Actually, The He-Man Movie Isn't That Bad
In defense of the seemingly indefensible failure of a film, Masters Of The Universe
artwork by James White Via Signalnoise
Tristan Young @talltristan
I realize no one really needs to hear this. It’s not like there’s a litigious discourse or lively online partisanship regarding the matter. In fact it’s one of the few things that nearly everyone, despite the epistemological fissures and ecosystems of toxic fandom ripping the internet to shreds, can actually agree on. All of us understand, with few if any caveats, that the He-Man move is bad. Really bad. Therefore it is with deep resignation, regret, and a much more potent dose of embarrassment than I usually care to display in public, that in actuality, I think I like the He-Man movie. It’s ridiculous, inane, cheesy, largely incoherent, and a flimsy excuse to sell toys. I think all of this just makes me enjoy it more. Since first watching it repeatedly in my early formative years, thusly considered a more excusable time to have no taste in such things, I always had an inkling that I was enjoying this film more than I should have been, what with it being objectively terrible. However I revisited the Pandora’s box of a film a couple days ago when it suspiciously popped into my Prime queue, of winch I was exhuming its algorithmically insane depths. There it was just staring at me, waiting for me to watch it one more time. I’m glad I did, and I’m sorry I feel compelled to tell you about it, but here we are.
If you’re not familiar with the mostly dormant and obsolete He-Man franchise of the 80s, you might be interested to learn that that decade spawned a number of mini media empires spanning comics, TV, and film for the sole purpose of selling toys back when such a thing was a financially lucrative market. The advent and ensuing economic scalability of video games becoming a key past time for youth that further developed in the 80s and early 90s largely exterminated this industry, but for a while it was quite the ride. Transformers, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles, all of these iconic franchise that still have an indelible grip on the nostalgia of simpler times operated under similar conditions and objectives. That they have evolved in one form or another into somewhat viable franchise in various modern mediums speaks to their ingenuity and appeal. And then there was He-Man. A beefy guy with a sword, fighting a bumbling skeleton with even more bumbling minions. From its comic book inception and toy line to more ambitious iterations, it was a franchise egregiously dressed in the most basic common denominators of ephemeral fantasy acumen and gossamer. It had very little substance and honestly about as much sparkle and flash. Which is to say, not a lot to go on should someone decide to make a movie out of it.
And yet someone did! Back in the mid 80s the He-Man franchise was, somehow, at the height of something akin to relevancy and the booming toy to film reciprocal cycle was too at its apotheosis. Conditions were right to take a crack at adapting the character. Released in 1987 and directed by Gary Goddard, who to be frank has done very little else of significance before or after, and tittled Masters Of The Universe, the film was a critical and commercial failure. It stared Dolph Lundgren as He-Man, who was himself something of a redundancy in the era of Schwarzenegger, and Frank Langella, who was one of the original Draculas back in the 70s, as the evil Skeletor. Even with such a fun roster it’s easy to see why the film tanked as its story was an infantile thicket of narrative non-sequitors, with plot developments that strained even the most nimble notions of logic while also being agonizingly banal. The film starts promisingly enough, basically doing a straight lift of the expository background of the He-Man franchise. The vile sorcerer Skeletor has captured a castle called Grey Skull on the planet Eternia, which is narcissistically situated in the center of the universe. By squatting in this castle, Skeletor will soon be imparted with all of the power of the universe due to some gallingly lazy plot devices and become the tyrannical ruler of everything. The heroic He-Man is all that stands in Skeletor’s way, but an errant skirmish between He-Man and Skeletor’s forces leads our hero and a few companions into accidentally going through a portal that takes them to earth.
This is where the movie goes sideways very quickly, in the overly long second act that spills into the proceeding and succeeding ones. He-Man and his pals find themselves transplanted from the fantastical setting the comics and cartoons were known for to the glacial doldrums of Middle America in the 80s. Massive and gothic castles on distant dystopian planets are supplanted for high school gymnasiums and a local rib shack. A tired ornery cop and some guy named Charlie from the music shop down the road replace black clad storm trooper rip offs that seemed a lot more fun. The battle of good and evil is partly obviated by He-Man having to navigate a floundering high school romance involving a very young Courtney Cox. Courtney Cox is in this? Eventually Skeletor’s forces follow them to earth and things pick up a little, but the dissonance of the fan base’s favourite characters dicking around on the local main street instead of flying through the skies of Eternia was so glaring that it soured most film goers interested in the core material. Without them, there were precious few left with any interest in seeing the film.
We see these narrative contrivances often in big zany films, all though usually they are disguised with at least a bit more narrative coherence, something Masters Of The Universe ejects quickly if it ever regarded it all. Think of the attendant parades of media tours directors and stars of movies like this do leading up to a release; they always say similarly prescribed things about a film’s story. That in a movie with big explosions and monsters and space ships or whatever, they wanted a more human element, something film goers could relate to; something to make it personable. In reality this is just a flimsily reverse engineered excuse to cover up that most films rarely have the budget to make a several hour-long experience comprised of pure spectacle. They need to pad it with regular people in regular costumes doing regular things to stretch the budget. We see it with Shia Labeouf bumbling around in Transformers movies or the disjointed family drama that obnoxiously inserts itself into the proceedings of Godzilla: King Of The Monsters. No one is ever here to see that stuff, it never actually adds any personality or relatability, and any good director knows those emotional constructs can be embedded directly into the spectacle of a film without the need for superfluous banality (see Terminator 2, Mad Max: Fury Road, etc.). But at the end of the day, most movies just don’t have the budget to not pad their film with boring frivolity, and Masters Of The Universe is a particularly endemic of this conceit.
Yes, most every moment of the film that takes place on earth is an exotic mixture of aggressively dull- watching our heroes argue about what the heck a cow is being a definite a low point. However! When the film actually did have some money to spend, oh wow did it ever know how to do it. At a roughly 22 million dollar allotment, Masters Of The Universe didn’t actually have that low a budget by 80s standards. By comparison, Aliens, one of the absolute pinnacles of 80s genre films and released in 1986, only had an 18.5 million dollar budget. Re-watching Masters Of The Universe with a matured and more budgetary mind, its clear that the film simply blew its wad on the opening and climatic set pieces and holy hell does it ever show. When the film doesn’t look terrible, it looks fantastic. When it’s not insufferably dull, it’s exhilarating. When the art department isn’t relegated to how much you can dress up the school dance, it looks down right majestic.
Skeletor’s throne room in the castle he usurped is a gorgeously ornate and robust set, full of baroque pillars, gaudy as fuck marble and complex geometry- all of it an actual set, none of it green screened. The mat paintings of Castle Grey Skull overlooking a beleaguered and scorched Eternia are sublime. The massive holographic projections of Skeletor, him proclamating his despotic intentions across the planet, are aesthetically bold and technically grandiose. Many of the costumes are impressive and detailed, as literally interpreted from the source material as one can for film with more camera friendly color pallets. The character Evil Lyn’s filigreed and bourgeoisie armor perfectly captures the cold and cruel despondency she feels towards those made to suffer by Skeletor’s machinations. Outfits for many of the recurring evil mercenaries don’t disappoint either. The marauding swordsman Blade, generously adorned in as many sharp things as possible, Karg who looks like a cross gendered adult version of Linda Blair from The Exorcist, even all of the armoured henchman and their over designed lasers- none of this looks cheap; all of it looks great.
Skeletor in particular looks absolutely fantastic. Extrapolating the design of the original Skeletor from the cartoon onto a template akin to the Emperor from Star Wars was a smartly inspired decision. He is draped in moribund and ceremonial robes, yet his svelte armor recalls the technological terrors of Darth Vader’s partly zombified existence. That aesthetic is a recurring theme throughout the design of the film, further bolstering its artistic clarity and vision. Later on, after absorbing all of the power in the universe his armor transforms into a gloriously silly visage of pristine gold so shiny and gaudy it would make Donald Trump blush. Is it ridiculous? Sure, but the film earnestly wears that kind of ridiculousness on its sleeve, and at least for scenes like that it has the resources to back it up. The facial make up for Skeletor is similarly great in a practical sort of way- mostly. His was a design that would be hard to interpret and translate into real life due to Skeletor being adorned with a floating skull head and no eyes to speak of in the animated renders. Make up did a more than admirable job crafting a fearsome and boney structure that looks appropriately lifeless and instilling the eyes that had to remain with a considerable amount of menace and malice. The only part that didn’t succeed is in trying to mask his nose with a covered void as if to intimate the cartilage that would be missing were the head just a skull. It looks fine from a distance, but on tight shots you can see it’s just fabric layered over. Beyond that hiccup, Skeletor’s reimagining in Masters Of The Universe is perfect. Even the sound design of him slamming his signature staff on the cold and dense surface of his throne as he marches around is appropriately rattling.
Part of the aesthetic choices in bringing He-Man to the big screen was largely influenced by the massive success of Star Wars. With Return of The Jedi wrapping up the original trilogy four years earlier, movie studios were still eagerly searching for the next franchise that could capture that same exquisite high of soft sci fi and fantasy. It’s that cynical desire to commodify and cannibalize any viable property or even concept to its furthest possible extremes that had a hand in getting a He-Man film green lit for production in the first place. This was of course done with the explicit understanding to make the film as Star Wars as possible, within the limits of copyright and IP jurisdiction, as well as the more fluid boundaries of interpreting the characters for the big screen. As a result, this movie has some big Star Wars energy and it’s great, even if it is a shameless rip off. Lasers were everywhere, even to the point where the ardent fan base (yes these people existed in the 80s) thought it heretical to see He-Man brandish a blaster along side of a sword. Yet it made for some visually diverse shootouts nonetheless. Other effects are just as serviceable for a 35 year old film that was never going to age well to begin with. The synaesthesia style light show that opens the plot device portals that bend reality just a touch look totally fine. There are enough sparks and explosions abound whenever a hired goon eats shit at the hands of He-man too. Speaking of the goons, Skeletor’s army of heartless enforcers look terrific, and a more than worthy analogue to George Lucas’s storm troopers. These ones were even armoured in obsidian black, beating Star Wars to the punch with their own elite Dark Troopers in fact.
The parallels continue between the franchises in more granular ways as well. While much of the fight choreography here is the typically trite close up shots designed to obscure the fact there isn’t much going into these motions, a few sequences are a bit more inspired. Namely He-Man’s climatic fight with a pimped out gold Skeletor at the end shows their movements are actually mapped with an intensity and coherence reasonable enough to make it a fairly interesting duel. What’s more, the contours of the set are drowned out by rotating flood lights of blue and red as if to mimic the struggle of good and evil and how both ebb and flow for dominance with each swing of their avatar’s weapons. This was a similar visual trick to the intensely thematic lighting illuminating Anakin and Count Dooku’s faces during their climatic duel in Attack Of The Clones. While the Star Wars prequel obviously had the institutional and financial resources to do it much more convincingly, Masters Of The Universe did it 15 years earlier.
And while Attack Of The Clones had the benefit of legendary thespian Christopher Lee playing its villain, he was confided by the narrow and myopic rigidity of George Lucas’ direction. Masters Of The Universe had no such pretences about similarly constraining Langella as Skeletor. The result is he being completely unleashed and having so much obvious fun just hamming it up as such a cartoonishly evil character. Langella absolutely nails the malicious and eccentric charisma and leans so heavily into chewing the scenery to bits. His ridiculous and ostentatious energy drowns out every other actor he shares the screen with and it’s just great. He knows this is all ridiculous and just goes with it. Most of the actors couldn’t be bothered to interpret the lines of their charters beyond literal repetitions of the syntax and they come off as unbearably stiff for the most part (although one can’t blame them considering how paper thin the characters are). When they occasionally do try to give it their all, such as Lundgren spouting some obligatory catch phrases with a supposedly exalted reverence, it’s just cringy. Langella on the other hand just goes for it and imbues his character with a wealth of overly dramatic flourishes and florid tirades. Serendipitous as it may be- which is to say it’s unlikely that he really cared much about the character’s nuances- Langella brilliantly articulates the aspect of Skeletor’s psyche that compels him to narcissistic levels of greed and distrust of even his allies. When his subordinate dutifully boasts that Castle Grey Skull is theirs at last, Langella furiously shrieks, “NO!” followed by him easing into a sense of callous self-satisfaction and coolly claiming, “Mine”. In a perhaps otherwise irredeemable movie, Langella is genuinely terrific.
Again, I don’t know who needs to read this; probably no one. I can’t imagine there are many ardent defenders or forceful detractors of Masters Of The Universe. Even to take a purely agnostic position seems unlikely for a film that was so resoundingly and outright dismissed. This isn’t a film that requires or has earned any kind of rigorous or even casual debate. Yet those that would relegate the film to the dust bin of cinematic history for it’s institutional or budgetary short comings without a second glance don’t give it enough credit for how much fun it had during its brief moments of exuberance. Beneath the tepid storyline, and embarrassing overall demeanour lies a project that may have been made by people that actually respected the source material. Considering that source material, that’s kind of remarkable, and maybe an argument that the film itself deserves a modicum of respect. Once again, I’m very sorry for bringing all of this up.