'Masters Of The Universe' Director Says Property Has "Inherent Silliness" That Is "Woven Into The Script"
Masters of the Universe director Travis Knight shared more details about his upcoming film.
In an interview with Empire, Knight stated, “There’s an inherent silliness to it, which we are acknowledging and embracing.”
In fact, he went so far as to claim, “I think it’s a virtue, actually. And it’s woven into the script to help some of these things make sense to a modern audience. Like, why would that character have that stupid name? Well, over the course of the movie we show you why.”
Knight’s comments are deeply concerning because the property is not “inherently silly.” Sure, it has moments of silliness, which typically involve Orko, whose bumbling antics provide genuine laughs, but the core of the property is earnest heroism.
Prince Adam secretly wields immense power as He-Man to defend Eternia and its people from the tyrannical Skeletor. The battles are high-stakes. The moral code is clear: good versus evil, and the characters fight with conviction.
This earnestness is what J.R.R. Tolkien says makes a successful sub-creator. In On Fairy Stories, he wrote, “He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”
This secondary world fails “the moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”
Knight invites that disbelief by already describing the names of the characters as “stupid” outright. He also appears to lack confidence in moviegoers’ ability to accept characters that have names that describe what they do such as Man-At-Arms or Beast Man. This is truly baffling given the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the biggest film achievements in history with characters named Iron Man, Punisher, Captain America, Spider-Man, and Black Panther.
The original toys and cartoon succeeded because it was presented with sincerity. He-Man’s transformation, Skeletor’s villainy, and He-Man’s duty and responsibility to protect his realm were delivered straight.
I'm not sure which I dislike more, the ones who say they respect the original material but do not actually respect the material, or the ones who openly despise and disdain the original material. Neither approach seems to result in stuff that's any good.
It's astounding to think that the cynical, exploitative, cash-grabbing original creators who made a series of 30 minute commercials to sell toys did so with more thought, creativity, skill, and love than every single Hollywood hack who's touched the property since.
How did we get here? How are we this creatively bankrupt? We should be capable of making something epic out of MOTU.
If they'd approached the property earnestly, with an eye to make it look, sound, and feel BADASS, we could have had MOTU not as it was, but as our 8 year old selves always imagined it to be.
But no.
Instead we get "Earf Man is having wacky adventures in silly place" with a condescending heap of millennial "humor" slathered all over it like an excess of runny, room temperature mayonnaise.
Yuck.