Rating: ★★★★ (4.0/5)
I was hyped for Masters of the Universe. The trailers showed a weird world that I just couldn’t wait to get my eyeballs on. It kind of looked like Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok in its art style, and that’s definitely not a bad thing. After all, it’s kind of hard to separate the styles when these worlds all borrow from the same myths anyway.
I’m not sure I have the words for how much fun this movie was.
There are so many opportunities in this movie’s over 2 hour runtime for it to fall on its face. Loads of chances for it to throw something out there that just doesn’t work. And let’s not forget that we’re talking about a weird 80s cartoon where the main character has a bob haircut and runs around in a loincloth. How do you even begin to make that live action? They did it by just leaning into how weird the worlds are and taking full inspiration from the cartoon that brought it to us in the first place.
He-Man, or Adam as he’s mainly referred, is a reluctant hero. He’s a bit of a weakling in the world he comes from and generally a disappointment to the people around him. He’s a bit of a trope of a character, but I found it endearing. The one thing that I was mainly worried about was that we would make the origin story mistake of waiting until the last 15 minutes of the movie before we get to see him at full strength. This movie did NOT make that mistake. We get a fully powered He-Man roughly halfway through and it’s an absolute delight to watch the rest of the movie because of that. He knows what he’s capable of and he wants to be the hero.
Skeletor is amazing in this movie. He’s threatening, but also a total egotistical nut job. They could have made him a very self-serious character but they went full cartoon on it. He’s a maniac but so goofy at times that it really lightens up the story. He’s awful, and nothing he does as good, but he cackles and says some of the dumbest things as the movie goes on. I’m not even sure how to explain it, but if your only exposure to Skeletor is memes, even you’ll be happy with how it was handled.
I’m thrilled that this movie ended up being amazing to me. It was like a cartoon come to life. Not to mention I felt like I was watching a real version of how my imagination saw these toys when I was a kid. You can tell this was a labor of love for the creators and I thought it was truly amazing. Definitely looking forward to seeing it again.