Anticipation of this movie has caused me to think back to when I had He-Man toys as a child. And it made me realize just how far back my problems with screen adaptations go. Many of my favorite toy lines included background material with the toys. From GI Joe, to Transformers, to The Masters of the Universe, to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there would be a dossier on the back of the blister packaging, or a small pamphlet inside, with a story about the character. There were also storybooks that came with a record or a cassette tape, which read the story to you. And then there were the TV cartoons, for all of the abovementioned properties. And those cartoons had different backstories, different characterizations and different world-building from a lot of the material that came with the toys. But we did not have a TV, when I was a kid, so I devoured the printed material as the only available content for the IPs, and was unaware of the conflict, until friends would tell me about them, and then we got a VCR, and my grandparents taped the cartoons for us, and the local video store also carried the episodes issued on tape. I first heard about the He-man cartoon from my brother, and he was yammering all sorts of stuff about some character named "Prince Adam" and I watched it and saw all sorts of nonsense, like Man-at-Arms having a moustache, and Battle Cat's secret identity of Cringer, which was basically a more articulate Scooby-Doo, and there was a Sorceress and do NOT get me started on the abomination that was Orko. Gone was all the continuity about He-Man & Skeletor each holding half of the combined sword that unlocked the power of Castle Greyskull, which He-Man used to defend the Castle and prevent Skeletor from getting to it.

Also, He-Man came with a sword and an axe. My assumption was that he used those things for the intuitive purpose of cutting off body parts of enemies or sticking them into vital points. But I was a naïve small child, and could not understand why He-Man mostly picked up Skeletor and threw him, or tied him up. Or why the Cobra troopers always managed to bail out of their H.I.S.S. tanks just before they exploded, and why GI Joe personnel never seemed to hit the enemies and had more luck chopping them on the back of their necks. I had a GI Joe Skystriker jet plane that looked suspiciously like a US Navy F-14. The missiles were labeled as Sparrowhawks and Sidewinders and my uncle, a veteran, explained to me what they did and how they worked and that was NOT what they showed on the cartoon. By the time the Ninja Turtles got live-action films, my soul had been crushed into sullen acceptance, so I barely found the energy to complain that Leonardo made it through all three without remotely putting the edge of his katanas to any sort of living flesh.

But back to He-Man (before I knew the term "canon" I had a visceral understanding of the concept, and tried to express it, vis a vis the conflicts between that of toys and that of the cartoons, only for people to give me blank looks and try to explain that it's all fiction. I could not understand why adults could not see that there can be two different fictional stories and one can suck compared to the other, and it undermined and devalued my effort to follow the original story), that cartoon was the first time I ran up against screen adaptations spewing out an inferior version of a story I liked in print.

All of this is to say, 7-year-old me would have loved and hated this movie. He would have loved that He-Man uses his sword as a sword, and not a lever or a machete or a bludgeon. He would have loved that He-Man breaks off a spiny part of one of Skeletor's henchmen and stuck it in his neck. But he would have hated how stupid and derpy Adam acts, and how Man-at-Arms was a big loser whose daughter is always yelling at him. He might have also been non-plussed at Man-at-Arms having even more facial hair plus a very different skin tone, but Idris Elba is welcome to play any race he can get paid for, thank you very much. He would have greatly preferred a Beast-Man who actually is formidable, rather than just carrying the idiot ball for Team Skeletor. He might have appreciated the fact that without a single body of water appearing in the movie, Mer-man was also sensibly absent, instead of just being the other goon with Beast-Man. And he would have hated how the character based on the least interesting action figure in the whole toy line, gets a disproportionate amount of screen time and action.

But that's the thing about this movie. It feels like two different people were making it, with two different ideas about what it is supposed to be, and the division goes all the way down. I don't know if they are trying to emasculate He-Man or give him depth beyond the simplistic hero of the original toys & cartoon, but whichever they were trying, they were bad at it, and it didn't work out. I can't tell whether they are just trying to have deconstructive Marvel-style humor, or if they actually hate the source material and are mocking it. Aspects of the story are very dumb in the specific way that suggests it is targeted at children, but then they make a joke out of Fisto & Ram-man exchanging dialogue that turns into gay sex terms. This movie might be fun for the kids, but there's so much that is either above kids' heads or things they would actively hate. It might be a winking play to the adult audience, inviting them to share a laugh at the absurdities of the material, but the story is too simplistic and sincere in places for that to land.

One element is Skeletor. Voiced by Jared Leto, he can, at times, be incredibly sinister and formidable, and is actually rather effective as a villain, without the sort of blunders that make you say "are we really supposed to be afraid of this guy?" But he is also very self-referential and moustache-twirly cartoonishly villainous to a degree that cartoon Skeletor would give a side-eye. Evil-Lyn is often eye-rolling at his pompous self-aggrandizement, but she is absolutely devoted to him and his cause, and in one of their earliest conversations, sort of implies she might be in love with him or something, and he has no more compunction about turning his lethal powers against her when seeking to punish failure than anyone else.

The general plot of the movie is that a young Prince Adam, struggling with the military training necessary for his role as the son of King Randor (criminally underused James Purefoy), is a first hand witness to an attack by Skeletor's forces on the palace, forcing him to flee with the Sword of Power, and they get zapped to Earth, where he loses the Sword and grows up, still haunted by his memories of his homeland, and looking for the Sword in the hopes that it will be able to take him home. Eventually he finds the Sword, just as a hero & a villain from Eternia arrive on Earth looking for it, and he is able to return home, where he discovers the power of the Sword to transform him into the figure with the meta name of He-Man (a word not spoken until the final scene of the film, and then only with great irony), allowing him to take the fight to Skeletor in the hopes of rescuing his parents and freeing Eternia.

There are bits in his arms training, and the framing of Man-at-Arms' tutelage that suggest they are going for some kind of enlightened criticism of machismo and masculine values, except the action sequence that follows validates Duncan's perspective. On Earth, adult Adam wears a pink shirt in a nod to Adam's cartoon & eventual toy costume. He works in HR and attends meetings that talk about communication and consent and other such crap. His desk has He/Him on his nameplate. He lives with a very un-masculine roommate of color. His one on-the-job conversation has him listening to a woman yammering about feelings and talking, and with an expression on his face that might be intended to convey pained distress or sympathetic sensitivity, turns around the buzzword spiel on her. He has a counseling session with his boss, where it is stated that he is good at his job, but that his obsession with swords and whatnot is detrimental to that job and he has to shape up or else. And in the low point of the final battle, where he is lying near death, the Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) tells him that he is different from prior Champions of Greyskull, because of his ability to talk out problems instead of just fighting them.

So it looks like this is the message of the film, and that is underlined by a coda scene that is a nod to the cartoons, where a character would break the fourth wall to deliver a moral lesson, in this case about the value of talking rather than fighting.

But that's not what they SHOW. In the meeting with the dialogue buzzwords about trust and whatnot, Adam is preoccupied with his search for the Sword of Power, and it looks like this corporate buzzword environment is part of the oppressive nature of his sojourn on Earth and a reason why he is so desperate to get home. He has absolutely HORRIBLE communication and social skills, making everyone think he is crazy by his constant yammering about Eternia and the Sword of Power. The film segues from the prologue of his childhood and trip to Earth, with the voiceover being revealed to be his telling the story to a woman on a date, which causes her to immediate leave the restaurant. When he does find the Sword, the scene is an extended "comedy" bit of him asking random people in the location where he has been led if they have the sword and then trying to acquire it in a manner slightly more fish-out-of-water than Thor in New Mexico in that eponymous film (which also featured a heretofore unknown blonde beefcake playing a muscular warrior prince trapped on Earth away from his high-tech fantasy homeland, where the primary national security measure is Idris Elba, and who needs to recover his magic weapon as a win condition). Thor, one might recall, strained plausibility with his cluelessness, and he was on Earth for less than a week. Adam has grown up here for 15 years and somehow got the necessary education for an office job, without learning what kind of behavior is socially acceptable. So we are not seeing an empathic communicator, and one explanation for his odd behavior might actually be some sort of princely/warrior-culture instincts compelling him to be frank and oversharing and unable to restrain his Eternian nature.

Anyway, back to the empathy message, the counseling session with his boss comes across as an Office-Space-type farce, where the boss, who looks like an anorexic Joy Reid, uses so much double-speak and non-confrontational lingo that it takes Adama a minute to understand, and blurt out "So this isn't counseling, this is an ultimatum," which she affirms and then tries to walk back lest she inadvertently somehow express compulsion or force. Again, the whole vibe is that Adam does NOT belong on 21st Century Earth and its culture of feelings and non-toxic deference, and his attempts to be nice and fit in and share and communicate keep backfiring on him.

In the final confrontation, when he rises up after the Sorceress' pep talk, the resolution of that conflict is NOT in line with the strength she describes in Adam, and rather more in the line of toxic violence. They literally have Duncan reprogram a cleaning robot into a combat variant. He-Man's attempts to talk out any problem, or motivate the good guys always fail and it comes down to physical strength and the application of it to violence. What we are literally shown on screen is that He-Man's strength is, well, strength.

There is also a bit with the Sword of Power that is more or less a ripoff of a similar plotline with a magic sword in Jim Butcher's "Skin Game" but less well-done and with a more toxic & egotistical lesson. Actually, if they did swipe it from anything, it's probably Thor 3, which shows just how they careen through the stages of a character's arc.

Frankly, IDK why they bothered having Adam come to Earth, aside from the chances for product placement. They did that in the last movie (and this one contains a heavy-handed cameo nod towards it), presumably because budget limitations and 80s technology meant it was a more viable plan to shoot on Earth locations, rather than construct Eternia sets for every scene. The juxtaposition with Earth just highlights the ways everyone on Eternia like Americans. Which in turn, leaves the film feeling compelled to address the point that their characters have names like Ram-Man, Fisto and Meka-neck. And their explanation is that those are not actually their names, but the labels young Adam remembers them by after seeing them in action on his final day in Eternia. That's not stupid if you have to acknowledge the simplicity of the names, but they get blurted out, because it turns out that Adam is no more socially aware or able to communicate on Eternia than he is on Earth, so we have way more runtime than was necessary for a decent story, of people reacting angrily to Adam calling them by their toys' names.

Also, there is a female character of unremarkable appearance, played by a stuntwoman, who is the awesomest gunfighter evar for a single scene, because it's 2026 and it feels like they tacked that on out of obligation. Her only other trait beyond Awesome Combat Skills, is that she bullied Adam when they were kids, but the film in no way treats her as a villain or problematic or repentant or in need of a lesson. So much for the anti-violence message.

I did not come into this expecting a faithful adaptation or even a good film, but they really found weird ways to let me down. Kids might like it, IDK. Who even knows what the coddled little pussies even like these days? It's not funny enough to laugh with, or take itself seriously enough to laugh at, and it's trying too hard to say something to write it off as mindless, but it sabotages itself too much to be interested or outraged at whatever it is trying to say. And what it claims it is trying to say it outright fails to do so. It wants us to respect this version of He-Man as the best one, while also taking mean-spirit potshots at silly elements of the source-material, at the expense of Adam's depiction here.

I don't know. Q stars out of epsilon, I guess.