Masters of the Universe

Barbie for boys, right? That had to be the pitch echoing around Amazon headquarters a few years back. Director Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe - screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham - attempts a similar sort of trick as Greta Gerwig's film by ascribing three-dimensional torments and traumas to plastic, two-dimensional characters. Although not directly dissected within the piece, this Masters of the Universe (like Barbie) posits an unchanging layer of reality, distinct from our own lived experience, that operates with the strange, impenetrable logic of children at play. Soldiers, who cannot understand that they are toys, stand glowering at their mutated opponents; the front line of a war trapped in perpetual stalemate. This impasse holding until the imagination that is arranging these battles returns and completes their game. They don't even have names without him. So, after escaping through a swirling portal in the midst of a coup, Prince Adam of Eternia is stranded on Earth for fifteen years, desperately searching for the power sword he lost in psychedelic transit. 

Like the title character in John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, any interim between the sacking of his kingdom and the mindless toil that greets him in manhood - the Cimmerian endlessly turning an enormous grain mill, singlehandedly; Prince Adam working for HR in a strict, backbiting American office - is deemed extraneous and elided here. Unlike Margot Robbie's doll though, Nicholas Galitzine's pretender to the throne isn't yet the finished article. He hasn't completely assumed the role of beloved action figure. The rotoscoped, cornball antics of Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe television series may exist as a yet-to-be-achieved state of success within Knight's film but, this blaring simulacrum aside, there is something very different about Prince Adam the person. Surrounded by stock characters and bullied incessantly as a child for his perceived weakness, Adam is, as his mother hints, unstuck and atypical in this setting. He doesn't instantly fulfil a role within the wider play setting. He is, in fact, a chimera: a hybrid that combines the imaginative energies that course through this fictional realm with the deeper, much more complicated emotional range of an actual human being. 

Adam's assumption of Grayskull's cosmic power then a condition of an uncanny birthright - his mother a lost astronaut originating from Earth; his father an unsparing, PVC warrior - that allows him to channel and iterate on hackneyed skirmish. This boon isn't then something that can passed freely between the rest of Mattel's product range. Impressively loud, thanks to Daniel Pemberton's thundering score and Brian May's superheroic licks, Masters of the Universe may betray a similar sort of studied irreverence as a Taika Waititi Thor (or last year's A Minecraft Movie for that matter) but Knight's vision is presented with a kind of 5½ inch fluency that registers as celebratory rather than mocking. So, Karg and even Pigboy (as well as Dolph Lundgren in a cameo that plays like a DVD extra) from 1987's Masters of the Universe cohabit with characters plucked out of syndicated cartoons, Little Golden Books, and a Trap Jaw, played by Sam C. Wilson, that could be kin to Chris Cunningham's Mean Angel from 1995's Judge Dredd. This lovingly curated brand maintenance (as that is exactly what this is) exists within a piece that, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakthrough hit, quotes liberally from the stadium rock wing of the action-fantasy canon: Queen tracks are lifted straight out of Highlander to serve space opera theatrics on loan from Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon. All of which is to say that, in presenting itself as a mutant patchwork of clashing, barely compatible sources, Masters of the Universe 2026 is an appropriately cacophonous adaptation of a 1980s toyline. 

Queen - Princes of the Universe

Hypnotize / Madara 1000 - abcdefg

Black Legion Chaos Champion by John Blanche

Memorex Memories - Farewell Atlas

Faces of Death

How to Blow Up a Pipeline director Daniel Goldhaber returns with Faces of Death, a cash-in-cum-companion piece to the original, 1978 video nasty that sees Dacre Montgomery's serial killer re-creating sequences from John Alan Schwartz's staged, mondo documentary with a series of micro-celebrity hostages then uploading them, anonymously, to a Tik-Tok-style video hosting website. Hot on his trail is Barbie Ferreira as Margot, a former content moderator for this short-form video app who lost her job quibbling with management over whether or not these highly successful snuff clips should remain on their site. Arriving at a point in time when allegedly subject elective social media platforms, like the former Twitter, have given themselves over to pushing all manner of x-rated or just plain alarming video footage in the name of the almighty algorithm, this Faces of Death is, strictly speaking, topical then but heavy-handed or, maybe more accurately, naive in its finger-wagging execution. 

The actually biting material sits in the front end of the film, when Margot is still gainfully employed, and relates to the strict, censorial parameters relating to drug and sex education (both are verboten) or the Martian double-speak of posters trained by summary deletion to type in childish euphemism. The numbing effect of seeing real people obliterated by unyielding machinery is fine but God forbid anyone actually type out words like 'killed' or 'dead'. The theatrical horrors dreamt up by Montgomery's Arthur Spevak, which in-universe are (incorrectly) taken to be elaborate fakes, pale in comparison to the steady stream of real-life combat footage that warring countries gleefully pump out or the partially obscured children trapped in the Epstein files. All of which land on timelines, unprompted, every day. The parameters for shock have shifted somewhat then, leaving this Faces of Death feeling rather quaint, specifically in its depiction of abyssal horror. This is no Red Rooms. Goldhaber's film shines though when we are allowed time with the victims powering Spevak's rental tape histrionics. A short section in which two parties attempt to make their escape, while Spevak plays suburban sniper (happily recalling similar situations from Peter Bogdanovich's Targets) is the film's highlight, proving again that Goldhaber has a knack for arranging bodies in adrenalised settings. 

Xiu Xiu - In Heaven

The Dark Knight Returns by Daniel Warren Johnson and Mike Spicer

Soleils Noircis - Un Collier De Silence

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

Director Joseph Kuo's The Swordsman of All Swordsmen proposes, as martial arts films often do, a tale steeped in vengeance. King Hu regular Tien Peng plays Tsai Ying-jie, the last surviving member of a household that was slaughtered while he was still a child. Having spent the intervening decades honing his skill with a sharpened scabbard - all that remains of his father's treasured sword - Tsai Ying-jie has grown to manhood, dedicating himself to the destruction of the bandits who murdered his family. Despite hailing from the late 1960s (1968, to be exact), The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is reflective, compared to some of its more declarative contemporaries; less concerned with the specifics of how bodies violently intersect and, instead, preoccupied with the churning natural landscapes that house these duels. How sunlight refracts through leaves (while blind men fumble for their swords) or the way waves crash and froth on a bleak shoreline. Tsai Ying-jie's mission isn't as clean cut as you might expect either. The outlaws he chases have all aged into subtlety different variations of the kind of men willing to kill innocents to possess an ornate blade. Although a few do remain bullies others have matured into grumpy teachers or a doddering minor lord, weighed down by regret. Kuo's film, the director co-writing with Tien-Yung Hsu and Shui-Han Chiang, refuses an easy path for its hero, subjecting him to armies of anonymous heavies, poison-tipped arrows and, most unsettling of all, sobbing inquiries from a series of attractive caregivers who cannot believe that this is all the dashing Tsai Ying-jie wants to do with his life. 

Sugar Minott - I'm Still Here

Imperial Remnant Snow Trooper by Mizmaru Kawahara

Mike D - What We Got

Toshifumi Hinata - Contemplation

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

The strangest thing about director Jon Favreau's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't that Disney have decided to relaunch the big screen aspect of their ailing space saga with an adaptation of an off-the-boil streaming series, it's that in centring Jabba the Hutt's offspring, Rotta the Hutt (voiced here by Jeremy Allen White), this adventure now becomes something of a sequel to Dave Filoni's unwatchable animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Speaking of Filoni, Lucasfilm's new Chief Creative Officer gets a co-writing credit with Favreau and Noah Kloor for this film; voices a couple of characters; and even scores a distracting cameo in the X-Wing pilot equivalent of a staff canteen. Actually, returning to Hutts, it's definitely more bizarre that, in detailing the living arrangements of Jabba's massive, slug-like species, viewers are treated to repeated instances of these creatures - sometimes even a pair that are related - writhing and intertwined. 

When Pedro Pascal (actually seen as well as heard)'s bounty hunter first arrives at the palace of these intergalactic gangsters, he walks along corridors lined with darkened rooms that appear, very much, like they have recently hosted gastropod orgies. The participants are abashed; pulling apart and reorganising themselves as Pascal (or Brendan Wayne or Lateef Crowder) stomp past. Perhaps it's the confrontational nakedness of The Hutts that gives pause? The film's repeated demand that we appraise blubbery bodies that sometimes look like puppets and other times look like their primitively textured ancestor from the 1997 revision of Star Wars? The grown-up Rotta - a gladiator who battles scaled-up monsters from Chewbacca's chess board - sports pumped-up arms and bulging pectoral muscles, an explicit point of departure from every other reptilian mobster we've seen so far. If nothing else it seems notable that Rotta's acceptance into the ranks of the Galactic Republic pointedly comes with a promise of clothing that is big enough to fit, and therefore conceal, his enormous body. 

This preoccupation with minor variations and the three-dimensionality of the film's participants speaks to, really, the piece's core appeal: these are the kind of adventures dreamed up by children as they played with their Kenner action figures. The first instance of connection with Star Wars for this viewer was, in the mid-1980s, seeing the overstocked occupants of Jabba's sail barge, from Return of the Jedi, heavily discounted in open-air markets. You might never come across a Luke Skywalker or a Darth Vader on these stalls but if you wanted a 3.75 inch reproduction of a Gamorrean Guard or a Weequay, you were in luck. You could slowly amass an entire collection of these bystanders and background players; characters who made basically zero impact on the unfolding saga but held their own creepy visual appeal as pure merchandise. Keenly aware that his film is, at its best, a rolling bestiary, director Favreau finds umpteen ways - beyond previous speculation on the Hutts' sex life - to fascinate and entertain. To wit: Pascal's delivery may be flat; his action so expert as to be dull, with a face buried beneath a gleaming helmet, but his side-kick is often delightful. 

A mixture of puppetry and computer-generated imagery, Grogu is of a piece with the Mogwais from Gremlins when sharing his scenes with larger characters. He's rapid and chaotic; possessed of an insatiable hunger for luminous snacks. When the film contracts to accommodate his tiny stature though, we are regaled with a sustained, wordless sequence in which this frog-like guru fashions a clay barracks around his deathly ill parent then traverses an inhospitable jungle and the swamp beyond, stealing smoked fish from Stephen McKinley Henderson's kindly, reptilian medicine man. If Mandalorian and Grogu is a truncated season of streaming television then this interlude is its own little bottle episode, reminiscent of similar asides in the Lone Wolf and Cub movies. As time passes to Ludwig Göransson's pitch-perfect Amblin score, and the camouflaged structure around the unconscious bounty hunter grows, there's a brief sense of a different, more ambitious movie: a Star Wars in which we are confronted with a melancholic permanence rather than just a temporary setback. Grogu seems to toil for days if not weeks. What if Mandalorians had a constitution closer to human? What if they were a little more fragile? What would that film look like then, if Favreau completely gave himself over to the Jim Henson of it all? Baby Yoda living amongst the bones of its parent, slowly honing his extra-sensory skills and fashioning his own approximation of armour before walking his own, vengeful path.  

Ludwig Göransson - Grogu's World

Vince Staples - White Flag

Binaltech Version Yellow Tracks by びー (@samhoshi7)

Scab - Bongo Man

Yusuf Gökcül - Untitled 87