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The Canberra Times
The Canberra Times

By the power of nostalgia, He-Man is back and it really works

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Young men - scratch that, men generally - these days are so fitness-obsessed and in pursuit of a Hemsworth-esque physique that it skirts close to a mental health issue for many of them.

Nicholas Galitzine is perfectly cast in the lead role. Picture supplied

I count myself among them with my two gym memberships and body dysmorphia issues, and I'm pretty sure I can trace the whole thing, for me anyway, back to the 1980s toy line and Saturday cartoon series Masters of the Universe.

In the Mattel toys, and cartoon, the meek blond Prince Adam of a world called Eternia would turn into a muscle-bound hero called He-Man thanks to a magical sword, and this version of himself would protect his world from no end of bad guys.

Those bad guys included Skeletor, whose buff body in the toy range was just the He-Man body painted a different colour, only this guy had a skeleton for a head.

Mattel, even though they had the sales juggernaut that is Barbie on toy store shelves, were financially struggling in the 1980s and the company credits He-Man for keeping them liquid into the 90s.

In 1987 they made a truly average feature film version, which didn't have much going for it cinematically except for the central performance of Dolph Lundgren, the beefcake former Canberra-based engineering student and nightclub bouncer who dated Grace Jones in the 80s.

And here we are, nearly 40 years later, back for a second attempt to harvest this 80s intellectual property that has now acquired quite a few generations of audience nostalgia.

This time around, however, all those nerdy obsessive childhood fans are now middle-aged Hollywood power-brokers and so the collective nostalgic love that has been poured into this production makes it a real joy to spend time with.

Adam, this time, is played by Nicholas Galitzine who has been a swoony Prince Charming in a dozen other films in recent years and so is perfectly cast.

Adam comes from a mystical land where he is a prince and had a talking green lion as a friend, but he lives in our world and the people he dates and the other staff in the HR department where he works think he is absolutely bonkers when he shares these stories.

But the mythical sword that can get him back to Eternia reappears, and back home he becomes the hero he always dreamed of being.

The sets and CGI world-building in Travis Knight's film draw from the lurid colours of the 1980s cartoon, while the camerawork captures the spirit of a child running around with one of those plastic He-Man figures in their hands, soaring through the air, defying the laws of physics and common sense.

The film's five acts each serve different notes and the whole thing is stitched together by the musical tapestry of Daniel Pemberton who pays fan service throughout to Queen's Flash Gordon soundtrack, full of electric sound and guitar riffs.

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The casting is quite fun, with Idris Elba as a down-at-heels Man-at-Arms, Riverdale's Camila Mendes as his daughter Teela, and even though he is visually unrecognisable, Jared Leto has found a role to match his own sense of peculiar in the scenery-chewing Skeletor.

The film has a whole passel of writers, and they're obviously enjoying themselves building adult jokes into the script, though with an M rating and 141-minute run time, I suspect they're making this film for the grown-up kids.

One of the film's constant gags is that while on earth Adam works in human resources and the supposed safe and inclusive language of HR aligns suspiciously well with the hell-raising violence of this other fantasy world.

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