employed, and some of them are rather poorly used.
Among the good guys, in addition to those already mentioned, we see Ram Man, Fisto, Mekanek and, briefly, Moss Man**. (I have a feeling they were mostly chosen for the relative ease in translating them to live-action, as earlier characters like Stratos***, Man-E-Face, Buzz-Off and so on were left out). Oh, and a woman named Dian. Ram Man, Fisto and Mekanek are all named by Adam, and they initially balk at these childish nicknames, which they insist aren't their real names, and the in-movie explanation for them is that Adam calls them by those names because he was a little kid when he thought them up (Although, from personal experience, I think 10 is getting a little old for MOTU; that's around the time I started to lose interest).
Of course, their real names are so unimportant that they are never actually given; in fact, none of them are defined beyond the single trait that young Adam focused on, like, for example, that the guy he calls "Fisto" has a big fist.
Among the bad guys, the only one aside from Skeletor given a real name is Evil-Lyn. Trap Jaw's name, like those of most of the heroes, is a nickname given to him by Adam, and Beast Man, the other "evil warrior" with the most screen time, is referred to simply as "The Beast" in passing by Skeletor. As for the others, they are Tri-Klops, Spikor, Karg and, for some reason, a big red guy with horns that I didn't recognize from the toys or cartoons, but who the credits listed on IMDb identifies as "Goatman".
Why viewers are supposed to think of "Skeletor" and "Evil-Lyn" as serious names, while "Beast Man" and "Trap Jaw" are meant to be too silly to be believable, I don't know.
Even the name "He-Man", that of the star of the movie, is held back until the very end of the movie, as if it were a climactic punchline all the other name gags were leading up to.
Speaking of the characters involved, like the 1987 film the new one chooses faceless crowds over all the interesting and/or deeply weird characters from the toy line, so that rather filling the heroic and villainous armies with characters as recognizable as, say, Spikor or Tri-Klops, the good guys mostly just look like the Rebel Alliance from the latest Star Wars trilogy, while Skeletor's army looks a lot like Lord of the Rings' various orc armies, albeit with some of them wearing skeletal "uniforms."
Even the character who do appear tend to get short shrift. For example Tri-Klops, whose defining feature is that he has three big eyes on a rotating visor on the top half of his face, each eye having a different ability, never reveals the fact that he has more than one eye, or that his visor spins, until a split-second before he switches to an eye that fires a beam, and only then because it then malfunctions in a way that takes him out of a fight.
I liked the movie's Skeletor a lot. I know it's not cool to praise Jared Leto, and I suppose his involvement does deserve a bit of an asterisk as, even his voice has some effects added to it at various points, so that, combined with his CGI appearance, it's impossible to tell where Leto ends and the computers begin.
I thought both Nicholas Galitzine and Camilia Mendes, who play the adult Prince Adam/He-Man and Teela respectively, did a fine job carrying such an overblown special effects IP exploitation film, and they both seemed quite game to throw themselves into the mishmash of characterizations and tones they had to navigate from scene to scene.
My favorite part by far, however, was the soundtrack, particularly the overblown, over-the-top, '80s guitar rock instrumentals that dominated. It reminded me quite a bit of the 1980 Flash Gordon (And, come to think of it, one of the three pop song needle drops in it is a Queen song).
I was also quite pleased that the film eschewed two aspects of the original cartoon series I hated—one a character, one an ongoing plot point—elements that, even as a six-year-old in 1983 when the show first debuted, I thought were dumb and childish...but then, in the last minutes, both elements are introduced. They are, of course, presented as jokes making fun of the cartoon, but still, I groaned.
Of course, the movie isn't really meant for me.
*Full disclosure: I had to look up what those guys' names were, as I didn't remember them as anything other than some randos on hover boards from my viewings of the film, the last of which was probably over 20 years ago at this point.
**He is treated similarly, but even worse, than he was in that Kevin Smith Netflix series. And Skeletor's joke about him here isn't as strong as that in Smith's show.
***Late in the film, there is a brief reference to an "Avion village"; Stratos is from Avion.
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