I wrote in my previous Masters of the Universe (1987) review that I used to love the He-Man (and She-Ra) cartoon series and had a load of the toys (I was always the baddies) and seeing them on screen in a more matching cartoon/toy form was brilliant.
In my review of the 1987 film my main complaint was that it was a bad adaptation of He-Man and didn’t really fit in with how I remembered He-Man and friends being portrayed on the small screen, so what about Master of the Universe 2026? Will it fair any better?
What’s Masters of the Universe About?
We start off meeting young Adam, the 10-year-old Prince of Eternia and a bit of a dweeb. Duncan, the King’s Man-At-Arms has been trying to train Adam to be stronger and more confident but he has no hand-eye coordination, get beaten up by his classmates and no one, except Duncan’s adopted daughter Teela, wants to spar with him.
The seat of magical power on Eternia is Castle Grayskull which sits just outside the capital city of Eternos and is protected by The Sorceress. Within its walls sits The Sword of Power, a weapon that when wielded by the Protector of Eternia will grant them great power — hence the sword’s name I guess!
And just as there is light with The Sorceress, there is the dark in Skeletor — a powerful warlock from Snake Mountain who will stop at nothing in order to hold the Sword of Power so he can obtain its energy and rule not only over Eternia but the whole Universe.
One night, Skeletor stages a surprise attack on Eternos and the King’s guards are swiftly overwhelmed. Fearing for Queen Marlena and Prince Adam, King Randor stays behind to delay Skeletor’s forces allowing his family to escape to Castle Grayskull.
Seeking sanctuary within its walls, The Sorceress realises that even she won’t be able to hold off Skeletor’s army and creates a magical vortex that will transport Adam and the Sword of Power to Queen Marlena’s home planet: Earth.
The journey through the vortex isn’t smooth causing Adam to lose his grip on the sword, they become separated with Adam eventually falling out of the vortex and into a large lake.
Cut to 15 years later.
Adam is working in HR where his days are full of seminars on how to communicate better, understand people’s feelings and resolve conflicts. His life doesn’t run smoothly though as he’s hauled into his bosses office after being caught looking for swords during company time. Not only is his search for the Sword of Power affecting his work, it’s also scaring his co-workers, freaking out his roommate and dates.
Just as the meeting is taking place, Adam gets a text message saying that someone has found his sword so he abandons his job in the hope that this sword is the one. Luckily for him, it is or it would have been a bit awkward asking for his old job back!
Adam tries to activate the sword to return back to Eternia but nothing appears to happen, little does he know that he’s just sent a signal that will be picked up by Skeletor and King Randor’s remaining forces forcing Adam in to a conflict he is little prepared for.
As he finally returns to his home planet he sees the destruction that Skeletor has wrought, killing thousands, imprisoning others and banishing the rest.
Any hope of a happy welcome for Adam are dashed as no one believes who he is, apart from Teela who rescued him from Skeletor’s Beast on Earth. As he tries to convince them that the sword is real he must also convince them that there is still hope and Eternia is worth fighting for once more.
And once Adam begins to realise his own inner strength and understand that you don’t have to be a musclebound warrior with a metal head like Ram Man or have a huge metal hand like Fisto in order to win a fight or command respect, he is able to tap into a power that was within him all along — The Power of Grayskull.
With this he becomes He-Man, Protector of Eternia and with King Randor’s remaining forces rallying behind Adam and his Sword they take on Skeletor in the hopes they can free Eternia from his tyrannical reign.
The Good
The 80s vibes of the film were great and really captured the feel of the cartoons, something that the dark-toned 1987 film didn’t even attempt to do.
The humour and subtle messaging was also spot on, I remember the “He-Man message of the week” quite well where the explanation of what happened shoe-horned in to the end of the episode so they could skirt around advertising issues arguing they were providing moral messaging for kids.
And in a way, this is the same with the corporate seminar and politically correct speak being brought to Eternia to help bolster King Randor’s troop’s confidence and even placate Skeletor (need you ask how well that went?!).
We then have the more overt and physical humour such as Adam attempting to wrestle the Sword of Power out of the hands of a 7-foot tall fibreglass Viking-type character. Of course with Adam not having his powers yet it ends comically with onlooker recording Adam seemingly humping the toppled plastic warrior.
And Dolph Lundgren also makes a little cameo as he essentially hands over the mantle (or should that be sword) to Nicholas Galitzine’s version of He-Man. It was quite a touching scene and a nice nod to Lungren who often got short-shrift for his first leading film role.
But I think my favourite scene was towards the end of the film when Fisto, Ram Man, Mekaneck and others are all standing around laughing with heads thrown back, hands on hips all giving a hearty “HA! HA! HA! HA!” just like they used to do in the cartoon. Brilliant.
The script, editing and directing were all deftly handled giving the film a pace that felt a lot quicker than its 2-and-a-half hours running time and the cinematography is also good given the amount of CGI that’s been used (more on that in a bit).
The Bad
A minor complaint is that we could have had some more time on Earth and a bit less time on Eternia with Adam trying to convince people to join him.
It would have been nice to have seen Teela being a bit more of a fish out of water on Earth and I think they missed a lot of comedic promise there.
Another minor quibble was using Kristen Wiig to voice Roboto. Don’t get me wrong, she is a fantastic actor and the performance was hilarious BUT it was far too close to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s L3-37 from Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018). Like I said, a minor annoyance but I couldn’t help drawing comparisons every time Roboto made a sassy comment.
Evil-Lyn wasn’t evil enough. Simple as that. In the 1987 film she was portrayed wonderfully by Meg Foster as underhanded, scheming and relishing in the misery of others whereas Alison Brie’s version is subserviant, weak and has very little stage presence. This isn’t the fault of the actor, I feel the script let her down a bit by leaning too heavily on the comedic aspect of the relationship between Evil-Lyn and Skeletor rather than the way she wielded power over his minions.
And some of the CGI looked really quite cheap. There’s a scene where Adam is riding on Cringer’s back and it’s so obviously CGI Adam on a CGI Giant Cat against a CGI background you have to wonder how they let it in to the film. Other places were like that too, with some of the aerial shots of the planet seemed to not be completely rendered out properly which is odd given the film’s $170 million budget.
Finally, I thought the weakest point of the film was the soundtrack.
I am not sure whether they were trying to pay homage to 80s films for nostalgia’s sake or they were just trying to be too clever for their own good but the rock-inspired soundtrack fell rather flat for me.
There was also the issue that instead of reminding me of the 1987 film or 80s cartoon I was just constantly comparing it to Flash Gordon (1980, Directed by Mike Hodges) which featured a soundtrack by Queen.
This was further compounded by Queen’s Brian May co-writing a couple of the songs and them using a heavily Queen-inspired track (Masters of the Universe) by The Darkness which really didn’t fit in with the pace of the fight scene it was laid over.
It’s a shame as it brought me out of the film entirely and made me think of the wrong 1980s movie!
The Ugly
Jared Leto.
I will reiterate: I have no idea why he still gets hired for big-budget movies (or any movie in fact) when he couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag.
In the 1987 film, Skeletor (Frank Langella) was in a physical suit and mask as of course there was no CGI and yet what he was saying could be understood clearly even though his face was completely covered.
Leto’s 2026 CGI Skeletor mumbles like a drunkard at closing time, slurring words together in an incomprehensible string leaving me to have to rewind portions of the film to hear what he said. In retrospect I should have put the subtitles on but I wanted a “cinema experience”.
I got the distinct impression that, given Leto’s terrible attempt at an English accent (which randomly became American again at points), we was attempting to do a voice that was as iconic as Jonny Depp’s Jack Sparrow except he fails miserably.
The sad thing is that the accusations surrounding him may keep people away from this film as it almost did me, and yet you could have removed Leto completely and Skeletor probably would have been immeasurably better. Or at the very least understandable when he spoke.
Final Thoughts
Leto and my issues with the soundtrack aside, Masters of the Universe is an enjoyable romp of a film and the actors (excluding Leto) do a great job of bringing the original 1980s cartoon characters to life.
The crew understood the assignment and the set designs exceptional with Castle Grayskull being almost as I remember the toy version being although we didn’t see enough of the Snake Mountain exterior though which is a shame.
The cast also understood the humour behind their roles and were certainly playing everything very tongue-in-cheek and that just made the film even more enjoyable to watch.
As Leto’s face is thankfully hidden for the entirety of the film you can almost forget he’s in it and if you can it’s a thoroughly enjoyable film and well worth a watch — just be warned that while cartoon He-Man never killed anyone at all and 1987 He-Man only killed robot-type creatures, 2026’s He-man is quite vicious when it comes to taking out enemies so it’s probably not suitable for your little ones.
At the end of the film in a post-credits scene we see what can be assumed to be She-Ra holding the Sword of Protection, perhaps either hinting at a spin off or a sequel featuring both He-Man and She-Ra.
A sequel was announced even before the film had reached cinemas but it looked like the poor box office ($114 million on a $170 million budget) would sink another film but as this is Amazon MGM backed and they don’t release their streaming figures, the film could be doing extremely well in the home market so it may have a chance after all.
Watch this film if you too remember the horrors of corporate seminars and meetings where you have to discuss your “feelings”.
