‘Masters of the Universe’ Review

A feature-length meme.

“By the power of Grayskull!” Nicholas Galitzine in Masters of the Universe. (Courtesy of Amazon MGM)

YOUR TOLERANCE for Masters of the Universe will likely depend on how funny you find it for a character called “Fisto”—because he has a giant fist, you see—uttering the following line: “Let’s fist some bad guys! Give him head, Ram Man.”

Now, this sequence is funny for a couple of reasons. For starters, Fisto and Ram-Man are not the real names of these characters: They’re just what Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) calls the two heroes of Eternia. Because of the aforementioned giant fist and Ram-Man’s head, which looks like a battering ram. But it’s also funny because of the double entendre. “Fisting” and “giving head” are sexual acts, as you, the adult reading this, well know. Fisto (again, not his real name) has said that he and Ram-Man (ibid) should commit acts of violence that also sound like phrases commonly associated with physical acts of love. The dissonance here is intended to provoke an uncontrolled guffaw as your brain connects the two ideas.

Ha ha. You get it.

And maybe you will love it! I do not dispute that this is mildly amusing; there were people in my theater who laughed quite heartily at several of these gags. “Fisto” is, objectively, a very funny name for a character based on a children’s toy. But it really gets to the annoying, leering wink at the heart of Masters of the Universe, a movie that seems to exist entirely in the hopes of turning any discrete 45-second chunk of footage into a GIFable, memeable moment, something to amuse people on social media once this thing hits home video in six or seven weeks, if not sooner.

Adam only knows Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) and Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang) by those names because he was forced to flee his home planet of Eternia at the age of 10 after an attack on Castle Grayskull by the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto). After spending fifteen years on Earth, where Adam works in human resources—the sign on his desk lists his pronouns as “He/Him,” which is funny because he is literally He-Man, ha ha—he finally recovers the Sword of Power, which brings both Skeletor’s henchmen and Adam’s childhood friend, Teela (Camila Mendes), to our planet to recover him and the sword. Teela and Adam team up with her father and his mentor, Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba), to retake Eternia and defeat Skeletor.

The whole film is weirdly disjointed; it’s overly long and yet still feels like it’s missing some key components. Like, for instance, why Skeletor’s hand burns everyone he touches? Or what, precisely, his powers are. I will say that director Travis Knight and the six (6) credited writers are refreshingly candid about Skeletor’s motivations. “Why would he do this?” Adam asks at one point. “Because he’s bad,” comes the reply. “There has to be more to it than that,” Adam says. “He has a skull for a face,” is the counter, and it’s all you really need. Sometimes you can just tell when someone is evil. For instance, when they have a skull for a face. Pretty good sign there.

Jared Leto in Masters of the Universe. (Courtesy of Amazon MGM)

Again, you can see something kinda-sorta interesting at work with Skeletor, both in the writing and the performance by Leto. It’s all over the top and theatrical and kind of silly . . . but then Knight and company can’t help but acknowledge the wink. The whole film is a series of wink-acknowledgments. It’s the sort of movie where heroes will theatrically laugh with their hands balled up into fists on their hips and their chests bowed out but won’t trust us to see this as cartoonishly silly, so another character will have to make the Jim from ‘The Office’ face straight to camera. It’s the sort of movie where a cop on Earth will sarcastically refer to Adam as “The Highlander” because he’s running around a city with a sword and then score the climactic battle to “Princes of the Universe,” the song Queen recorded for the original Highlander movie.¹

Mostly, I just don’t really know who this movie is for. It’s certainly not for today’s children, given all the double entendres and surprisingly frank stabbing violence. There’s a fairly narrow stripe of irony-poisoned millennials and hopelessly detached Gen Xers who will understand a medium-deep-cut joke about the score for Highlander, I suppose, but I’m pretty squarely in that demo and I mostly just found myself annoyed. Maybe it just needed one more Fisto gag.

1. In fact, Masters of the Universe is scored, in part, by Brian May of Queen fame, and the guitar-heavy musical stylings were one of the few truly interesting things about it . . . but they couldn’t help that big, exaggerated wink.