Masters of the Universe (1987) Retrospective Review - So Awful It’s Magnificent
The year was 1987. Audiences were having the pleasure of being given all-time great science-fiction and fantasy films such as RoboCop and The Princess Bride, and Cannon Films was becoming desperate. The production company founded by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had spent a decade churning out low-budget action films with a particular combination of commercial instinct and artistic indifference that had made them, if not critically respected, at least reliably profitable. By the mid-1980s, however, the bills had come due. Cannon needed a hit – not merely a hit, but a phenomenon. When they pitched Masters of the Universe to financiers, Golan and Globus described it as “the Star Wars of the ’80s.” Ambition, at Cannon, was never burdened by self-awareness.
The property they had acquired was, on paper, genuinely promising. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had been one of the defining toy lines and animated series of the 1980s – a sword-and-sorcery universe of Eternian warriors, cosmic power, and a villain with a skull for a face who seemed to have wandered in from a different, considerably more frightening piece of entertainment. The cartoon had been watched by millions of children. The toys had generated billions of dollars. There was a built-in audience, a recognizable mythology, and a character whose visual iconography – blond and muscled with his sword raised toward the heavens – was as immediately legible as any in popular culture.
What Cannon gave that audience was the 1987 film Masters of the Universe, written by David Odell, whose credits included The Dark Crystal and the 1984 Supergirl film, and teamed with a first-and-last-time director whose previous experience consisted entirely of theme park 3D attractions and dark rides. The film starred Dolph Lundgren, a Swedish giant who’d just had his breakout role three years earlier as the near-wordless Soviet killing machine Ivan Drago in Rocky IV and who brought to He-Man approximately the same emotional range he had brought to that role, which is to say very little. It opened in August 1987, and failed to come anywhere near contemporaries such as RoboCop or The Princess Bride – critically, commercially, or by most conventional measures of cinematic achievement.
And yet, there is a particular category of film that criticism has never quite developed adequate language for – the film that is objectively bad and yet also genuinely enjoyable in ways that are not entirely reducible to ironic detachment or nostalgic charity. Masters of the Universe inhabits this category with a cheerful lack of self-consciousness that is, in its own way, almost admirable. It knows what it is. It does not pretend otherwise. And within the severe limitations of what it is, it delivers a quantity of absurdist entertainment that its more ambitious contemporaries occasionally failed to match.
The plot, such as it is, follows He-Man and a small band of allies as they escape from the battle-scarred world of Eternia – where the villainous Skeletor has seized Castle Grayskull and captured the Sorceress – to 1980s Earth, where they attempt to acquire a device called the Cosmic Key that will allow them to return and reclaim their world. The Earth-set premise was not an artistic choice, but a budgetary one – building the full scope of Eternia on a $22 million production budget for the entire length of the film was simply not possible, and transplanting the bulk of the action to contemporary California allowed the filmmakers to use existing locations while devoting their limited resources to the few Eternian sequences the story required. Castle Grayskull’s throne room, with its towering statues and hellpit architecture, is genuinely impressive for what it cost, and its large-scale physical spectacle serves the film’s most ambitious sequences reasonably well.
Lundgren’s He-Man is the film’s central liability and, in a perverse way, one of its unintentional pleasures. He is not acting so much as posing – a live-action cartoon character of such magnificent blankness that his comrades mock him openly and he receives their mockery as a form of praise. When Man-At-Arms sarcastically describes an insane plan of attack as requiring them to “fight off two or three thousand of Skeletor’s crack troops, break into the force field, and free the Sorceress,” He-Man responds with an enthusiastic “Right!” that suggests he has not registered the sarcasm and would not have been troubled by it if he had. He is a hero of such unreflective, uncomplicated virtue that he becomes, against all odds, unintentionally endearing. Dolph Lundgren, who certainly can’t be said to have enjoyed his time in the role, has also said of the film that it was “a fun movie, a kids’ movie,” and that “there’s nothing wrong with it.” He is correct on both counts, and the breezy equanimity with which he has made peace with the film’s legacy is itself oddly charming.
But where Masters of the Universe does something genuinely right is Frank Langella’s Skeletor, one of the more purely enjoyable villain performances in 1980s fantasy cinema, and it is enjoyable in the way that only performances by great actors doing exactly what they want with material they have correctly identified as beneath their dignity can be. Langella has said that Skeletor is among his favorite roles. Watching him, you believe it completely. He delivers his one-liners – including at least one borrowed from Richard III – with the relish of a Shakespearean actor who has decided that if he is going to wear a skull mask in a Cannon Films production, he will wear it with the full commitment of a classical performance.
But the film that surrounds these performances is, by the standards of 1987, modest in its ambitions and uneven in its achievements. It was a box office failure and helped hasten Cannon’s eventual collapse, along with the concurrent disaster of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. David Odell, despite the truly great earlier films he’ll always be most recognized for his involvement with, went on to direct the somehow-even-worse science-fiction comedy film Martians Go Home in 1989 before retiring from Hollywood entirely. Masters of the Universe did not launch a live-action film franchise. It did not become the “Star Wars of the 1980s.” It became something smaller and stranger – a cult object for the generation that was the right age to see it, a gleefully daft artifact of a moment in popular cinema when the gap between a property’s cultural footprint and its screen realization could be enormous and nobody seemed particularly troubled by this.
39 years later, a new live-action Masters of the Universe adaptation directed by Bumblebee’s Travis Knight arrives this weekend with considerably more resources and the accumulated lessons of four decades of superhero cinema at its disposal.
Before you see it – or perhaps after – there is something to be said for revisiting the attempt that came before.
Certainly not because it is good.
But because it is, in its own magnificently misguided way, unforgettable.