Masters of the Universe
Jul. 12th, 2026 02:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraMasters of the Universe, 2026 film. It's taken me awhile to write this up (I saw it a month ago) because I wanted to try to actually say things (it's a bad movie but a rich text) and coherency can be hard these days.
I mostly dislike and won't watch the genre of live action/realistic-CGI remakes but I thought He-Man was the perfect use case for them in that unlike a Disney or Dreamworks movie the Filmation animation was mostly optimized for budget rather than for artistry and is not (IMO) the sort of fully-realized creative vision that something like Moana or Lion King or HTTYD is. My love of He-Man was already about nostalgia and imagination and not the actual cartoon footage, and so seeing Beast Man etc brought to CGI life was fun, whee! (Sadly didn't love the Sorceress costume/design though.)
(The rest cut for length and spoilers.)
Along other nostalgia lines, every time Adam starts his "I am Adam" intro was fun, and they successfully put in the memes (What's Going On and the hands-on-hips laughing) and all the characters I could remember (except I thought Spikor was Mer-Man, oops). Adam's Earth costume with the pink shirt was cute. (Galitzine was fine in general; Leto was a mumbly and tedious Skeletor (why do they keep casting him in things?) but the "dream sequence" with gym bro, pick-up artist, and office versions of Skeletor was pretty funny.) I would have liked more use of the Filmation cartoon intro theme in the music (they made us wait until the very end for a really short quote of it - I would have liked a big symphonic treatment) but the choice to go guitar-centric (with Brian May!) was solid, giving it a distinctive and 80s-appropriate sound, and they made a stab at having a real recognizable theme which so many movies don't anymore. I was glad to get at least a little moment of Orko, the other thing I spent the whole movie hoping for.
But who cares, let's talk about gender. Because He-Man is always about gender, and I think this movie acknowledges that but is playing a little game about what it's actually saying.
The actual message of this movie is, predictably, that Man = Power = Big Punch. The actual character arc for Adam is that he's a feminine boy in the masculine world of Eternia who wants to reject the violence of that world (or feels rejected by it) who is banished to the feminine world of Earth where he experiences true emasculation (= a Black woman has power over him, by being his boss at his job in HR), realizes he would rather be in Eternia, and ultimately embraces (or at least accepts) the necessity of violence as the price of life in masculinity.
This isn't terribly surprising - and maybe fair, it's a legitimate assumption that why are you at a He-Man movie if you don't want Big Punch - but the movie makes some stabs in the direction of pretending it's saying something else.
Orko, at the end, tells us that "muscles don't necessarily make the man", and while the He-Man episode morals varied a lot in how relevant they were to the episode, you can read this as the movie attempting to make an explicit claim about its thesis, or as the movie giving lip service to a claim, or the movie doing a tongue-in-cheek performance about a claim. In a generous read, the movie could be saying something like "there is more to masculinity than fighting - empathy, compassion, and connection are also a kind of power." The Sorceress chooses child Adam for The Power despite his lack of martial prowess because of some other quality she perceives in him - sadly I can't remember exactly what word she uses and I can't find a script, but let's say it was "heart". It was definitely something like that. Adam claims to be good at his HR job, and there are a couple of scenes that try to imply that he's contributing along such lines - recognizing and recruiting Roboto, dismissed as a cleaning bot, as a combat bot, and getting all the heroes to work together to break out of a cell. Unfortunately, though, the movie doesn't put much weight behind this theme. Adam claims he's good at his job, but we never see that onscreen - if the movie really wanted us to believe it, it would show it. Recruiting Roboto doesn't seem to make much of a difference to anything, and there's no set-up that the heroes have any kind of problem working together that Adam is the answer to. And we don't really get a demonstration of what the Sorceress saw in him, either - he's a cute and silly kid but we don't see him do anything particularly kind-hearted. Contrast this with the weight the movie puts into reframing his dad's violent masculinity-enforcing parenting - not, the dad claims, trying to change Adam, but trying to protect him, awww. (Because what else would a movie ever be about other than daddy issues.) Notably, Adam's attempt at trying to get Skeletor's story is mocked, both in-scene and at the end, when the second half of Orko's moral is that having a skull for a face guarantees that someone is the bad guy. (And if a bad face can make someone bad, doesn't it seem more likely that muscles *do* also make a man?)
There's also a somewhat separate thread about integrity and persistence and believing in yourself, with a funny cameo from Dolph Lungren giving an inspirational speech and a sort of pact to keep going between Adam and Man-At-Arms, who has become an alcoholic but was maybe Adam's real dad in an emotional sense. Possibly this was more like the trait the Sorceress was supposed to be rewarding. Teela has of course also been steadily persisting the whole time but that's just expected, nobody's handing her a Power Sword about it and telling her she's special. (But she's fine with that! one of the boys! happy to make a "pussy" joke about Cringer to show her allegiance to the masculine order! or maybe it was someone else who makes the joke and she joins in, again, I can't find a script and I can't recall exactly, but I'm pretty sure she's part of it.) And the wish-fulfillment aspect of the He-Man mythology seems non-trivially at odds with an attempt to anchor masculinity here. I think part of the whole *point* of He-Man's power is that it is not, especially, earned - he is a little boy (they say he's 10, but he seems younger than 10, and 10 seems old to me for peak He-Man fandom age which for me at least was six) and the Sorceress picks him, and then he doesn't do much for fifteen years other than pine for Eternia and trawl for the sword on the internet (the framing of the Lungren scene is that he has gone to the gym maybe for the first time where he obviously doesn't know what he's doing, so it's not like he's been trying to train or prepare himself), and then, hey, magic sword, and then it turns out the power was in him all along (after the Sorceress gave it to him) which is even better than being dependent on a magic sword. All this lets the viewer imagine that they, too, would be powerful if chosen, that not being chosen is the reason they're not powerful, that they don't need to do any particular work.
The movie's last attempt to play coy about its gender politics is to claim that the name "He-Man" is a self-evidently silly name that child Adam gave himself, haha we don't really mean it! The movie is very concerned about the names of the characters like Ram-Man and has come up with this elaborate explanation that 10-year-old Adam didn't know anybody's names and so gave them childish superhero names and aren't they just so goofy and awkward and sometimes unintentionally sexually suggestive, forming one of the main running gags of the film. To me, this is a sort of "Superman wears his underwear on the outside" criticism - if you're not buying in, surely there are more interesting things to critique, and if you are, it doesn't bother you - but it's one more curtain to try to hide behind. And I think there's something interesting in how the movie draws attention to the "child" part of its character age choices but treats adult-Adam's 25-year-old age as an obvious default unworthy of comment - he's come of age he's in the prime of life don't worry about it. I mean, nobody watching this movie is 25 any more than they're 10, we are all somewhere around 50 (unless I guess we picked up He-Man on one of the later incarnations, but it felt to me like it was very much about the Filmation cartoon specifically). Maybe we're expected to feel quietly superior to this poor kid, still trying to figure out what masculinity means for himself, when we sorted that out for ourselves years ago? (I truly don't know how much gender anxiety men my age have, but this movie doesn't feel like it was made for the overly self-reflective.)
I don't know what I would try to say, if I was making a He-Man movie. I would want to do an Into the Spiderverse kind of thing - kid He-Man, old He-Man, trans He-Man, Black He-Man, what is it that makes them all He-Man, can we put masculinity through a kaleidoscope like that or is The Most Powerful Man In The Universe always ultimately just one original-flavor bodybuilding blond - but Spiderverse is already doing that. I would want to do a story where the Sorceress has some interiority and withdraws her favor and we dig into why it feels fine for her to have this power and control over him (or for his mother to end up ruling after his father's death) but so threatening for him to have a female boss in his Earth-life. Or does it in fact totally destabilize him as He-Man if the Sorceress is a character in herself rather than a sort of Blue Fairy. (I was always the Sorceress when I was six, but I can't remember what kinds of plots I had. I think the one time the Sorceress gets a character arc in the cartoon it's all about Being A Mom and how Teela can't ever know.) I would write an Adam who *is* at home on Earth and who has to make a genuinely hard choice between the Earth life he was making for himself and the larger-than-life life he could lead on Eternia. Like, if you're going to insist on doing daddy issues, make him a few years older and give him a kid. A son, it would have to be. Is he really willing to subject his son to the violence of Eternia in order to live in the heroism of Eternia. Can he really justify his father's "tough love" when he's just hit his own kid and realized he's becoming him. Maybe the kid is scared of the He-Man alter ego and just wants his dad. Maybe the kid can't wait to be He-Man himself and the Sorceress has to be like "I know we're in a monarchy but this is not actually a hereditary position". I know nobody is going to a He-Man movie to see something fraught, but masculinity is fraught. There's got to be a better way to reconcile that than a pussy joke.
I mostly dislike and won't watch the genre of live action/realistic-CGI remakes but I thought He-Man was the perfect use case for them in that unlike a Disney or Dreamworks movie the Filmation animation was mostly optimized for budget rather than for artistry and is not (IMO) the sort of fully-realized creative vision that something like Moana or Lion King or HTTYD is. My love of He-Man was already about nostalgia and imagination and not the actual cartoon footage, and so seeing Beast Man etc brought to CGI life was fun, whee! (Sadly didn't love the Sorceress costume/design though.)
(The rest cut for length and spoilers.)
Along other nostalgia lines, every time Adam starts his "I am Adam" intro was fun, and they successfully put in the memes (What's Going On and the hands-on-hips laughing) and all the characters I could remember (except I thought Spikor was Mer-Man, oops). Adam's Earth costume with the pink shirt was cute. (Galitzine was fine in general; Leto was a mumbly and tedious Skeletor (why do they keep casting him in things?) but the "dream sequence" with gym bro, pick-up artist, and office versions of Skeletor was pretty funny.) I would have liked more use of the Filmation cartoon intro theme in the music (they made us wait until the very end for a really short quote of it - I would have liked a big symphonic treatment) but the choice to go guitar-centric (with Brian May!) was solid, giving it a distinctive and 80s-appropriate sound, and they made a stab at having a real recognizable theme which so many movies don't anymore. I was glad to get at least a little moment of Orko, the other thing I spent the whole movie hoping for.
But who cares, let's talk about gender. Because He-Man is always about gender, and I think this movie acknowledges that but is playing a little game about what it's actually saying.
The actual message of this movie is, predictably, that Man = Power = Big Punch. The actual character arc for Adam is that he's a feminine boy in the masculine world of Eternia who wants to reject the violence of that world (or feels rejected by it) who is banished to the feminine world of Earth where he experiences true emasculation (= a Black woman has power over him, by being his boss at his job in HR), realizes he would rather be in Eternia, and ultimately embraces (or at least accepts) the necessity of violence as the price of life in masculinity.
This isn't terribly surprising - and maybe fair, it's a legitimate assumption that why are you at a He-Man movie if you don't want Big Punch - but the movie makes some stabs in the direction of pretending it's saying something else.
Orko, at the end, tells us that "muscles don't necessarily make the man", and while the He-Man episode morals varied a lot in how relevant they were to the episode, you can read this as the movie attempting to make an explicit claim about its thesis, or as the movie giving lip service to a claim, or the movie doing a tongue-in-cheek performance about a claim. In a generous read, the movie could be saying something like "there is more to masculinity than fighting - empathy, compassion, and connection are also a kind of power." The Sorceress chooses child Adam for The Power despite his lack of martial prowess because of some other quality she perceives in him - sadly I can't remember exactly what word she uses and I can't find a script, but let's say it was "heart". It was definitely something like that. Adam claims to be good at his HR job, and there are a couple of scenes that try to imply that he's contributing along such lines - recognizing and recruiting Roboto, dismissed as a cleaning bot, as a combat bot, and getting all the heroes to work together to break out of a cell. Unfortunately, though, the movie doesn't put much weight behind this theme. Adam claims he's good at his job, but we never see that onscreen - if the movie really wanted us to believe it, it would show it. Recruiting Roboto doesn't seem to make much of a difference to anything, and there's no set-up that the heroes have any kind of problem working together that Adam is the answer to. And we don't really get a demonstration of what the Sorceress saw in him, either - he's a cute and silly kid but we don't see him do anything particularly kind-hearted. Contrast this with the weight the movie puts into reframing his dad's violent masculinity-enforcing parenting - not, the dad claims, trying to change Adam, but trying to protect him, awww. (Because what else would a movie ever be about other than daddy issues.) Notably, Adam's attempt at trying to get Skeletor's story is mocked, both in-scene and at the end, when the second half of Orko's moral is that having a skull for a face guarantees that someone is the bad guy. (And if a bad face can make someone bad, doesn't it seem more likely that muscles *do* also make a man?)
There's also a somewhat separate thread about integrity and persistence and believing in yourself, with a funny cameo from Dolph Lungren giving an inspirational speech and a sort of pact to keep going between Adam and Man-At-Arms, who has become an alcoholic but was maybe Adam's real dad in an emotional sense. Possibly this was more like the trait the Sorceress was supposed to be rewarding. Teela has of course also been steadily persisting the whole time but that's just expected, nobody's handing her a Power Sword about it and telling her she's special. (But she's fine with that! one of the boys! happy to make a "pussy" joke about Cringer to show her allegiance to the masculine order! or maybe it was someone else who makes the joke and she joins in, again, I can't find a script and I can't recall exactly, but I'm pretty sure she's part of it.) And the wish-fulfillment aspect of the He-Man mythology seems non-trivially at odds with an attempt to anchor masculinity here. I think part of the whole *point* of He-Man's power is that it is not, especially, earned - he is a little boy (they say he's 10, but he seems younger than 10, and 10 seems old to me for peak He-Man fandom age which for me at least was six) and the Sorceress picks him, and then he doesn't do much for fifteen years other than pine for Eternia and trawl for the sword on the internet (the framing of the Lungren scene is that he has gone to the gym maybe for the first time where he obviously doesn't know what he's doing, so it's not like he's been trying to train or prepare himself), and then, hey, magic sword, and then it turns out the power was in him all along (after the Sorceress gave it to him) which is even better than being dependent on a magic sword. All this lets the viewer imagine that they, too, would be powerful if chosen, that not being chosen is the reason they're not powerful, that they don't need to do any particular work.
The movie's last attempt to play coy about its gender politics is to claim that the name "He-Man" is a self-evidently silly name that child Adam gave himself, haha we don't really mean it! The movie is very concerned about the names of the characters like Ram-Man and has come up with this elaborate explanation that 10-year-old Adam didn't know anybody's names and so gave them childish superhero names and aren't they just so goofy and awkward and sometimes unintentionally sexually suggestive, forming one of the main running gags of the film. To me, this is a sort of "Superman wears his underwear on the outside" criticism - if you're not buying in, surely there are more interesting things to critique, and if you are, it doesn't bother you - but it's one more curtain to try to hide behind. And I think there's something interesting in how the movie draws attention to the "child" part of its character age choices but treats adult-Adam's 25-year-old age as an obvious default unworthy of comment - he's come of age he's in the prime of life don't worry about it. I mean, nobody watching this movie is 25 any more than they're 10, we are all somewhere around 50 (unless I guess we picked up He-Man on one of the later incarnations, but it felt to me like it was very much about the Filmation cartoon specifically). Maybe we're expected to feel quietly superior to this poor kid, still trying to figure out what masculinity means for himself, when we sorted that out for ourselves years ago? (I truly don't know how much gender anxiety men my age have, but this movie doesn't feel like it was made for the overly self-reflective.)
I don't know what I would try to say, if I was making a He-Man movie. I would want to do an Into the Spiderverse kind of thing - kid He-Man, old He-Man, trans He-Man, Black He-Man, what is it that makes them all He-Man, can we put masculinity through a kaleidoscope like that or is The Most Powerful Man In The Universe always ultimately just one original-flavor bodybuilding blond - but Spiderverse is already doing that. I would want to do a story where the Sorceress has some interiority and withdraws her favor and we dig into why it feels fine for her to have this power and control over him (or for his mother to end up ruling after his father's death) but so threatening for him to have a female boss in his Earth-life. Or does it in fact totally destabilize him as He-Man if the Sorceress is a character in herself rather than a sort of Blue Fairy. (I was always the Sorceress when I was six, but I can't remember what kinds of plots I had. I think the one time the Sorceress gets a character arc in the cartoon it's all about Being A Mom and how Teela can't ever know.) I would write an Adam who *is* at home on Earth and who has to make a genuinely hard choice between the Earth life he was making for himself and the larger-than-life life he could lead on Eternia. Like, if you're going to insist on doing daddy issues, make him a few years older and give him a kid. A son, it would have to be. Is he really willing to subject his son to the violence of Eternia in order to live in the heroism of Eternia. Can he really justify his father's "tough love" when he's just hit his own kid and realized he's becoming him. Maybe the kid is scared of the He-Man alter ego and just wants his dad. Maybe the kid can't wait to be He-Man himself and the Sorceress has to be like "I know we're in a monarchy but this is not actually a hereditary position". I know nobody is going to a He-Man movie to see something fraught, but masculinity is fraught. There's got to be a better way to reconcile that than a pussy joke.
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Date: 2026-07-14 02:40 am (UTC)(I haven’t seen the movie, but I was vaguely intrigued by the trailers (even though I know almost nothing about He-Man—I wasn’t a fan as a kid, have largely avoided everything about it since then, except for the 2018 She-Ra series). So this review is of practical use to me as well as being philosophically and politically interesting.)