As I kid He-Man was the guy. The muscles, the sword, his cat. I loved the cartoon. The theme tune, the baddies, everything.

In 1987 as a six-year-old boy, I went to the cinema with my dad to watch the film. I loved it even though I was scared! Amazing!

The box office sales said different.

Even though it featured the successful Dolph Lundgren (Rocky 4, a View to a Kill) it flopped, due to a tiny budget, poor marketing and a declining toy line. It grossed only $17.3 million against a $22 million production budget.

As a kid I didn't care. It wasn't a business, it was about fantasy and imagination and heroics. For me it re-inforced my love for the brand - purchasing Mattel figures and timing them round my dad's legs.

Fast-forward 19 years and here's me watching the film on my phone. I get I’m not that kid anymore that thinks he's He-man but I’m hoping its going to bring me a snippet of that feeling, that nostalgia from '87. Instantly I lost interest, even scrubbing through the timeline when it felt flat, and there were lots. The humorous dialogue set the tone and it became relentless. I don't like to simply compare to what I've seen previously of this character, but there should be a good level of light and dark to the production. Yes, it has a level of good and bad characters in this film - but even of a contrast and there's definitely blurred lines.

In terms of He-Man, it just all felt a bit too fluffy and over-complicated in making the main character, Adam, too rounded and conforming to the current society that screams acceptance. Yes the main protagonist, Skeletor stays true to his 'north star' villain ways, which I very much respected! But even he was too like-able. I want the main bad guy to be the scariest, darkest, most spine-chilling. He wasn't. Other villains were more ruthless in character. That made me sad. He used to scare the pants off me with his yellow face in the cartoon and his ghastly laugh and wide-open yaw, and later in the '87 film with his pure white wrinkly facial features. In this 2026 version, Skeletor would have been more at home on stage at Live at the Apollo than his natural habitat of Snake Mountain. Not satisfied with his own charismatic cackling, I felt he was aiming for a laugh a minute every time he was in the scene. Admittedly, a couple of times he made me laugh, but it took me away from the adventures of the Universe. This is a 12A cert after all, not a Pixar production that needs to be comically on-par with those kinds of amazing animated genres. Let Toy Story and the like take care of that. This should be an action-film after all, not a comedy.