Masters of the Universe (1987)
By the mid-1980s, the toy aisle had become one of Hollywood's favourite hunting grounds. Mattel's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe line had been a commercial phenomenon since its launch in 1982, generating billions in sales and anchoring one of the decade's most-watched animated series. The cartoon, produced by Filmation, was itself a carefully engineered piece of cross-promotion, designed to keep the action figures flying off shelves. By 1987, the craze had peaked and was already beginning to fade, which gives the live-action film adaptation an odd, slightly desperate quality in retrospect. It arrived at roughly the moment the cultural moment was passing, rushed into production by Cannon Films, the Golan-Globus outfit that had made its name churning out high-octane, low-polish action pictures throughout the decade. Cannon was not known for restraint or rigour, and the budget, reportedly in the region of $17 million, stretched noticeably thin once production designer William Stout tried to render the fantasy world of Eternia in three dimensions. The film ended up landing Cannon in serious financial difficulty, partly through cost overruns, and a planned sequel never materialised.
Gary Goddard, making his feature directorial debut, had a background in theme park design and theatrical spectacle rather than cinema, which perhaps explains some of the film's stranger qualities. The screenplay, credited to David Odell (who had previously written The Dark Crystal, of all things), takes the bold and somewhat baffling decision to spend much of its running time not on Eternia but on a nondescript American town, presumably to keep location costs manageable. Dolph Lundgren, then best known as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, was cast as He-Man, a role that suited his physique perfectly well but made rather more demands on him dramatically than he was quite equipped to meet. Opposite him, Frank Langella plays the villain Skeletor, and by most accounts he committed to the role with an enthusiasm that bordered on the theatrical. Langella has spoken warmly about the part in interviews since, and his performance is one of the few elements of the production that people tend to remember with genuine affection. The supporting cast includes the late Billy Barty as the inventor Gwildor, Jon Cypher, and a then-unknown Courteney Cox, a couple of years before she became a household name, playing one of the Earth-side teenagers who gets swept up in events. For fans of Captain Marvel or Aquaman, it is worth remembering that the superhero blockbuster as a polished, franchise-driven machine was still decades away; this is what studios were producing when they looked at a beloved property and thought, yes, let's make a film of that.
The film sits in an interesting position within the broader history of toy-to-screen adaptations, a genre that has produced everything from genuine classics to some of the most cheerfully terrible cinema of the twentieth century. Whether Masters of the Universe falls closer to one end or the other of that spectrum is, of course, a matter of personal history as much as critical judgement, and few things colour the way we watch a film quite like childhood memory. Similarly nostalgic questions about animation adapted for the screen come up in our review of Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution, and the thorny business of recapturing a childhood favourite also surfaces in the piece on A Goofy Movie. With all of that in mind, here is what Macca made of it.
I grew up perfectly at the tail end of the He-Man craze, meaning my childhood was inextricably linked to a battered VHS tape of Gary Goddard’s 1987 live-action Masters of the Universe and the cartoon that dominated our Saturday mornings. For years, my nostalgic memories of this picture were glowing, painted in the bright, primary colours of Eternia. But revisiting it now, those rose-tinted glasses have been unceremoniously smashed. Honestly, I found that the magic I remembered as a kid was entirely a product of my own imagination, because the actual film is just bad in pretty much every conceivable sense.
When you strip away the childhood nostalgia, the sheer lack of cinematic craft on display is staggering. The costume design looks like it was raided from a discount fancy dress shop, the scenery is a mishmash of cheap studio sets and unconvincing matte paintings, and the synth-heavy soundtrack is an absolute assault on the ears (and I usually love synth soundtracks). Even the acting, which you’d hope would carry some of the weight, is remarkably wooden. Dolph Lundgren does his best to chomp the scenery as He-Man, and Courteney Cox tries to inject some life into her role, but they are completely undermined by a script and a production design that feel like a bit of a mess.
What saves this from being a truly miserable watch is that it isn't exactly offensive; it’s just profoundly inept. It teeters right on the edge of achieving that legendary "so bad it's good" charm, much like The Room or Troll 2.
There are moments where the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of a muscle-bound hero fighting a guy in a skull mask with a glowing sword almost makes you smile. But it never quite commits to the bit with enough sincerity to become a genuine midnight movie masterpiece. It just sort of sits there, awkwardly existing in the uncanny valley of terrible 80s toy adaptations.
Goddard’s picture is a fascinating time capsule of a bygone era of Hollywood cash-ins, but it’s a deeply flawed piece of cinema. It’s a harmless enough watch if you’re specifically hunting for a laugh at the expense of its own production values, but as a genuine fantasy epic, it fails spectacularly. I can appreciate the fond memories it holds for my generation, but looking at it with adult eyes, it’s a profoundly underwhelming experience.
Masters of the Universe endures as a curious artefact: a film that exists primarily because a property was popular, made by a studio that moved fast and rarely looked back, and remembered today mostly by the generation who encountered it on a worn-out VHS before they had the vocabulary to articulate what was wrong with it. The interesting question it raises is whether nostalgia is a form of criticism in its own right, or simply its enemy. Films like this one survive not because they are good but because they were there, lodged in impressionable minds at exactly the right moment. Strip that away and you are left with the film itself, which has to stand on its own two sandalled feet. On that measure, Goddard's picture makes for a rather sobering case study in what happens when a cultural phenomenon meets a production that was never quite up to the task. Some memories, it turns out, are best left on the shelf.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1987 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Masters of the Universe (1987) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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