Recommendations of the Editorial team
He-Man has always been Freddie Mercury, ABBA, Erasure, Tom of Finland, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Burt Reynolds rolled into one character. Skeletor has always been Liberace, King Lear, Bela Lugosi and Paul Williams all rolled into one character. Actually, both should appear together at the ESC. If the term “camp” hadn’t existed long ago, it would have had to be invented for “Masters of the Universe,” the Mattel toy line loosely based on “Conan,” which later lived on as a wonderfully over-the-top cartoon. Director Travis Knight and his four-person writing team may not risk quite as much dismantling as Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in their best moments, but their take on the heroes and villains of Eternia is, aside from the genre-standard CGI collapses and castle-smashing in the third act, a loving tribute to the saga.
Between camp and mythology
Debates about “woke”, “empowerment”, “object fetishism”, “masculinity” and “femininity” are inevitable because this “Masters of the Universe” evades them with dialogue that is deliberately chatty and even misleading. “You are the man I could never be,” says Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba) to his daughter Teela (Camila Mendes): a gender philosophy so queer that it’s better not to even try to solve it logically. What remains binary here is the classic division into heroes and villains. “Every villain is the hero of his own story,” as the saying goes, but Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto) isn’t interested in gray areas. “I am a villain,” he explains simply, justifying his hunt for the Sword of Eternia, which secures power over the planet. Yes, owning a single sword is enough for this. The mythology of Eternia is more broad than complex.
The existentialist question is posed by, of all things, a machine, similar to the cynical K-S20 in the “Star Wars” film “Rogue One”. Roboto (Kristen Wiig) observes the people irritated: “It’s like they want to die the whole time.” It would be an exaggeration to say that “Masters of the Universe” wants to explore the death instinct, but the warriors of Eternia throw themselves at each other with almost suicidal enthusiasm. In fact, this time some prominent figures on both sides even die. You would never have done that to your own action figures in the 1980s!
The Children of Eternia
Luckily, the film doesn’t have any really ridiculous characters like Stinkor or Buzz-Off, but Trap-Jaw seems terrifying. The real point, however, is that Adam alias He-Man (Nicholas Galitzine) apparently invented all the absurd names like Ram-Man or Fisto (who permanently becomes the butt of the joke because of his nickname) when he was still a little boy. The film takes on the perspective of those children who played with these mountains of muscles in the eighties. Even Evi-Lyn (Alison Brie) laughs when she has to say “Moss Man.” This probably falls under meta-humor. One actually just wishes that at least one figure had once performed the distinctive hip turn with which the action figures back then made their side punches.
“And what did you call yourself as a child?” asks Teela. Adam sheepishly replies, “Hey…Man?” She laughs at him. Adam may not be a “modern man”, but he is a “man of the modern age”: full of doubts about what his role should actually look like. How much toughness, how much strength, how much empathy is involved, how much of it is pure performance?
That’s why the first act of the film, in which Adam has to go into hiding on Earth after his escape from Eternia, works a little better than the rest. On Earth, he works in a “The Office”-like office hell with a “He/Him” name tag, wears a pink shirt, googles the Sword of Eternia and is considered a fantasy nerd until he finally finds the weapon in a comic book store populated by incels, people for whom He-Man never stopped. to be important. The fact that the precious sword does not end up in a museum on earth is a lovingly ironic comment on the “He-Man” fan cult.
Men, myths and pop culture
The Cure classic “Boys Don’t Cry” serves as the perfect needle drop here. He is later replaced by Queen’s testosterone-charged “Princes of the Universe.” Brian May composed a piece for the soundtrack, although his Red Special is surprisingly rarely heard. Perhaps his most important task was to organize the rights to the Queen song. “Watch this man fly!” sings Freddie Mercury as Ram-Man is thrown through the air.
And in the end, the most important question remains: Why does He-Man actually live in a castle called Castle Grayskull, whose facade has a gigantic skull emblazoned on it? Shouldn’t Skeletor live there?
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Why does Campino think that sometimes it’s good to just keep your mouth shut? Why does he sometimes feel like a drinks delivery man? He provides the answer in our cover story about the Toten Hosen’s big farewell, exclusively in issue 06/26. And that’s not all: the magazine includes the world exclusive 7-inch single “Always just loved” – on which Sven Regener from Element of Crime also contributed. You can easily order the ROLLING STONE edition here.