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. 

Bumblebee

The relationship between humans and machines has been a major theme in the live action Transformers films. Michael Bay's quintet, a loosely assembled series if ever there was one, may have taken a different tact every instalment but the underlining thesis was one of disgust. The humans trembled in the company of these walking gun platforms while the Cybertronians regarded their flesh companions with the kind of revulsion usually reserved for vermin.

In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the massive, barbed Megatron toys with Shia LaBeouf's Sam, delighting in his fragility. The contrast is clear - the Decepticon leader is built to hurt, his hands betray no other function than to slash and tear. Sam is the perfect target, a tiny, blubbery curiosity that would smear at the lightest touch. Even the heroic Autobots recognise a basic disparity between the two races that, apparently naturally, tracks into an acute loathing. Transformers: Age of Extinction gave us a shellshocked Optimus Prime driven into hiding by mankind's treachery.

Prime's distaste runs deeper than Megatron's tactile disconnection too - he doesn't hate humans because they're physically weak, he distrusts them for their moral and ethical failings. After winning the Battle of Chicago single-handedly, slaying both a mortal enemy and his mentor in the process, Prime's reward is for his friends to be stalked and murdered by American special forces. Their remains pulled apart and reconfigured as toys for the consumer end of the military spectrum. Michael Bay's Optimus Prime is an engine of pure destruction, an indefatigable God Emperor powered by four million years of war and a violent, inflexible idea of egalitarianism. 

Travis Knight's Bumblebee, written by Christina Hodson, is the first live action Transformers film that really pushes at an idea of healthy, mutually beneficial symbiosis between mankind and the Cybertronians. Not even just in a material or technological sense either, the film is built around the friendship between Bumblebee, presented here as an amnesiac child soldier prone to post-traumatic outbursts, and Hailee Steinfeld's Charlie, a lonely teenager who feels alienated from her family. It's the same basic set-up as 2007's entry, except the filmmakers have spent time trying to engineer a dramatic hook with a little more heft to it than Sam Witwicky's eBay grumbles.

Both Charlie and Bumblebee are in mourning. Charlie missing her father, an auto-mechanic whose death curtailed his daughter's interest in, well, basically everything. Charlie stopped diving competitively, the activity too wrapped up in painful memories of Daddy-Daughter bonding. Charlie has grown distant from her remaining family, resenting her mother and brother for allowing another, and as far as she's concerned lesser, man to enter into their lives and take her father's place. Charlie isolates herself, working a demeaning Summer job (hotdog serf for jocks and princesses at a local fair) to hustle up enough cash to continue working on an apparently unsalvageable Corvette, her last physical link with her departed Dad.

Bumblebee's pain is founded in extreme shock. His movement (here called the Autobot resistance) has been routed and the planet he calls home has fallen, consumed by Megatron's lieutenants. Most tragic of all, Optimus Prime is apparently dead, last seen surrounded by an army of cackling Decepticons. Prime's portrayal in this film skews nostalgic and idealised, calibrated to appeal to those raised on Sunbow, Marvel and Toei Animation's The Transformers TV series. Prime pops in and out of the film, springing onto the screen from Bumblebee's fragged memories. The diminutive Autobot recalls his commander as explosively powerful, utterly fluent in combat, but equally willing to lay down his life for his smaller, weaker comrades. Essentially, Bumblebee is pining after his own lost father.

Bumblebee, as in the film, feels unexpectedly fresh because it allows these two characters the time and space to just be in each other's company. They hang out, listen to tapes and talk through their problems. Knight's film isn't an excitable gag machine pushing at slashed-up, chromed-out absurdity, it's actually interested in locating a sombre emotional tone then working through it. The Transformers are allowed to navigate scenes as dramatic participants, responding to, rather than contrasting with, their human companions. That the film is able to carry this off is mainly down to Steinfeld and how she is able to anchor rote situations with a delicacy and innate likeability otherwise lacking in this snorting, reptilian franchise.

Bumblebee - RAINMAKERS

Sprinkled in with Travis Knight's pleasant-looking meet cute are a few, fully-animated glimpses of the Cybertronian civil war, unexplored territory for the live-action robots in disguise franchise. Although unlikely to take up more than about three minutes of actual screentime, it's still a kick to see the likes of Optimus Prime and Shockwave (is Big Purple hanging out with The Rainmakers from the Divide and Conquer episode of the 80s TV series?) rocking designs reminiscent of their Generation 1 animation models. Before Transformers: The Last Knight under-performed there was talk of a feature-length cartoon spin-off based on the Transformer's home planet courtesy of Boulder Media, an Irish animation studio responsible for (among other things) Cartoon Network's The Amazing World of Gumball and the BBC's recent Danger Mouse reboot. Could this be a taste of films to come?