Masters Of The Universe ★★

Released: 3 June 2026

Director: Travis Knight

Starring: Nicholas Galitzine, Jared Leto, Idris Elba, Camilla Mendes, James Purefoy

The Masters of the Universe reboot’s journey to the silver screen has been rife with troubles for almost two decades. Nearly every major studio and director circulated at some point or another, until Amazon finally got a hold of the rights in 2024 and tapped Travis Knight to direct.

For those familiar with the IP, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was a spritely 80s cartoon that captured that era of children’s television perfectly – camp, vibrant, and nonsensical fun. Knight, no stranger to adapting 80s classics into contemporary family blockbusters (Bumblebee), helms this with that same joie-de-vive; the action is frenetic and explosive with the monsters and characters of Eternia feeling like a ten-year-old’s drawings come to life. The film really tries to channel the feeling of getting up early on a Sunday to run downstairs and watch the cartoon marathons of He-Man, Transformers, TMNT and Scooby Doo all morning. In some ways, it succeeds. But in most others, it doesn’t.

The film opens with an obtuse prologue introducing audiences to the fantastical realm of Eternia, the Sword of Power, and scrawny youngster Adam who is striving to be a better man for his father, King Randor (James Purefoy). An attack from Skeletor (Jared Leto) forces Adam and the Sword to flee to Earth, and he lives out his years longing for vengeance as we jump a decade or so forward to a now older Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) on a Hinge date fantasing about reuniting with the sword (that he has since lost) and returning home. It’s a clunky, exposition-laden first act that skims through the “whose who” of the source material’s extensive roster and the lore behind the Maguffin – it’s later revealed, however, that Adam was only ever heroic because of his empathy and deep-rooted humanity which is never once explored or setup.

The Earth sequence is admittedly funny, the fish-out-water elements offering a few laughs. There’s no information about the ten years in which the film skims over – who knows if Adam had an adoptive family, or how he got his seemingly decent-paying job in HR or built his social cues – but it’s funny to watch an inept Adam obsess with swords until it finally comes to fruition when he finds it in a shop and calls himself home with the help of his childhood friend Teela (Camilla Mendes). Home, however, is not what he imagined it to be and he sets out, alongside the heroes of Eternia, to free the city from Skeletor’s rule.

Here, the film does find its groove a little more but most of the mission, and even the setup, feels arbitrary and the result of a series of thinly connected coincidences and contrivances. The moment in which Adam finally uses the Sword for the first time (a visually cool transformation) feels unearned and then he’s basically invincible so his epic quest becomes pretty easy. Even when the script does try to add stakes, the emotionality of it never hits because the film doesn’t spend any time building out those relationships or motifs. The nonsensicality of the 80s show works for condensed, singular 20-minute episodes but the lack of a cohesive plot with emotions, stakes, tension and narrative threads doesn’t translate the same way in a film adaptation.

There’s also a fine line between camp and cringe, and a lot of the dialogue feels more like the latter. Skeletor was always a goofy villain but the quippy one-liners detract from his imposition as a character; Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn is a fun addition but her pantomime performance feels out-of-place alongside the more grounded efforts of Mendes, Idris Elba, and even Galitzine’s earnestness; the parent-child scenes between Mendes and Elba or even Galtizine and Purefoy yield nothing; even the final scene feels awfully reminiscent of Fant4stic’s infamous “say that again” conclusion. It’s perhaps unfair to ask for a Masters of the Universe film to have depth when the cartoons didn’t; it is silly and goofy as the show was, the world is vibrant and visually well realised like the colourful animations; the action is fizzy and dynamic and fun. And yet, the adaptation still struggles to hold on to any real feeling by the time the credits roll. The soundtrack shreds though, but it’s otherwise a loud, empty outing for He-Man. He may be a jack of all universes, but he’s certainly a master of none.