Masters of the Universe (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man

Masters of the Universe

★★☆☆☆

A two-hour-twenty-minute He-Man film that can’t decide whether it wants to be parody, action thriller, or earnest fantasy, and ends up being none of them.

I realise I’m probably not the target audience for this. Not only am I considerably older than the demographic this film is aiming at, but even back in the 1980s, I never really understood the appeal of He-Man.

I never owned the toys, never followed the cartoons with much enthusiasm, and, if I’m being honest, always thought the whole concept was a bit ridiculous.

A muscle-bound hero wearing what is essentially a furry loincloth, fighting a skull-faced villain called Skeletor in a fantasy world populated by people with names that sound as though they were invented during a particularly bad Dungeons & Dragons session? Even as a child, I had questions.

Still, my son and I had already seen pretty much everything else at the cinema, so we thought: how bad can it be?

Well… pretty bad.

The strange thing is that the film itself seems fully aware of how absurd its source material is. There are constant self-referential jokes about the costumes, the names, the mythology and the general ridiculousness of the whole enterprise.

At one point, the film almost feels embarrassed by its own existence.

Unfortunately, self-awareness can only take you so far.

One of the many problems is its tone. Had the filmmakers fully embraced the madness and turned the whole thing into a knowingly camp fantasy adventure, I might actually have enjoyed it.

Instead, the film keeps changing its mind.

One moment it’s parody, the next it’s earnest drama, then suddenly it’s trying to be a tense action thriller before veering into surprisingly violent territory.

As a result, the whole thing feels oddly confused. It never settles on what kind of film it wants to be.

Visually, things don’t improve much either.

I hesitate to criticise visual effects too harshly these days because audiences have become somewhat spoiled, but some of the CGI here is astonishingly bad. There is a scene involving He-Man and a lion that looks less like a finished visual effect and more like a rough draft accidentally left in the final cut.

The landscapes, castles and fantasy environments rarely feel tangible. Everything has that weightless digital quality that makes you long for the days when fantasy films had actual sets, actual locations and actual things for actors to touch.

The plot is equally muddled. Characters move between worlds through vaguely defined portals, rules appear and disappear according to convenience, and much of the mythology seems to be invented on the spot.

To be fair, perhaps lifelong fans will have a better grasp of what’s happening than I did, but as somebody coming in relatively fresh, I spent much of the running time questioning the logic of the universe and asking myself “Why?” (I meant “why is this happening”, not just “why am I here?”).

On the positive side, Nicholas Galitzine makes for a perfectly likeable He-Man. He has an easy charm and enough sincerity to stop the whole thing from collapsing completely under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

The film is directed by Travis Knight, whose previous work includes the excellent Kubo and the Two Strings and the surprisingly enjoyable Bumblebee, which makes the end result all the more disappointing.

Oddly enough, the film kept reminding me of Flash Gordon, mostly famous today for the catchy Queen song. This film uses a Queen track too. A coincidence, or were they trying to emulate that same campness and ludicrousness? Flash Gordon eventually became cult cinema… but audiences today are a bit more savvy.

This feels like somebody trying to manufacture cult status in a boardroom.

There is one genuinely funny moment involving Dolph Lundgren, star of the infamous 1987 adaptation, making a brief appearance and telling the new He-Man: “You’re in my spot.” I confess I laughed. In fact, I’d probably pay good money to watch a whole film built around that joke.

Unfortunately, it arrives in a film that lasts a staggering two hours and twenty minutes. For He-Man.

I know every generation deserves its own fantasy heroes, and perhaps today’s children will embrace this in a way that completely passed me by. My son certainly seemed more forgiving than I was, although I suspect he may simply have been trying not to hurt my feelings.

As for me, by the final half hour, I was checking my watch and wondering whether Skeletor could perhaps conquer the universe a little faster.

And given how dramatically this film has dropped at the box office in its second week, I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this sense of detachment and boredom with this wannabe franchise.

I laughed a couple of times. That’s something.

But for a film built around one of the most outrageously entertaining silly concepts ever created, I left wishing it had been either much smarter or much stupider.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.