Travis Knight has, with his 2018 Transformers spin-off, Bumblebee, already achieved something close to impossible, having fashioned a genuinely touching coming-of-age drama from franchise effluent.
The director, who is also chief executive of the Laika animation studio, could justifiably retire in glory to some sun-baked island. But no. He now takes on another daunting challenge concerning another toy-flogging saga.
Remember Masters of the Universe? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re too young to have experienced Mattel’s notorious efforts, in the 1980s, to sell Gen X kids action figures through the medium of lobotomised space opera. (The phenomenon was sufficiently notable for Tom Wolfe to riff repeatedly on it in The Bonfire of the Vanities.)
Against the odds, Knight has pulled it off again. Combining the small-screen cartoon’s brash aesthetics – the neon whoosh is sickeningly retro – with sharp, self-conscious wit, this Masters of the Universe dances gaily, to quote This Is Spinal Tap, on the “fine line between clever and stupid”.
There are reminders of Mike Hodges’s Flash Gordon, from 1980, but Knight has a much surer sense of purpose. Everything here is funny on purpose. The chaos is precisely ordered.
