Masters of the Universe

The Sincerity of the Sword

I really did not expect to care about a man in a furry loincloth. Going into Travis Knight’s *Masters of the Universe*, I had my guard fully up. We live in a time when toy lines keep getting dragged back to life and dressed up as cinema. But Knight, who already did something unexpectedly tender with *Bumblebee*, makes one crucial choice here: he takes the material seriously, though never so seriously that it becomes ridiculous. As he told *Empire Magazine*, "There's an inherent silliness to it, which we are acknowledging and embracing." That balance saves the whole movie.



The opening stretch on Earth has a nice roughness to it. It feels tactile, almost handmade in places. I kept thinking about how childhood memory distorts things, how those old cartoons always felt bigger and stranger in our heads than they ever did on a real TV. Knight handles the return to Eternia not as some clean digital doorway but as a violent rip in the fabric of things. The sky doesn’t simply light up. It bruises. Maybe the grading is a little overcooked, depending on your tolerance for modern blockbuster palettes, but I found the mood strangely effective.

Nicholas Galitzine is a big part of why it works. After his run as a romantic lead in *The Idea of You*, seeing him bulked up as Prince Adam is a bit disorienting. Smartly, he doesn’t carry that size like a born warrior. At first he seems almost apologetic inside it. In the scene where he finally takes hold of the Power Sword, he doesn’t strike a triumphant pose right away. His shoulders sag. His breath goes shallow. The sword looks genuinely heavy in his hand before the magic hits. That little beat gives the scene weight it could easily have lost.



And then there’s Skeletor, or rather Jared Leto disappearing gleefully inside him. With the face fully CGI, the role lives in voice and physical rhythm, and Leto goes broad in a way that mostly pays off. He moves like a classically trained actor who wandered into a metal concert and decided to stay. Not every line lands, and now and then the camp threatens to topple over into pure nonsense. Still, his scenes with Alison Brie’s Evil-Lyn are genuinely fun because she does the opposite. Where he buzzes with malicious restlessness, she barely moves. It gives the whole villain side of the film an actual texture.

Idris Elba, as Duncan, gives the lore some backbone without sounding trapped inside exposition, and Camila Mendes brings Teela a nice blunt pragmatism. Both of them commit to the stakes even when the production design is screaming in color from every corner.



There’s one sequence near the middle that explains what Knight is really interested in. Adam and Teela are trying to cross a collapsing causeway outside Castle Grayskull, and instead of turning it into pure visual overload, the camera stays low and close, tracking their feet as the stone breaks away. The score falls out. What you hear is breath, boots scraping, bodies trying not to die. Knight turns spectacle into effort. Into survival. That’s much harder than it looks.

I left the theater surprised by how melancholic the thing felt. Under all the muscles, lasers, and iconography, this is basically about exile and inheritance. About whether going home is even possible once power has chosen you. Maybe that sounds overly generous for a movie built from action figures. But maybe that’s exactly the job: finding something human in the plastic.