Masters Of The Universe
“Masters Of The Universe (1987)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: September 10th, 2015
Cannon Films’ live-action adaptation of the hit Filmation television series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universewas added to Netflix Instant a few days ago. Masters of the Universe is the first film I can remember seeing in a theatre. I was four years old. My mother had planned to take me to the 50th anniversary re-release of Disneys’ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but that film’s laborious pacing proved even more intolerable to me then than it does now. Unable to sit still, I began running up and down the aisles until my mother took me up and decided we should sneak into Masters of the Universe and at least attempt to salvage the money she’d spent. I sat in my seat, enthralled. Men on hoverboards. Men with lasers. Men with swords. Scary beast monsters. Skeleton makeup. I didn’t know anything about movies, really, but I knew this was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be watching all the time. So I did. We bought it on VHS shortly after it came out, and I am sure I watched 20-30 times as a child. I was probably 15 the most recent time. Now, thanks to Netflix and a bout of flu I can change “probably 15” to “today.”
Unfortunately my desire to be contrarian, to declare this one of those secret unheralded masterpieces of ‘80s genre filmmaking quelled soon after the movie began. Masters of the Universe is little more than a hodgepodge of other ‘80s blockbusters briefly held together by decent production design and cinematography. Like a lot of fun ‘80s films, nights in Eternia (and, later, on Earth) are bathed in near-perpetual fog. Grayskull is a massive chamber of tall statues and long hallways. Outdoors, during the day, Eternia looks like an apocalyptic wasteland of burning fire and dead bodies. The makeup effects also hold up surprisingly well. Frank Langella as Skeletor looks exactly like the kind of grimdark variation of the cartoon’s bumbling villain that this adaptation calls for. Evil Lyn, similarly, is transformed from a vamping cartoonist’s fantasy with a ridiculous headdress into an eerie, ethereal presence, like a dark version of the princess in David Lynch’s Dune. Even the group of mercenaries (Blade, Karg, Beast-Man, and Saurod) manage to be both frightening and singular, etching their sinister visages into my childhood psyche.
But much of my affection for the film ends with these memorable character designs. From the opening credits one can see this film has little interest in originality. The score, an insistent brassy number that pummels the audience as animated credits fly out towards the audience, blatantly rips off John Williams’ catchy, memorable theme forSuperman. Similarly, Gwildor, a character created for the film, is clearly modeled after Frank Oz’s Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, alternating between pandering comic relief and bland philosophical ruminations. “I’m going! I’m going!” becomes his pseudo-catchphrase, a comical answer to the impatient heroes trying to hurry him along. As for philosophy, at a late point in the film Kevin -- one of the Earth heroes in this fish-out-of-water story -- in a moment of screenwriter-ly self-doubt, declares “there’s a million of me” regarding his musical talents. “No, Kevin,” Gwildor replies, “only one of you. Only one of anyone.” Even ignoring the relative inanity of this statement (by children’s film standards, it could be much worse), it exists for no reason. Kevin’s conflicted opinion about his self-worth as a musician is not a story in the film. It comes up only in this moment so that there can be a thirty second pause for drama on the way to victory, where Gwildor and Kevin team up to create a new Cosmic Key and transport everyone back to Eternia.
That moment offers another insight into the failure of this film. The ending is far too long. For solid portions of the beginning I found it surprisingly enjoyable, albeit in a bland inoffensive way. Exactly the kind of movie to watch on a sick day home from work. Comforting in its familiar badness. Like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. This isn’t good, but it feels like childhood. As the title of this series would imply, I don’t often get that feeling. Four summers ago I rewatched the original Star Wars trilogy for the first time as an adult. As a child I loved everything Star Wars related. Read all the post-trilogy books, played the trading card game, played any video games I could get my hands on (at that point, my options were the infamous difficult SNES games and a variety of LucasArts PC games that ran horribly on my mother’s decrepit PC), and even played the tabletop RPG with the few friends I could coerce into playing along with me. The point of this digression is to say that I loved Star Wars, and that rewatching the original trilogy gave me none of the same feelings of warm reminiscence that the opening thirty minutes or so of Masters of the Universe did. Perhaps He-Man didn’t have as far to fall.
The finale, though, seems to have no idea where it’s going and thus keeps introducing new and unnecessary plot points in order to pad out the run time/give every major character a story arc. The battle in the record store leads into the hoverboard fight leads into He-Man being captured and Skeletor turning into a golden god leads into the aforementioned storyline with Kevin regaining his apparently lost confidence as a musician. It’s in these moments that we also receive the highest deluge of elements ripped off from other movies, especially Star Wars. The hoverboard sequence is very reminiscent of the speeder bike sequence on Endor, the sword battle between Skeletor and He-Man that climaxes the film feels exactly like the one between Darth Vader and Luke in The Empire Strikes Back (even to the point of having similar camera placement), and Skeletor’s “demise” immediately recalls Emperor Palpatine’s chasmic fate. Even the aforementioned jerry-rigged Cosmic Key has a distinct Back to the Future vibe to it. The fun evaporates and I found myself waiting for the movie to be over. Waiting very impatiently. Even Skeletor’s golden god get-up feels entirely unnecessary, as He-Man quickly defeats him and he reverts back to his former (much better) makeup.
Hopefully in the future this column will be a little more… relevant? I can’t make any promises, but I do feel a little strange writing 1000 words about why a movie that bombed at the box office, critics hated, and has not been particularly well-loved outside of camp nostalgia circles, is not a very good movie. Except, I guess, its uniqueness to my own cinematic autobiography. What’s the first movie you can remember seeing in the theatre seems like a great icebreaker question it has never occurred to me to ask a person before? Perhaps now I’ll start. If any of our listeners/readers happen to read this entire review, maybe they’d like to weigh in with their own early theatrical experiences
-Basil Swartzfager, 2015
