Copyright: 1987 by Cannon Films
Starring: Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Meg Foster, Courtney Cox
Running Time: 106 min.
Score: 6/10
Buy?: Buy at Amazon for $10.49 or less. You can also view it on their On Demand channel, for rent, for $2.99. I highly recommend just renting and streaming if you just want to take a peek at it. Three bucks is more than fair.
Even most fans of the Masters of the Universe cartoon, toys, and comics are skeptical, at best, about the film adaptation of the series. The original cartoon was produced innocently enough, but due to modern pop culture trends and a lot of out-of-context animation reels that -- let's face it -- look pretty suggestive to audiences today, most who weren't fans of the show think that He-man and all things related are just one big gay joke. Because everybody has heard all of those jokes, and thanks to online critics like the Nostalgia Critic, even the live action movie, which I'll be reviewing here, has been included in the joke. Which is fine. But for that reason, this review is not going to linger on the gay jokes and just focus on the film at hand -- a film that, for all its flaws, is one that I was raised watching and therefore love.
Base Reaction: Okay, people. You've seen my score, but don't mistake this for a good movie. With the exception of films like Aliens and Willow -- which were well written and critically and financially successful, and maybe one or two other films that stand outside those standards and just managed to luck out, the standard for Sci-Fi/Fantasy movies, especially those that were made in the 80s, was for them to be gimmicky and awesomely bad, if awesome at all. I won't say there is no such thing as a good sci-fi/fantasy movie from the 80s, because as I said, there are exceptions.
However, I promise you that none of those exceptions came from a pure and unadulterated desire to capitolize on a toy line and the masses of screaming boys (and some girls) who demanded them.
That being said, I do enjoy this movie in spite of its faults. A movie can be a bad movie and still be fun to watch. Look at how many fans there are of Napoleon Dynamite. Now, I think that movie's boring, but they seem to be enjoying themselves.
Let alone that most fans I've met strongly resemble the main character, and therefore it's difficult to register an expression.
Our film today is, like the cartoons and comics, set in the world of Eternia, where the forces of good and evil, mostly in the form of sweaty muscle men in loin cloths and speedos, did battle over entry to the mythical Castle Greyskull, guarded by the now-wingless Sorceress. Contained inside is apparently untold power, granting the holder god-like abilities and mastery over the universe -- hence the title of the series. The whole point of the series was that Prince Adam was given a sword by the Sorceress that allows him to transform into He-Man (played in the film by Dolph Lundgren), the strongest man in the Universe, and with those powers he could protect Castle Greyskull from the evil forces out to conquer it -- namely Skeletor (played here by Frank Langella).Well, the movie starts after those efforts by He-man have completely failed. Skeletor, backed by an army of Darth Vaders, has taken Castle Greyskull and imprisoned the sorceress. He achieved this through use of one of two Cosmic Keys -- musical devices that open dimensional doorways and make teleporting possible. These keys were created by master inventor Gwildor (Billy Barty), not featured in the series and invented both to replace the wizard Orko (CG was not yet advanced enough to make him look realistic anyway) and to give the toy company an excuse to cast another figurine. He-man, now leading the resistence in a war-ravaged Eternia, rescues Gwildor, and he and his allies are shown Gwildor's second key -- which Skeletor does not know exists. They use it to enter Castle Greyskull but fail to rescue the Sorceress, forced instead to open a door to an unknown world and jump through to evade capture.
And where do they end up? Earth. In the 1980s. God help them.
There are a few side plots that come out of this -- of course the typical fish-out-of-water plot with the Eternians, but then you meet Julie and Kevin, teenaged lovers who are about to be permanently separated. Julie's parents died recently in a plane crash, and she's moving away. There's also an angry never-listens-to-anybody cop who keeps making things more difficult for everybody once Skeletor starts sending his minions in search of the key. (And this guy, James Tolkan, never plays any other kind of character -- not cops, necessarily, but angry adults who serve as nothing but a buzzkill to teenaged protagonists. You'll remember him from Back to the Future as Principal Strickland.)
So it's one of those race against time plots, because the key that He-man had (it was lost upon re-entry) has been damaged, and the heroes must return to Eternia before some series-lexicon-identified event occurs, in which Skeletor will have all the powers of Grayskull bestowed upon him. Skeletor wants the other key destroyed because so long as one exists there's always the possibility of He-man returning. And rather than send people to kill He-man while the lady that gave him his powers in the first place is slowly being drained of her essence, he wants him captured because of some lame Evil Overlord List violation regarding not wanting He-Man to be a martyr. But the two teenage kids find the key (Kevin mistakes it for a synthesizer), and the heroes have to find them, but the bad guys are chasing them, and people get separated -- and it leads to about 20 minutes of "who has the damn thing now?" After that 20 minutes the storylines finally come together and we have some deus ex machina and a final battle to get to. Yippee!
Here's Where it Fails: In multiple places -- but I promise you I've actually got more things to praise about it than to criticize.
To get to the smaller points, the production values aren't the best (maybe okay for the time, but don't expect to be blown away by the special effects -- sometimes they don't even fully synch up with what's happening on screen). The dialogue is dreadful in places (but spectacular in others -- I'll get to that in my Gush), and Dolph Lundgren is nigh impossible to understand because his accent is so thick. They overplay Gwildor's exposure to earth-culture and spend WAY too much time at the chicken place (these points are all better addressed in the Nostalgia Critic's review, so I won't touch them here).
More importantly, what turns a lot of original fans off to the movie is that it's viewed as too different from the original cartoon series. I'll address a number of these points here:
-He-man is shown as having superhuman strength perhaps once, and is more often seen fighting with a gun than a sword.
-There's no Orko, but I'm kind of glad they left him out because I could have done without the muppet on strings.
-You never see Prince Adam, and the "transformation" sequences in both the He-man and She-ra cartoons were considered highlights of the series, to children.
-The story doesn't take place in Eternia -- a landscape that fans would have liked to see in greater detail. To be fair about the latter, though, this probably saved a buttload on production values, and for a film that budgetted an estimated $17 million, that was probably a good thing.
-I don't hear this often from fans of the series, but wonder about it myself -- Teela has implied romantic feelings for He-man in the series, or at least I'm almost certain she does, and this never gets addressed or even hinted at onscreen. (Most fans complain that Teela's not a redhead, and I think that's inconsequential.) Seeing some character development for the main heroes, and not the villains (you get an interesting moment between Skeletor and Evil-Lyn in the middle of the movie) nor two earthlings who are carried through the entire movie by means of inertia, would have really grounded the film a bit more.
-I think it's a bit of a plot hole that He-man can muster the strength to fight Skeletor at the end of the film, while Skeletor has absorbed the powers of Greyskull, if the power in He-man's sword comes from the castle, or the Sorceress. Bear in mind here that Skeletor has both, and should therefore have had the power to deny him the added strength that the sword provides him. Anything for a happy ending, right guys?
-Most of Skeletor's usual Rogues Gallery has changed. The only returners are Evil-Lyn and Beast Man -- the latter of which never speaks and does not interact with animals, as the cartoon version does. Instead he's more used a like a poor man's Sabretooth. The other villains were invented for the film, so that again, there would be an excuse to release some new figurines.
Something tells me this has nothing to do with him not knowing it's not real bacon.
That Being Said: I never had a problem with the movie being too different from the series as a child. Never. Now, you might say "But DVD Fairy, that's because you're a girl!", and I therefore might not have been as into the series, but I am also a girl who had two big brothers. So a lot of things I watched were things directed at boys. When I was a kid, I noticed differences, sure, but I didn't care because unlike the cartoon, the movie, to me (aged 4 at least), was real. And it's okay if things are a little different when it's real. People say it's okay that the first Ninja Turtles movie was nothing like the cartoon because it more closely resembled the comics. But if you were born around 1984 and were a turtles fan, then it's very likely that you didn't READ the comics at the time and only knew the cartoon. So to make concessions for one fandom and not the other is kind of pointless.
The choice to set most of the film on Earth, I thought, was a smart move to make, not only from a budget standpoint, but also because it would allow newcomers a familiar entry point. Julie and Kevin are there so that kids who have never seen the movie have somebody normal to identify with (and as a child I met more kids who were interested in MEETING their heroes and not being them, so having people project onto them instead of He-man makes sense to me).
The backstory about Julie's parents seems kind of dark and out of nowhere, but I think it was handled well enough within the film, and every now and again produced some interesting scenes. There's a moment where Julie is tricked into thinking her mother is alive, which genuinely disturbed me when I was little, because I could not imagine anyone being so mean as to do that to a person, and the ending, I'll admit, always makes me really happy, even if it's kind of deus ex machina (spoiler: She and Kevin are sent home to a time just before her parents died, so she is able to prevent them getting on the flight that would have led to it).
Another thing that I really, REALLY enjoy about the movie is its score, composed by Bill Conti, who also composed the famous Rocky theme. Skeletor's entrance music at the beginning of the movie is my ringtone, in fact. I absolutely love this soundtrack, and my only regret is that the album doesn't include the Cosmic Key music, which I find rather pretty.
Dolph Lundgren might be hard to understand, but he looks perfect for the part, and I won't say he's the best of actors, but then you don't see a lot of facial expressions in the old cartoon, either.
Except for when it's completely inappropriate.
Of the new villains, Blade is probably one of the most interesting, because his dialogue in the movie suggests there is some assumed continuity with his character, that he's faced off with He-man before (and is excited to have another chance to). It's a shame the cartoon never took advantage of this, and is probably one of the reasons that the redesign for TriClops (one of the original rogues) in the 2002 MOTU Cartoon Series was kind of an amalgamation of the original and this new character. OR, conversely, it might be possible that Blade was developed as a version of TriClops without the eye gimmick, which would have been hard to envision on the screen back then.
Note the similarities.
Everything else that's nice I have to say about this movie belongs in its own section, so without further ado...
Here's My Main Gush: Skeletor. Holy crap do I enjoy the film version of Skeletor. Now, let me explain to you a few things about myself before I continue, because I want the level of my enthusiasm, even from an early age, to be perfectly clear: As I said before, I have two older brothers, and am the baby in the family. There was a lot of boy stuff in my house growing up, but that doesn't mean girly stuff was completely absent from my upbringing. In fact, anything that was "for girls" was special, to me, because it was just for me. Any token girl character in a series for boys was almost always automatically my favorite character, because it gave me something to identify with. However, with Masters of the Universe, I've always been more interested in Skeletor -- largely because while my brothers got to see something of the series and toys before they saw the movie, I myself started with the movie, and Skeletor is arguably the most noticeable and engaging character onscreen. He's the only one who either doesn't suffer from terrible dialogue, or is played by a good enough actor to deliver it well, and despite suffering from bad makeup (which was really the best they could do back then), his overall design was so awesome that parts of it influenced his 2002 redesign.
My first review on this site featured Frank Langella, too, and I promise that my choosing this as the second full review was entirely coincidental, but I have to stop and mark his performance in this. I have always been impressed by the work he put into this -- largely because this wasn't the most ambitious of productions, and most of the time all he got to do was stand around, monologue and act menacing. He was playing a movie version of a cartoon villain, who -- let's face it -- looks and sounds pretty damn corny when measured up to most others. From that whiny voice to the groan-worthy one-liners, he was a bad guy in what was clearly a kid's show, and Langella had the balls to take the role he was given and try to play him totally straight. He studied the role, and he worked with Meg Foster (Evil-Lynn) to develop some on their background to work out body language, and once shooting started up, he stormed in, full regalia, and played Skeletor like a fantasy villain would be played by today's standards. (And fair enough that Nostalgia Critic didn't like his "becoming a god" speech, but I think that the dialogue was bad and Langella made it his bitch, end of story.)
I still openly acknowledge that this Skeletor breaks all the Evil Overlord rules. He would rather his enemy be broken than killed. He doesn't heed the sound advice of his advisors. He conveniently looks away from avenues of escape (or entry), and almost always shows a greater willingness to bump off one of his own followers for screwing up where even he has failed multiple times than somebody who is actually doing him real damage.
But man, he's fun to watch.
In Conclusion: Masters of the Universe is not a good movie, but for the right people, and when you're in the right mood, it makes for an afternoon of nostalgic fun.
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