I remember the first time I saw MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, the original 1980s movie. My goodness did I hate it! I am a He-Man kid. I watched this show every time it was on, religiously. My mom even got me He-Man, Skeletor, and Man at Arms figures to play with. The ones with the rolling chest damage each figure could take. I wasn\u2019t a collector but a loyal watcher. I cheered every time Adam transformed into He-Man, even chanting HE-MAN to the theme when he did. He-Man was a large part of my early years and when I saw the Dolph Lundgren movie, I lost it.<\/p>\n
I lost my temper.<\/p>\n
No Prince Adam. No Orco. No Cringer. No epic theme. B roll of Lundgren swinging his sword like an idiot at the camera intercut with Luke vs The Emperor in RETURN OF THE JEDI. Main action on Earth. I wasn\u2019t MAD! To this day I still hate this movie.<\/p>\n
Then I started seeing trailers some 40 years later for a new MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Everything LOOKED right. Cringer as thr MGM tiger. He-Man and Adam looked right. Teela was absolutely hot. Man at Arms looked great. Skeletor looked fantastic. The entire set looked and felt like He-Man. Finally.<\/p>\n
Then\u2026 I saw the film.<\/p>\n
With that out of the way, let\u2019s get into this.<\/p>\n
The overall tone of this film, the content, the world, all of it took me back to my childhood. Sitting on the living room rug watching He-Man before going to school in Alliance, Ohio. That little kid watching and wishing he could be as strong and courageous as He-Man. He felt like Cringer, though, cowardly and weak. Afraid of the very thing that changes all of that: the residual from the Sword of Power to transform me into Battle Cat!<\/p>\n
Unlike the 1980s movie, THIS one had it all! It was He-Man and everything in it was perfect. Prince Adam portrayed as a mamby pamby, runt, weak little boy who just wants his father to be proud of him. That\u2019s how Adam plays himself in the cartoon. That\u2019s how Adam is in this movie. Except, it\u2019s not an act. When Skeletor invades Eternos, the King sacrifices himself while the Queen takes Adam to Castle Grayskull on the outskirts of the city\u2026 (more on that soon) .<\/p>\n
We see Adam as a victim of woke culture. Stuck in the wokest of woke jobs, Human Resources for A company (we don\u2019t know which nor care), all the while the movie is poking fun at this.<\/p>\n
Not celebrating or endorsing it. The woke IS the joke in all of the scenes Adam is on Earth.<\/p>\n
When his mother and Sorceress send him there, they remind Adam to not lose the sword. He does. That accident ended up saving his life for the entire 15 years he\u2019s there. As soon as he finds the sword as an adult, Beastman comes for him. Yes, Teela saves the day. That\u2019s because Adam is still a weakling who can\u2019t fight.<\/p>\n
True to the cartoon.<\/p>\n
We get to Eternia and Eternos is a dystopian hellhole. Teela takes Adam to the resistance (fresh from the She-Ra pilot storyline of the rebellion against the Horde – I like it). Adam brings the sword and it\u2019s taken from him by Fisto and Ram Man – though they\u2019re not happy with those names. They lock him up with Teela and some rotting drunk dude on the ground who ends up being Duncan, the King\u2019s (ex) \u201cGD Man at Arms.\u201d After Skeletor finds the rebel base, our heroes stage an escape.<\/p>\n
We come up to our first major fight and He-Man\u2019s first appearance. THIS they got totally right! His full transformation and the cues were spot on! We never got that in the first movie.<\/p>\n
He-Man vs Trapjaw was excellent! The right pace and the right action sequences. He-Man never attacking with the sword is cartoon accurate (more on that later too). But him killing every fool who came with Trapjaw And the way he did it was comedy gold.<\/p>\n
We follow an awesome chase sequence with the SkySled that we don\u2019t use for any more than two minutes of total screen time. He-Man takes out Skeletor\u2019s flying goons only to crash with Teela and Duncan someplace in some red and pink forest. There are some tender moments with Duncan and He-Man before Teela friend zones He-Man. I didn\u2019t mind this.<\/p>\n
We follow the heroes to Snake Mountain where He-Man kills his father. After a tender goodbye moment, he\u2019s de-powered, sword taken by Skeletor, and he\u2019s thrown in the dungeon. Adam reunites with Cringer and the movie can finally begin!<\/p>\n
After a HR seminar, Adam leads the charge of Eternia\u2019s Champions to escape and re-invade Eternos, where our climax begins. Adam and Skeletor fight it out and the demon breaks the sword after some extremely hilarious Vulcan mind meld scenes. Then, Skeletor stabs Adam and he dies.<\/p>\n
\u2026only to be brought back Tenchi Muyo! style as The Power spares him. Adam becomes He-Man once again and decides to talk it out with Skeletor. Doesn\u2019t work. He-Man puts the sword into the ground and destroys Skeletor in a DBZ-style hand to hand combat sequence that Skeletor had no chance of walking away from.<\/p>\n
With Eternos saved and the monarch of Eternia partially restored, we get the best moment in the film. The aftermath of everything. Teela is in her cartoon costume and so is Adam. Our heroes have a very self aware corny laugh session when Adam is called into action once again. He falls for Cringer, who complains (that cat steals every scene), and they go transform\u2026<\/p>\n
THE THEME SONG BLASTS as He-Man and Battle Cat ride on, rocked out to black by Brian May from Queen!<\/p>\n
So yea. The entire movie worked!<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t have much prepared for this. But I\u2019ll try.<\/p>\n
1. Earth. I\u2019m not sure I liked this. I wasn\u2019t a fan of being on Earth in the 1980s film. The entire cartoon took place on Eternia and I was happy with that. But there are some points to this and I\u2019ll get into it.<\/p>\n
2. Castle Grayskull. In the cartoon, Grayskull was on the other side of the planet from Eternos. It required teleportation or flight to get to it. Only in the movies was Grayskull attached to Eternos. This bothered me.<\/p>\n
3. Princes of the Universe. Look, I get why it\u2019s there. The movie\u2019s theme. Brian May from Queen. I get it. But the chorus of the song was not good. Freddie Mercury did a really bad job writing this song and arranging it. It didn\u2019t know what it wanted to be. That didn\u2019t fit here. There\u2019s a reason Highlander only used the opening verse. That\u2019s all I gotta say about it.<\/p>\n
So let me address the elephant in the room.<\/p>\n
The woke.<\/p>\n
There are elements in this movie that I called right down the middle. Elements that some of my favorite commentators got horribly wrong. Dave Cullen dumped on the movie because Adam had pronouns on his name plaque. From there the Computing Forever commentator said the entire movie will be woke garbage and would never give it a chance, hoping it would fail.<\/p>\n
Jeremy from Geeks and Gamers defecated on the film for a race swap. He spent months badmouthing the film for turning Man at Arms black with Idris Elba. To his credit though he ended up liking the film but wouldn\u2019t give it a second watch.<\/p>\n
The woke IS the joke. The Earth segment is a commentary on it. Human Resources being one of the most evil departments to work in, making Adam focus on finding the sword rather than his horrible job being the butt of it. The entire film being a commentary on \u201ctoxic masculinity\u201d is worked very well here but it doesn\u2019t conclude with \u201cbeing a man is bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the contrary. Being a man means standing tall especially after being knocked down. Push those feelings aside and get the job done! Feeling is for after the fact but make sure you feel. Otherwise you become Skeletor.<\/p>\n
Sorry but not, this movie is based! Not woke. I truly appreciated this.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a perfect film. 2:15:00 is quite a long time but it does keep you entertained for the whole thing. A few jokes don\u2019t land well but most of them do. The nostalgia is there.<\/p>\n
Speaking of, many pundits online have criticized this film by calling it \u201cThor Rangnarok.\u201d It\u2019s not. Not even close.<\/p>\n
Beat for beat, this is FLASH GORDON. And I\u2019m here for it.<\/p>\n
8\/10<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember the first time I saw MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, the original 1980s movie. My goodness did I hate it! I am a He-Man kid. I watched this show every time it was on, religiously. My mom even got me He-Man, Skeletor, and Man at Arms figures to play with. The ones with the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[160,162,158,164,159,161,163,165],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":774,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions\/774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fleishmi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}