Classic Movie Review : Masters of the Universe (1987)
Masters of the Universe is a psychedelic and sexually ambiguous swords-and-planets cartoon created by Mattel in the early eighties to sell action figures. It is the type of over-the-top media that could've only existed in this particular decade without any parents going like : "fuck, I have no clue what the hell is going on and I doubt my child does". But the eighties were all backwards so, unbeknownst to me, someone made a Masters of the Universe live-action movie in 1987 and it's pretty great in context.
Given that you'd need to explain the entire lore of the series of unsuspecting audiences, Gary Goddard's adaptation of Masters of the Universe is pretty straightforward. Skeletor (freakin' Frank Langella of all people) has kidnapped the sorceress of Castle Greyskull (Christina Pickles) and he wants to use something called the cosmic key to breach into the castle through a portal. He-Man (Dolph Lundgren) try to use the artifact instead to rescue the sorceress, but end up having to flee to another realm.
On Earth, of course!
(Meta) Commercialism
This is a pretty straightforward E for Everyone movie (in the eighties, this would be PG-13 today) where forces of good and evil fight over a powerful ancient relic. Given that you're old enough, you've probably seen movies like Masters of the Universe at least fifty times in your life. It has more in common with Big Trouble in Little China than it does with the cartoon. But if you consider that Masters of the Universe is a metacommentary on the cartoon of the same name, it works somehow.
One detail I’m obsessing over is that when the cosmic key lands on Earth through a portal of its own creation, it’s mistaken for a super sophisticated Japanese synthesizer by two dumb teenage kids (Robert Duncan McNeill and a pre-Friends Courtney Cox). A sacred and powerful object is mistaken for a commodity as its true usage is foreign to a society where It is not required to travel to other worlds in order to survive. Kevin spends almost half the movie trying to make music with it.
I might be the weirdest, most baked film audience you've ever met in your life, but I find it hilarious that a Mattel owned property produced a fucking film basically telling there's actual magic in store bought bullshit. It's such a product of the Hollywood cocaine era. This couldn't have happened at any other time in film history. I'll admit it's a dumb fucking reason to like a movie, but I love silly, unself-conscious stuff and a mulleted Dolph Lundgren playing He-Man looking for a jacked synthesizer is exactly that.
Skeletor and the Death of Moral Cinema
As I priorly explained, Masters of the Universe is an unabashedly moral fantasy. Everyone that fights for freedom, love and whatnot are slick and beautiful and everyone against it are some kind of weird, corrupted beasts. On top of a politician warlock with a skull for a head, there's somewhat of a wolfman, a one-eyes psycho who's a master of projectiles, a stone-faced sorceress who looks like like the antagonist from Sleeping Beauty. Apparently, not being chill makes you rot.
In the most intertesting scene of the movie, the aforementioned sorceress (Meg Foster) transforms into Courtney Cox's dead mother to coerce her into handing over the cosmic key. This is interesting because it questions her character's true motivations. Was she interested in freeing a distant civilization from a skull-faced man or was she in it for herself all along like we’re doing with Ukraine? This is why you can't make moral cinema anymore. It's too depressing to be confronted to our own self-serving bullshit.
*
Masters of the Universe isn't a classic by any means, but it’s a goofy and anachronistic movie made in an era we won't ever experience again. It is appropriately out of its mind. It doesn’t have much to do with the cartoons as it tries to reboot its themes on a more conventional axis, without He-Man's weird, latent sexuality, but who gives a fuck? Decent barbarian-in-underwear movies are few and far between and Masters of the Universe fits the bill even if it's really about an interdimensional synthesizer.
