(courtesy IMP Awards)
The 21st century is not exactly a laughfest of goofy silliness.
That’s been obvious for quite some time but when you compare it to the ’70s and ’80s when all kinds of fabulous strangeness was not only play but exuberantly celebrated, it feels very grim and serious and monotone intense.
While this mindset has produced some truly excellent drama, the kind that compels you to watch and which deserves all the awards, It does mean that when older properties are updated, they tend to have all the colourfully idiosyncratic life and glory drained out of them.
So, it is with a full laugher-filled heart that I can happily announce that Masters of the Universe has bucked this dour trend, combining all the fun and escapist spirit of the 1980s cartoon show, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe with a self-referential, comedically rich self-awareness that affectionately funs at itself without once diluting a gram of the pure joy that comes from the original animated iteration.
At the heart of the story is, as always, Prince Adam aka He-Man, played with a pitch-perfect goofily sweet vulnerability by Nicholas Galitzine, who ends up alone on Earth as a ten-year-old boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) after the evil disfigured warlock Skeletor (Jared Leto) attacks his home city Eternos in the magically fantastical planet of Eternia.
Known as Adam Glenn and working for a human resources company, which is an hilarious parody of just about every HR anything you have ever come in contact with, the exiled heir to the throne, whose parents King Randor (James Purefoy) and Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley), who herself is from Earth, are held captive by Skeletor who now rules Eternia, is obsessed with finding the Sword of Power which he lost when he plummeted to far more ordinary realms.
That sword is the key to him returning home and reclaiming the throne and the planet, and while everyone around him, including one very disastrous date, thinks he’s absolutely mad (with the exception of his roommate Hussein (Christian Vunipola) he sticks to his story and his mission, never forgetting that he is a prince and has a planet to save.
While Masters of the Universe has a lot of very theatrical, ’80s glam rock-backed action sequences, which has a cartoonish poetic artistry to them, beautiful to watch but goofy all the same – think the murderously violent action sequences in movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and you’ll have a sense of the visual aesthetic at work here – it’s happily and giddily sidesteps any and all Marvel-esque earnestness.
That’s frankly a relief because while those superhero set pieces are dazzling to watch, they are exhausting to watch much of the time and often emotionally empty and devoid of any sense of fun, something Masters of the Universe never relinquishes.
That’s not to say there aren’t consequences to many of these scenes and Adam, and his allies and friends including now grown-up childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes), her father, Randor’s Man-at-Arms Duncan (Idris Elba) and Roboto (Kristen Wiig), do suffer their fair shares of sadness and setbacks, but the battles themselves have a mischievous, if impactful sense of fun to them, and it’s hard not to be swept up into their garrulous sense of playfulness.
The banter between the characters is an absolute joy too, and it’s not just restricted to the good guys either.
Even Skeletor, who let’s face it is campily theatrical without even trying, all flounce and swagger even when he is trying to intimidate his enemies, gets to ham it up as do his goons like 2IC sorceress Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) who have some comically rich moments which add some real levity and personality to otherwise intense proceedings.
While Masters of the Universe is happy to be serious and have real stakes at play, it’s also more than happy to have Adam and Teela awkwardly almost kiss and then not, or have the Heroic Warriors, who rally to Adam’s cause, such as Teela’s uncle Malcolm/Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) and Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang) and Mekaneck (James Wilkinson), laugh raucously at the end of the film with all the cartoonish cheesiness and overplayed theatrics of their decades old animated counterparts.
From the cheesy ’80s rock to the self-knowing winks and nods, to the self-aware dialogue and always present of the ridiculous, Masters of the Universe knows it’s all just a little, or frankly a lot, silly.
For all that though, and good lord it executes every beat of the film with a buoyantly fun-filled sense of escapist playfulness, Masters of the Universe also manages to knock some really impactful scenes well and truly out of the park.
Quite what they are falls firmly into the realm of full movie enjoyment spoilers, but suffice to say there are real moments of affecting gravity in the film, and it’s a credit to the writers and director Travis Knight that the goofily silly and the movingly serious sit in perfect tension with each other.
One or the other could have quite easily dominated to the film’s detriment, but what would have been a thematic and emotional cannibalisation never happens and Masters of the Universe emerges as a film with warmth and heart and genuinely moving moments that is also enthusiastically happy to play the well-written fool when needed (and honestly, that’s often).
The joy of Masters of the Universe is that it well and truly tips its hat to the nostalgic element of a decades-old franchise, which was really only summoned from creative ether by a need by Mattel to sell a metric ton of toys, without being swallowed whole by it.
Thus, Masters of the Universe, which is a giddy escapist blockbuster triumph in every sense of the word, is open and available to anyone who remembers being sprawled in front of the TV in the ’80s watching the cartoon series but also to those who are encountering the franchise now, making it that rare revival (one which also features the 1987 He-Man, Dolph Lundgren, in a cameo) which doesn’t succumb to 21st century grimness, even as it embraces a modern aesthetic while celebrating what made the franchise and its memorable characters so well loved in the first place.