Following is my review of the 2026 movie, Masters of the Universe. Enjoy!
Is He-Man a Flash in the Pan?
The evening of the day my family saw Masters of the Universe (2026) in the theater, we also streamed Flash Gordon (1980). The films are many years apart, made by very different teams of people in very different Hollywood cultures, but the one reminded us of the other. They have more in common than might at first appear. The surface similarities: Both are adaptations of sword-and-sorcery/sci-fi hodge-podge properties, Flash Gordon beginning its life as a comic strip which had been adapted into a serial film as long ago as 1936. Both feature a blonde beefcake in the lead role, though Sam J. Jones's Flash forgoes Nicholas Galitzine's mild-mannered alter ego of Adam Glenn in favor of being all testosterone, all the time. Both are what could be classified as kids' stuff: silly good-vs.-evil adventure material that mature individuals might eschew as having no serious issues behind them. Flash Gordon was made in the 80s; Masters was made for people who grew up in the 80s.
Interestingly, both also feature music by members of the band Queen. Flash sported an entire soundtrack by the then-thriving band; Masters has its own score enhanced by the distinctive stylings of Queen's legendary lead guitarist, Brian May. (The movie also makes use of a single tune from another Queen-penned soundtrack, 1986's Highlander - another sword-wielding fantasy property. The song, "Princes of the Universe," plays during a knowingly spoofy striding-into-battle heroic tableau, very Guardians of the Galaxy.) Queen's flashy, bombastic, and homoerotically tinged music stylings are a great match for both films, which each sought to embrace the camp, absurdity, and overt sexuality of their respective subjects. In the case of Flash Gordon, sex is splashed all over the screen, with objectivized women traipsing around in slinky and skimpy costumes, being panted over by men in skin-tight slacks when they aren't being whipped or otherwise exploited.
The sexuality of He-Man, MOTU's superhero, is a touchy subject for fans who grew up on the ostensibly innocent cartoon, its original run lasting from 1983-1984. But in retrospect, looking back with the jaded and genderfluid eyes of the late 2020s, that sexuality is almost impossible to ignore. A tan, muscular guy who, when he's not wearing a pink vest, regularly exposes his pecs and abs, has never heard of tight slacks - or any pants at all, for that matter - wrestling a bunch of other guys who also have no pants? Come on. The original cartoon, unapologetically created to sell to its impressionable audience the line of action figures introduced in 1982 by Mattel, was produced by the California-based animation studio Filmation. Yes, California, in the United States of America. Domestic art studios were something that still happened in the 80s, with American animators funded by friendly executive producer Lou Scheimer. Scheimer was an old-fashioned mom-and-pop business owner who employed his wife Jay as well as his daughter Erika Scheimer on the He-Man series, the latter as a voice actor and eventually as a recording director. Erika came out as homosexual in 2007 and is quoted as saying that the animation studio was "one of the gayest places in town." What I'm saying is - the things you feel when you look at that muscle-bound oaf? They're not just your imagination.
Masters's Adam isn't gay (his first scene has him sharing ill-advisedly candid biographical details while on a date with a woman, and he clearly has the hots for Camila Mendes's Teela), but what themes the tongue-in-cheek film does manage to explore do center around sex - that is, gender. (But also sex - that is, coitus. More about that later.) The introductory scenes have Adam awkwardly narrating events from his childhood on the fantastical world of Eternia. Even though he was the royal prince, and therefore securely in the 1%, we're immediately forced to sympathize with his character, who gets shoved around by his peers, patronized by the royal weapons master (Idris Elba as Duncan), and even given a beat-down by his own father, King Randor (James Purefoy). The issue is that Adam doesn't seem to have what it takes to be a "man" in this world of war, where battle is the measuring stick for success and victory the only acceptable outcome.
A subsequent scene shows the grown Adam, exiled to Earth after a coup d'etat by the wicked Skeletor (Jared Leto), sitting in a cubicle, forced to work a 9-to-5 rather than wear a crown (or a loincloth). His nameplate informs us of his preferred pronouns: HE/HIM. It's a joke: we all know we're looking at "He-Man," the most masculine name to embarrass the English language. On another level, it may also be a sly statement on the current political discourse over gender identity - though if so, it's left subtle enough not to offend parties on any side of the debate. But it also, in a more traditional, old-fashioned sense, touches on Adam's own questions of identity. The poor guy finds himself burdened not only by the loss of his family and world, but by the disbelief of everyone around him in the existence of that world, AND, on top of all that, his lingering lack of confidence in his own masculinity.
Flash Gordon, a film of an earlier time, has no such difficult questions to explore. Unlikely lead Jones plays a confident quarterback for the New York Jets, whose father no doubt instilled in him all-American values, and never beat him to the ground with a sword. If the film has a message beyond "look at all the gilding on everyone's costumes," it's that men and women fooling around is lots of fun, kinks are OK on full display, but that real romance leads to marriage. Even the world-murdering villain - the cringing yellow-peril stereotype Ming the Merciless, played with understated skeeviness by the great Max von Sydow, who seems content to let the flexing of his fingers and his costume do most of the acting - tries to wed Flash's girlfriend Dale Arden (Melody Anderson). Marriage is the right thing to do, for both corn-fed footballers and harem-owning tyrants. Good naturally defeats evil in the end, and Flash gets his girl, on the way rousing allies to his side so they can (as he insistently puts it, in one of several hilariously transparent sports analogies) "team up" to win.
Adam likewise finds he has to do a lot of convincing of people, though his methods are much less sports-related. He has the right job for it, being a conflict resolution expert in the human resources department of his non-descript Business Company on Earth. Though Adam's obsessive searching for his lost Sword of Power stands him in poor stead with management, the young man nevertheless takes his career skills with him when he ultimately returns to the world of his birth. It's a little difficult to understand what director Travis Knight was really trying to say about corporate America here. Though Adam's boss (played by Sasheer Zamata) seems a nagging caricature, and Adam doesn't seem to have a lot of respect for his co-workers (he hates Darrell, for instance), he still is described as being good at his job in a way that suggests that matters.
The lack of clarity here is one that's evident in other would-be themes of the story. Is Adam's instinct for compromise meant to be laughed at, as in the scene where he stupidly attempts to find common ground with the one-dimensionally wicked Trap Jaw? Or is it his greatest and most defining heroic trait, as the Sorceress implies at the climax of the film? To be fair, this messiness is cribbed directly from the Filmation series, which - even though it was the first in a long line of animated cartoons created solely as merchandising vehicles - was made in a time when interest-group-led parental concerns required strict moral boundaries on juvenile entertainment. He-Man could spend 18 of the 20-odd minutes of every day's episode punching bad guys and tossing them in the mud, but it was all while paying ludicrous lip service to the idea of only using conflict as a last resort. And in the brief PSA that concluded every episode, viewers were served up a tidy moral lesson about sharing, or not judging a book by its cover. Similarly, Knight's Adam must try to find common ground with even the most dyed-in-the-wool enemies - before wiping the floor with them.
Flash Gordon was not a movie that had any concern for being faithful to its source material. Producer Dino de Laurentis failed to get famous Italian Spaghetti Western auteur Sergio Leone on board to direct the adaptation, due to Leone's dissatisfaction with how far the script had strayed from the strips. (Another early interested party? George Lucas, who ironically turned to his Star Wars idea after failing to get the rights to Gordon from Laurentis. The eventual 1980 Laurentis release had to contend with looking like a poor imitation of Lucas's seminal series.) Though the movie used the main elements of the original comic, it added characters, comedy, and set an unclear and contradictory tone that was alternately naive and perverse, twisting what was a serious adventure story into something like Adam West's Batman.
That was then; Hollywood was known for and largely expected to take artistic liberties. But in 2026, post-MCU, any fandom worth its salt requires complete fidelity to canon from any adaptation - on pain of a severe internet drubbing. And, for the most part, Travis Knight obediently delivers. The first of multiple post-credit scenes even includes that PSA lesson, albeit one told with more than a pinch of meta self-awareness. As an added bonus, the lesson is expounded by fan-favorite floating magician Orko, who appeared in the great majority of the cartoon's episodes but was notoriously missing from the previous 1987 Masters film.
Speaking of that 1987 incarnation, its He-Man, Dolph Lundgren, delivers a fan-serving but undoubtedly heartwarming cameo in this iteration, providing advice and one of several potential father figures to our latest blonde muscle-man.
The settings and sets imitate the colorful palette of the animated series, giving us a passable live-action imitation of Castle Grayskull, Snake Mountain, and the surrounding fantastical forests we'll remember from our childhood. Many of the series' and toy line's delightfully chimerical characters are here, in faithful reproduction: villains in the form of the aforementioned Skeletor and Trap Jaw, along with Tri-Klops, Beast Man, and Evil Lyn. On the heroic side are the neck-stretching Mekaneck, the head-butting Ram Man, and the single-swollen-handed Fisto. (Other characters hide in easter eggs, such as the fishy Mer-Man, whose head can be found as a tile decoration on a floor; and the mystical Zodac, whose name is uttered as part of a pseudo-religious exclamation.) Knight embraces the ridiculously on-the-nose nomenclature of the originals, though he cleverly explains most of it away as the nicknames young Adam invented for Eternia's heroes based on his hazy child's memories of them. (To avoid confusing the audience - though it serves to add illogicality - none of the offended misidentified heroes offer up their "real" names.)
As is customary these days, Knight also peppers in some more obscure references for the hardcore fans - the unbreakable material "photanium" used in a prison cell, a name-drop of the absent winged warrior Stratos's kingdom of "Avion," "Fright Zone" being the name of both the store where Adam finds his sword and the Evil Horde playset sold by Mattel, the appearance in the store of both the warrior Torak (the original concept character that became He-Man) and Big Jim toys (a Mattel line that preceded MOTU), the use of 4 Non Blondes' song "What's Up" (associated with a famous online parody video cutting together clips from the cartoon) - and surely more that would be revealed by closer scrutiny and a photographic Filmation memory.
Also evoked to humorous, almost surreal effect, calling to mind spoofs such as The Naked Gun or Police Squad!, is the classic animated-episode-ending laugh by the good guys, who celebrate their victory by throwing their heads back in a display of mirth that lasts just a little too long to be natural. It's an awkwardly amusing scene that, like many would-be laughter-inducing moments in the movie, skates dangerously close to just being awkward. This moment stays on the right side of funny, since it's such an accurate lampoon. But others really do fall flat, such as when a pair of Earth police officers who have arrested Adam for sword thievery attempt to tease him. One cop cleverly references the movie Highlander (yes, that same one from before - weird how it came up twice), but his partner struggles to improvise an original insult of her own. We're meant to laugh at her discomfiture, but it ends up just being discomfiting. Much like a good bit of Adam's opening narration, which is intended to sound winningly straightforward and off-the-cuff, but ends up just sounding poorly written.
There are ways in which Knight's interpretation diverges from the cartoon. Roboto, for instance, who in his animated form was a man-sized and clearly manly robot, is a CGI giant here, and is voiced with much sarcasm by Kristen Wiig - a gender-swapped attempt to boost the number of female heroes and to garner the same success as recent snarky Star Wars droids such as Alan Tudyk's K-2SO. Skeletor is given the ability to burn people through mere skin-on-skin contact, a power his animated version never had. It really shouldn't matter, but some fans will complain that Eternia's man-at-arms is now brown-skinned instead of the caucasian Tom Selleck clone of his animated version. Though He-Man's winning desire to avoid conflict is still very much in place, the violence has to be ramped up for our 40 years older, (possibly) maturer audience. Several good guys get killed (no spoilers), and even He-Man has little compunction about tossing the odd villain into a pit of lava or impaling them on a sword. Some of those villains were never in the cartoon: Karg (Hung Dante Dong) is pulled from the even less-faithful 1987 film, and Goat Man (Hafbór Björnsson) is an obscure character pulled not from the Filmation series but from a Golden Book story.
This highlights one of the difficulties in adapting the He-Man legend with any accuracy, since what can really be deemed "canon" is up for grabs. The toys were released in 1982, a good year before the cartoon started airing, with Filmation providing its own narrative ideas and daily episodic plot structure (such as fully adopting the secret identity of Adam, first invented by DC Comics). During the preceding time, the action figures' back story was provided by the packaged mini-comics, which told a markedly different tale. Even without this disconnect, MOTU has from its earliest conception been a gloriously schizophrenic enterprise, developed to appeal to the widest array of childhood fantasies. Barbarians (the persistent rumor that He-Man was a repurposed Conan the Barbarian toy refuses to die) wield swords side-by-side with laser-gun-toting goggled mystics, space flight is possible but non-monarchical governments a distant dream, and talking tigers rub shoulders with women who transform into birds. It doesn't really make any sense, and Knight astutely doesn't try too hard to force it to.
In addition, he does eventually give us a message about the dangers of toxic masculinity. Duncan's overconfidence, his insistence on success being the only measure of worth, proves his downfall. Adam returns to find the weapons master a self-loathing alcoholic ("Drunken," as Wiig's Roboto nastily dubs him), unable to reconcile himself to Skeletor's victory. It takes a genuine, flaxen-haired young human resources manager repeating some of Duncan's own encouraging advice to get his father-figure back in the game. Failure, we learn, is not the end of the road. Adam's "real" father, when the two are finally reunited, is willing to admit that he was perhaps a bit too hard on his son, and that being true to oneself is more important than trying to live up to any image of what a "man" should be.
The value of being yourself is a common theme to the animated series as well; but the cartoon always undercut itself by conveying this message using a weak man who can simply raise a sword and speak magic words to transform into someone better - someone stronger. What happened to Adam, He-Man? The movie eventually sidesteps this core principle, endangering the support of its fan base by choosing a more internally consistent explanation: the power of Grayskull comes from inside, not from the sword. The magic words, as the Sorceress patiently explains, are "I have the power."
When it expresses such winning endearments, the movie succeeds in giving us a story with a little more value than just Saturday morning fluff. Maybe the original cartoon achieved that as well: maybe all those years of PSAs were more than just paying lip service. Maybe He-Man, perhaps without even meaning to, really did teach us some good lessons. What it also may have done without meaning to was introduce a lot of young people to sex. Its pervasive sexualized imagery, pulled from the paintings of artists like Frank Frazetta, undoubtedly awakened the desires of hetero- and homosexuals alike (and anyone in between); and this is something else that Knight doesn't shy away from. He realizes that any grown-ass man with an internet connection and access to the urban dictionary will be at least a little hesitant to say "Fisto" in mixed company. He addresses the issue with a series of double entendres which are funny at first, though they get a little tired with repetition. Skeletor also seems to be a trifle preoccupied with Adam's muscles and makes a lascivious reference to the hero's long, dangling "sword." Oddly, the movie retains the cartoon's chasteness with regard to its lead couple, since Adam's feelings for Teela remain unrequited. I guess it's OK to advise Ram Man to give people head, but adding a romantic subplot is just too fraught.
As for the performances of our actors, the lead roles are handled with aplomb by Nicholas Galitzine and Jared Leto. Both understand the zany assignment, and Galitzine's insecure Adam manages to be endearing without being too whiny. When he eventually makes the transformation to the much more muscular and slightly tanner He-Man (the superhero persona remains unnamed until the end of the film, but let's call a spade a spade), effectively re-enacting one of the most famous and inspiring sequences from the cartoon, we believe that, too. Leto, with his blue-skinned bodysuit, special-effect head, and melodrama-soaked voice (so curdled with pomposity that it's sometimes difficult to comprehend), is nearly unrecognizable - and perhaps that's for the best. The troubled star is eccentric even by Hollywood standards, and has a growing reputation for alienating his co-stars and dooming projects in which he appears (Morbius, Tron: Ares, Suicide Squad). But his power-hungry, unapologetically and smugly wicked Skeletor echoes the inventive name-calling and penchant for evil laughter of Filmation's one-and-only legendary Skeletor voice actor, Alan Oppenheimer - while wisely avoiding any nasal, high-pitched imitations, which could have easily descended into farce.
These two main characters bounce off of each other well, particularly during their final battle, which includes an intriguingly surreal and memorable mind-meld sequence that has Leto's bony form dressing in business casual attire and carrying a skull-labeled coffee cup. Some other actors were fortunate to be cast as important characters, and garner sufficient screentime to shine. Idris Elba does what he can with Duncan, who proves a more reckless and vulnerable man-at-arms than the unerring foster-father of the animated series. Camila Mendes's Teela gives Adam a perky and loyal (and platonic) partner. Some actors shine with the very few lines allotted to them, such as Jóhannes Jóhannesson as Fisto.
But the crowded stage means that many parts get lost in the shuffle, and some simply hit sour notes. I expected more from Alison Brie, whose comedic chops from Community should have helped her bring some wicked humor to the wicked witch Evil Lyn. Instead, she puts in a fairly one-note performance as the submissive half of a very unhealthy relationship with Skeletor. Morena Baccarin has nothing to do as the mysterious Sorceress, spending half of her screentime as a bird; and for the little we see of Charlotte Riley, it's hard to tell what mother Queen Marlena was to Adam. Male relationships are much more central to this plot. That might not seem surprising for an IP led by someone named "He-Man," but actually the toy line and its spin-offs were surprisingly supportive of and attractive to female fans, and there are strong female characters to spotlight in the universe, had Knight only found the time. (Perhaps there will be time in the sequel - wink, wink, check out those post-credit scenes.)
Any attempt to cover the crazy-quilt that is MOTU will have difficulty fitting it all in, and sometimes the throughline of the story suffers. It would have been nice, for instance, to understand just how a ten-year-old Eternian flung into an Earth lake managed to become a 25-year-old human resources manager. Was he adopted? The movie avoids cluttering its tale with any additional parental figures at the expense of a crucial plot point. Castle Grayskull, always a focus of the animated series and described as the heart of the universe in the opening narration, is seen often but proves to have little importance either to the freedom fighters or Skeletor. As suggested previously, the Sorceress appears once or twice to buck up Adam at crucial moments, but her larger purpose - and what she's been doing for the intervening fifteen years of our main character's absence - remains obscure. The entire planet seems to have been holding its breath while Adam was gone - I guess people age differently on Eternia.
Still, Masters hits many of the required nostalgia notes, gives us a cohesive summer spectacle, makes some sometimes-successful tries at humor, and teaches a lesson in the process. I'd argue it was more successful than Flash Gordon, whose lasciviousness was a greasy undercurrent behind glitzy glamor rather than the jokey admission of Masters, and whose allies had to be dragged into supporting the main characters' crusade against their own selfish interests and lack of empathy. Eternia's heroes, at least, all liked each other before Adam showed up; Flash's allies (the bird-winged Vultan and the uptight Barin) were busy with mutual conflict.
It seems ironic that the post-COVID, Trump-era movie should have more heart to it than one made before the proliferation of the internet and the birth of AI. Flash's budget of $20+ million, then thought frivolous, pales in comparison to MOTU's $170+ million. But Galitzine's Adam gives us charity and optimism. Jones's Flash comes off as empty, shallow, doltish. He means well, but doesn't seem to know why. It probably doesn't help that the actor fought with producer de Laurentis behind the scenes, leaving before post-production and causing some of his dialogue to be dubbed over by someone else. (Adding what you might call a secret identity to the part . . .)
Despite its perfunctory morality and see-sawing tone, Gordon has proven a cult favorite. It remains beautiful to look at, with a brutish swagger and an infectious soundtrack, and there is something charming in its brazen, lumbering simplicity. It's a kinky movie made in a simpler time. I hope Masters, a hopeful movie made in a more jaded time, has the same staying "power."