Masters of the Universe

Hollywood spent nearly forty years trying to drag He-Man back onto the big screen, cycling through directors the way Skeletor cycles through henchmen, and the result of all that development purgatory is, somewhat miraculously, fine. Travis Knight, the man who made Bumblebee the only Transformers film with a pulse, clearly understands the assignment: take a property born as a thirty minute toy commercial and find the human being buried under the pectorals. Nicholas Galitzine plays Prince Adam as a displaced golden retriever, stranded on Earth for fifteen years before the Sword of Power yanks him home to an Eternia rotting under Skeletor's rule. The bones of a genuinely good fantasy film are all here, assembled with obvious affection. The problem is that the script keeps tripping over its own punchlines on the way to using them.

The cast is absurdly overqualified. Idris Elba brings actual gravitas to Man-At-Arms, Camila Mendes makes Teela considerably more than a sidekick, and Alison Brie commits to Evil-Lyn like she is auditioning for a better movie that may yet exist. Then there is Jared Leto's Skeletor, a performance that swings between genuinely menacing and community theater Halloween special, sometimes within the same scene. The bigger issue is the script's pathological fear of silence. Every emotional beat, every moment of awe, every flicker of stakes gets immediately defused by a quip, as if the four credited screenwriters were each contractually obligated to land a joke per page. When a film about a magic sword and a skull wizard does not trust its own sincerity, the audience notices, and the spell keeps breaking.

And yet, when Knight is allowed to direct instead of refereeing the joke quota, the film sings. Eternia looks gorgeous, a painterly toy box of impossible towers and chrome beasts that finally does the source material justice. The first full transformation, sword raised and lightning cracking, is a legitimate goosebumps moment that earns the forty year wait, and the kids in my screening were practically levitating. The bright side is real: this is a sincere, handsome, occasionally rousing blockbuster that loves its dumb source material enough to find something true inside it. If the inevitable sequel fires two of the screenwriters and learns to trust the silence, He-Man might actually become the franchise Amazon paid for. The power is there. It just needs to stop apologizing for itself.