The trailer for Masters Of The Universe was really bad, but the movie won me over

This week I decided to go see the Masters of The Universe (He-Man) movie on a cheap matinee before it drops out of theaters, which might already have happened by the time you read this.

The trailer for this movie was a constant presence before nearly every film I saw this year from prestige to anime arthouse. Every time I saw it, it came off as too impossibly lame to exist, like I was watching parody. The trailer came off as much too serious about its silly subject matter, and made it look like the hero would only be getting into adventures at the very end of the film; the “Surf Dracula” formula (via the scholar Topher Florence).

And it was He-Man, you know? (Actually, maybe you don’t: they probably should’ve made this movie 20 years ago.) The 80s action figure hero is as campy and childish as it gets: even we old kids who watched his animated adventures growing up didn’t really respect him. “Jared Leto as Skeletor” is just a really good punchline.

So as it turns out, Masters of the Universe is not the movie the trailer presents (and Leto, buried under CG animation and voice masking, actually turns into a pretty damn good Skeletor). It has a whole other objective, one which becomes clear once you see the Mattel branding, the cameo appearances from (actual) action figures, and all the bad guys looking like they jumped out of my hand-me-down toy box: this is the Barbie movie, but for men.

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If you’ve seen Barbie, you probably understand what I’m getting at: it uses the childhood touchstone as a prism through which to view life as a woman in the modern era. Barbie crashes into today’s hostile, unfair world and ultimately embraces a life of her own in reality after a lot of soul-searching, not unlike Shinji’s epiphany in Evangelion. (I'm not joking at all when I say this. You should see Barbie.)

The funny thing, then, is that meek prince Adam’s story in this film is the reverse of that. Eternia, the fantasy world, is the place that matters. (And to be fair, I don’t want to see a He-Man movie that takes place on modern Earth again, either.) Adam has been forced to live as an ordinary guy in Oklahoma after Skeletor invaded his home, and life on Earth for him is a procession of humiliations: ditched on dates, labeled a weirdo at work, owned by Dolph Lundgren at the gym. All of this he takes in stride as he does his best to fit in while desperately seeking home (via his Sword of Power, transported somehow to a comic shop). But Adam doesn’t need this place to self-actualize and become the he-man he wants to be: a better world is waiting for him.

Looking at these movies as the cultural mirrors they set out to be, you can’t help but notice that Barbie chooses to leave her flat plastic world and face reality, but for He-Man, the plastic is the ideal. He gets to leave all the bullshit behind and live out his own heroic fantasy in a universe of infinite wonder. I get that there’s no He-Man movie without the heroic fantasy! It’s just… interesting, culturally.

The other thing you’re going to notice about this movie is how very long it is: two and a half hours. The filmmakers committed hard to giving the character a developed arc that feels right and satisfying, but that takes two lengthy prologues— one in Eternia when Adam is a kid and another in Oklahoma where he’s trapped in office life— before the main story gets going. There certainly isn’t a lack of action in that space: rather, an hour into this movie you have had a whole movie’s worth of glossy, expensive action sequences… and Adam has not even yet held his sword alof and spoken the magic words.

When Adam finally does transform— secretly shredded under the pink polo shirt– and the characters take a little breather after a battle… the only child in our theater began to get restless. His narrative senses were right: this little intermission is effectively the start of a long second and third act, the real He-Man stuff. Surf Dracula this was not.

And if you had any affection for or interaction with Masters of The Universe back in the day— if, at youngest, you’re a 90s kid who watched cartoon reruns— there’s a lot of payoff in this movie, seeing obsessive recreations of your childhood action figure shelf slug it out in some surprisingly well-choreographed action scenes. The movie’s vibe in these scenes falls somewhere between transforming a goofy character like Man-At-Arms into a gunslinging Idris Elba and hammering a joke about a dude who gets nicknamed Fisto into the ground.

While this is a movie about a traditionally masculine heroic awakening, it wants to emphasize a positive masculinity: Adam realizes his role is to protect people and to bring them together under his leadership, that the power he bears was given to him specifically because he’s a peaceful guy who wants people to get along. Meanwhile, Skeletor frames himself as the direct opposite when he lays bare the core insecurity that drives him to crave power and domination for their own sake. Anything that he doesn't have, he says, is something someone else could take. And then what would he be, right?

Not that he's some deep, conflicted figure here: he's Skeletor, for Christ's sake. “Jared Leto as Skeletor” is still a pretty good punchline, but honestly? Really entertaining performance. He’s so CG animated and so voice-modulated that I’m not sure we can even call him Leto anymore— and the classic quacky voice has tragically been traded down a little bit— but he revels in his cartoon evil. "You nincompoop!" The sequence where he literally manifests as Adam’s insecurities is superb: “Gym Bro Skeletor” is actually an even better punchline than “Jared Leto Skeletor”.

But it’s noticeable that these effects-heavy characters have a limited screen time based on how much it costs to put them on the screen: Adam’s old pal Cringer (the mighty Battle-Cat) joins the action very late in the film and only ever appears on screen if he absolutely must be there, disappearing immediately into thin air as soon as he can. Even Skeletor, the villain of the film, seems very economically used.

I didn’t get what they were going for with this movie from just the advertising and trailer; in fact I’d say I found the trailer actively repulsive, a bad joke. I’m glad I gave it a chance on friends’ recommendations, and it truly deserves to be re-discovered when it turns up on streaming. (There is too much of everything, and everything moves too fast!)

But another funny thing about this movie is that as “the male Barbie”, it seems to have expected the same kind of massive financial success. There are three different post-credit scenes teasing the sequel, indeed suggesting concurrent He-Man and She-Ra film franchises. Considering this movie hasn’t yet made its budget back, those plans might get scaled back. I’ll take an Orko episode, personally.

(By far the most entertaining Masters of the Universe figure I had as a child was Ram Man. The short, stout fella's spring-loaded legs popped up into his body and sent him flying. Literally years of entertainment.

After all, the basic He-Man and Skeletor figures were boring: you wanted those really crazy characters with ridiculous “action” features, like the dude with the extending neck, or the robot with the cranking gears inside him. Actually, Roboto is a woman in this one, because they were really hurting for female Masters of the Universe characters. They go so far as to take a character from the newspaper comics, and that actress, a stuntwoman, steals one of the best action sequences in the movie.

Horny Award goes to the look Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn gives the camera after every time Skeletor tortures her with his magically searing grip.)