Masters of the Universe’s critical reception in its opening weekend is a bit of a Rorschach test: audiences on Metacritic give it a 7.7 while the critics’ score is closer to 55. Headlines abound attempting to indict MotU for its “Skeletor problem” and “He-splaining” while others ardently insist “Masters of the Universe is good, actually“. Let’s break down some of the things that work and don’t for this movie with spoilers.
We should start by saying this is a hard reboot of a pop culture phenomenon that even in its heyday flopped so hard that it never received a sequel: barbarian sword-and-sand films and television shows like Conan the Barbarian, She-Ra, He-Man, and Red Sonja–like the host of low budget Star Wars dupes that came before them–were a weird pop culture keystone of the 80s, and no doubt the success of Barbie led some executive to shove $200 million dollars to budget for this thing. Galatzine who plays the titular He-Man was always a canny pick for the Big Guy, following the success of 2024’s Bottoms, where he plays another cocky man-child, while also defusing the toxic masculinity of his character with his more progressive personality. Masters of the Universe doubles down on a lot of that undercutting of 80s masculinity much in the same way that Jessa Crispin found an evolution in the masculinity of Michael Douglass through multiple decades of his movies. MotU is constantly rolling its eyes at its own (terrible) script, which neurotically nitpicks at its own silliness from any line that Skeletor utters to commentary about costumes to some tiger asking if it can lick someone as a greeting for reasons unknown?
At times the plot feels so redundant and cliched, but in its own clunky way, MotU is setting up tropes of lesser action movies in order to lead its audience to some innovations in the final act: Adam is constantly going it alone, the ultimate Mary Sue, earning muscles, incredible strength, and near-invulnerability without so much as a training montage, while his much more prepared companions watch on and awkwardly react to his repeated awkward failures. That is, until his Big Plan to get himself captured fails to yield results and he must resort to what amounts to one of the least inspiring pep talks in recent memory and a very silly group fight sequence.
Similarly, the opening act in Eternia feels like some lazy Freudian explanation for Adam’s motivations later in life, but it actually seems like a way of subverting our expectations about what the valorous characters we meet in the Golden Age end up becoming once their empire is overthrown. Idris Elba’s head of the guard has some of the crispest, dopest fight scenes in the entire movie in the first act and those early cool moments are balanced out by how far he falls once Adam returns (much in the same strain as One Battle After Another). The Core Group of good guys don’t actually spend that much time interacting with one another or building stakes for when some of them get culled by the massive final battle with a bunch of faceless minions, but they trot out enough of the identifiable characters from the cartoon to serve fans. One weird coincidence is the use of What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes, which figures prominently in the Street Fighter trailer coming out later this summer, something Reddit has noted the overuse of already.
And while we’re at it, Allison Brie, who is not Brie Larson in case you are wondering, has this staff which looks so cheap that it’s actually a little distracting whenever she’s on screen.
But now that we’ve been catty, probably the coolest thing about this movie is in the final Boss Battle when Skeletor whips Adam around his life on Earth sporting a variety of extremely sassy outfits and calling him a “naughty boy” before clicking his teeth like a good vampgirl. The callback to the underused Earth storyline is a seed they plant for themselves early in the movie to harvest at the moment of highest tension. There’s not much more to say about MotU beyond the fact that it really does elevate Red Sonja as a successful example of how to adapt 80s kitsch.
