Sonic the Hedgehog (Paramount, 2020) starts in medias res with Sonic running through Downtown [city]. Then we get a flashback of Sonic explaining to us a montage of his life growing up. He knows we can watch it, he says things like “That’s longclaw”. His mother figure get shot, and, fearing for his power, she opens a portal to Earth to save him from attackers. In under 4 minutes, we get to 10 years later.
Masters of the Universe starts on Eternia. We follow him through his daily life. We watch him train (he’s the weakling and the welp), we learn about the mythical power of a god and the sword what contains it. Then, enemies attack, his parents are attacked, and he is sent through a portal to Earth. I wasn’t timing, but I think it was 20 minutes until we hit the 15 years later text.
Then, MotU hits us with a bit of product placement (Coca-Cola!) and we reveal that Adam is a grown, honest-to-a-fault dweeb on a first date. He’s been talking continuously about his fantasy land for twenty minutes.
Masters of the Universe is not a Sonic Movie, and it doesn’t want to be. It wants to be a different Paramount movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023).
These two movies occupy the exact same spot in the cultural landscape: a heartfelt genre film with charm and humor in equal parts. The D&D movie, unfortunately, did it more earnestly, and better all around. The CG here all felt like CG.
David Erlich on IndieWire compares it to Guardians of the Galaxy, and I see it. “Give ‘em Head” is a line as funny as it is jarring. It’s delivered by a joke character we spend little time with, when it should be a a Peter Quill line. There’s a “pussy” joke aimed at the giant cat that really doesn’t land, written just because they could. The humor is strangely raunchy for such a toyetic world. If this seems a hard circle to square, it gets easier when you remember the target audience: 50-year old children.
That’s not to say that a movie is above analysis, criticism, or the standards of good storytelling just because it’s aimed at children! The Sonic movies are better than they have any right to be. The recent Sheep Detectives film is one of my favorite movies of the year! But Masters of the Universe commits a few basic errors.
The biggest one is having Skeletor quote the bible. Doubly bad, he does it in a cliche. Adam comes back to face Skeletor after time away, and Skeletor rightfully taunts him. Unfortunately, he does this with, “Oh, look. The prodigal son returns!”
NO! Bad!
Prodigal means “spending a lot of money!” That’s not a thing Adam has done! The prodigal son is a reference to a specific bible story! It DOES NOT MAKE SENSE FOR SKELETOR TO SAY THIS, and it totally broke my immersion of the film in the middle of its best monologue! Bah! At this point in the film1, this remark is inexplicable and inexcusable.
The biggest difference between this movie and Sonic or Guardians of the Galaxy is that those movies aren’t ashamed of their source material. Star Lord’s name is made a bit of a joke in the beginning of the movie, but he’s never ashamed of it. He’s ashamed that he’s not more famous. And by the end of the movie, he earns that fame.
Here, all of the characters couch their names by the excuse that a 10-year old boy named them. That’s Trap-Jaw, there’s Fisto next to Ram-Man. Of course these names are dumb, and the characters all take umbrage with the names. But at no point do they say, “My name isn’t Fisto, it’s Jack.” Because they can’t! There is no other name. So the movie tries to have it both ways by having the characters accept their new dumb names, and it doesn’t work.
Adam himself fails at this in two ways: first because he’s constantly telling people, “I’m Adam… you know, the king’s son?” Does he not have a last name where he’s from? Presumably Glenn is his Earth name, given by whatever foster family fished him out of the lake and hooked him up with a social security number.
Second, because they want to have your title drop please clap moment, he’s set up to reveal his own nickname for himself at the end of the movie. And I simply refuse to believe that he had a superhero name for himself. He was idolizing the people around him, and saying that He-Man is the kind of dumb name only a 10-year old boy could come up with is both true and insulting to the viewers.
The movie is afraid to take risks. In the third act, it invokes another one of my movie-going pet peeves. A bunch of rocks fall on Adam’s dad, prompting him to clear the rubble away. The king is bleeding lightly and has exactly enough time to forgive and apologize to Adam, providing the closure he needs before dying quietly.
NO!
It’s much better to have the king die in front of Adam, showing that as strong as he is, he’s still powerless. Have him seek validation from his father that he NEVER could have gotten, and now never will. By having his father say “Yeah I was wrong, being weak is great actually” and then dying because his super-strong son couldn’t save him, even at his strongest, is just serving to make Adam happier. Well-adjusted, perfect heroes aren’t compelling!
Have Adam’s mom tell him that his dad would have been proud. Let him wrestle with the fact that it’s a lie, that he wasn’t strong enough to save him. Show him doubt over whether his emotional strength really is as good as his father’s actual might. Give us a hero who aches to prove himself to a man who would never accept him and could never accept his form of power.
Kill the king before his arc is complete, and let the audience wrestle with that lack of satisfaction. And, again, GIVE US A SCENE WITH HIS MOTHER WHO IS ALSO STILL ALIVE!
The movie is a romp, I won’t deny that. It’s not as much of a romp as other movies in the same sapce, and unlike some of those, it’s embarrassed to be what it is. It’s a coward’s movie, one that allows a dad to give a soliloquy about why all of his beliefs are wrong moments beofre he dies, one that apoogizes for its characters having dumb and goofy names.
And the biggest sin of all is that Battle-Cat, the talking green tiger, is on screen for like 3 total minutes. (To say nothing of the times where both he and the kickass robot lady disappear from the backgrounds of scenes until the moment they are plot relevant again).
If you’re a child of a certain again (and again, that age is 50), this is a fun afternoon. But it doesn’t respect you as a viewer, it doesn’t take risks, and it’s embarrassed to be a movie about he-man. Is it good? Sure. Is it fun? Absolutely.
And that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it.
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Near the end of the movie, Skeletor enters Adam’s mind and pokes through his memories. Adam had liked in Oklahoma City for 15 years at this point. It’s likely he knows who Jesus is, and my even be familiar with the story of the Prodigal Son. By extension, it’s plausible that Skeletor has a passing familiarity with the same. In a sequel, I could excuse this line (but probably wouldn’t). ↩