Masters of the Universe

Synopsis

Prince Adam returns to battle the forces of evil, defend Eternia and become He-Man once more.

At least that was the plan.

What follows is a two-hour assault on nostalgia featuring questionable dialogue, relentless one-liners, and a villain who somehow manages to make world domination look less appealing than a Monday morning Teams meeting.

What I Expected

As a child of the 80s, I went into this film hoping for a bit of nostalgia.

Not a frame-by-frame recreation of the cartoon.

Not an Oscar-winning masterpiece.

Just a fun trip back to Eternia.

I also deliberately avoided looking too closely at the cast beforehand. For me, this wasn’t about actors. It was about revisiting a small part of my childhood.

Unfortunately, what followed was a masterclass in how not to do that.

What I Got

The acting was, at best, variable.

The dialogue often felt like it had been generated by feeding every Marvel script into an AI model and then asking it to remove all of the good bits.

The humour rarely landed. The dramatic moments rarely felt dramatic. And the emotional moments had all the impact of a strongly worded email.

Skeletor deserves special mention — not because he was particularly threatening, not because he was particularly memorable, but because he managed to transform one of the most iconic villains in fantasy into a walking collection of cringe-worthy one-liners.

At one point I found myself wondering how this had happened. Then I discovered afterwards that Skeletor was played by Jared Leto. Suddenly a number of creative decisions began to make sense. Not good decisions. But decisions.

Even Idris Elba couldn’t save this one. Which is saying something, because he was legendary as Heimdall in the Thor films. Here he looked like a man quietly wondering whether there was still time to leave before filming had finished.

Review

The highlight of the film? A brief Dolph Lundgren cameo.

Not because of nostalgia. Not because of the acting. Simply because it was a respectful nod to the 1987 film — the only moment in two hours that felt like it understood what this property actually means to people.

Battle Cat eventually appeared. The end credits also appeared. Both were welcome developments.

I’d rather spend two hours troubleshooting printer drivers over a VPN connection than sit through this again.

Final Verdict

By the Power of Grayskull…

I would not watch this again. The 0.1 out of 5 is awarded for Battle Cat — who did eventually appear near the end, though even that was a bit meh — and Dolph Lundgren’s cameo. Without them, this review would have required negative numbers.