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The funny thing about the new “Masters of the Universe” movie is that nearly everyone seemed determined to misunderstand it before it premiered.

The trailer features a shot of the main character, Adam, at his desk behind a nameplate that says “He/Him.” Of course half the internet panicked while the other half preened, and almost everyone walked straight into the bit. Conservatives saw the clip and assumed another childhood franchise had been stuffed into a DEI binder. Leftists were happy to claim another cultural trophy. Both missed the joke.

Apart from being a nostalgia filled blast, the new “He-Man” movie works because it understands something Hollywood usually treats like a thought crime: Evil is not defeated by a group therapy session. The movie isn’t an endorsement of that worldview, but a mockery of it.

The live-action “Masters of the Universe,” released theatrically June 5, stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam/He-Man, Jared Leto as Skeletor, and Idris Elba as Duncan/Man-At-Arms. Amazon’s own description frames the story around Adam saving “his family and his world” from Skeletor’s rule. That matters because the film’s central jest is not just cultural; it’s moral.

Beneath the explosive, nostalgia-fueled spectacle, “Masters of the Universe” is a thinly veiled satire of the modern corporate grievance complex. It pokes fun at HR culture, it mocks the blue hair brigade, and it skewers the childish postmodern fantasy that every conflict is just a misunderstanding waiting to be resolved by therapy speak.

Skeletor is not waiting for someone to validate his trauma and invite him into a restorative justice circle. He does not care about your shared emotional space. Skeletor is a genocidal maniac.

This is the key to the whole movie. Its moral universe is not complicated in the lazy, modern way so many blockbusters now pretend to be complicated. It makes clear that evil exists, evil chooses evil, and evil sometimes loves being evil. And when evil refuses to stop, refuses to negotiate, and keeps coming for your home and your family, the moral response is not weakness dressed up as compassion. The moral response is courage.

This is where the film becomes more than a joke at the expense of corporate wokeness. It becomes the defense of something older, deeper, and much more important: strength ordered toward the protection of the innocent.

Elba’s Man-At-Arms drives this point home as he trains a young Adam. The lesson is not that masculinity means cruelty, nor that a man should go looking for violence. The lesson is that a man has a duty to stand between danger and the people he loves.

That is what He-Man represents. He fights because there are things worth defending. He protects because protection is one of the foundational duties of manhood. And that, more than anything, is what makes the movie feel almost radical in the current cultural moment.

For years, audiences have been told that traditional heroism is suspect. Fathers are fools, warriors are dangerous, courage is primitive, protection is patronizing, moral clarity is simplistic. Every villain needs a grievance dissertation, and every hero needs to learn that the real battle was inside himself all along. “Masters of the Universe” does not play that game.

But the movie is not merely a rebuke to the woke Left. It’s also a rebuke to the woke Right, or the New Right, whatever we’re calling them now. I mean the perpetually online, performative “Right” that mistakes reflexive isolationism for wisdom, “swagger” for strength, and cynicism for seriousness.

The Left’s error is obvious: It thinks evil can be managed by language, empathy, and institutions that specialize in avoiding reality. But the woke Right has developed its own mirror-image error. It sees real evil abroad, in Iran or in the imperial ambitions of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and responds with a shrug masquerading as prudence. It looks at tyrants who have already told the world what they want and insists that the truly sophisticated move is to pretend they don’t mean it. That is not prudence. Prudence begins by seeing reality as it is.

Iran is not a misunderstood actor seeking emotional validation from the international community. Nor is Putin’s war against Ukraine an unfortunate misunderstanding caused by insufficient empathy. Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, and the Ukrainian conflict is an imperial war waged by a man who wants territory, control, and submission.

This is what evil looks like in practice. It doesn’t always announce itself with a skull for a face and a horned staff. Sometimes it arrives in a suit, gives speeches about historical destiny, bombs apartment buildings, demands territory, and calls the whole thing peace.

But whether in Eternia or the real world, the moral principle is the same: When a regime has built its identity around revolutionary domination, terrorism, and the pursuit of weapons that would alter the balance of civilization, you don’t defeat that regime by pretending that your refusal to act is a moral strategy.

And here the woke Right makes the same mistake as the woke Left, with different branding. The woke Left says, “Surely we can defeat evil with empathy and feelings.” The woke Right says, “Surely evil will stop if we simply declare it none of our business.” Both positions are fantasies, and they both allow evil to continue while the people who should know better congratulate themselves for being “above the fight.”

That doesn’t mean America should rush blindly into every conflict. It doesn’t mean every foreign crisis requires American troops. And it doesn’t mean every enemy is best answered with bombs. Prudence, strategy, cost, and national interest all matter.

A strong country, like a strong man, does not fight because it enjoys fighting. It fights when fighting is necessary. It arms allies when allies are standing between civilization and conquest. It deters enemies before deterrence becomes war. It understands that weakness invites aggression and that the time for talking eventually ends when the other side uses every negotiation as a pause between attacks.

In this way, He-Man’s line lands heavy during his final battle with Skeletor: “The time for talking is over.”

This is not a rejection of reason. It’s the recognition that reason has already been rejected by the other side. It’s the realization that mercy cannot mean surrender to tyranny. And that seriousness is exactly what so much of the online commentary missed.

“Masters” also offers a clean break from the fake masculinity peddled by Andrew Tate and his imitators. Tate-style masculinity is not strength. It sells young men the idea that being a man means becoming unaccountable and unburdened by anyone else’s needs.

It’s also not a coincidence that Tate was recently glazing Russia and Putin. Fake masculinity is often drawn to fake strength. It sees a strongman and mistakes him for a strong man.

He-Man understands that his strength is not ordered toward conquest. It’s ordered toward protection. His masculinity is not chest-thumping or cruelty. It’s duty. It is love strong enough to become dangerous when the people he loves are threatened. That is the part Hollywood keeps missing. And it is the part the online woke Right too often misses as well.

A man who refuses to protect his family is not enlightened. A country that refuses to recognize evil until it arrives at the doorstep is not wise. It’s asleep.

The appeal of “Masters” and of He-Man is not complicated. Audiences are tired of heroes who need to be deconstructed before they are allowed to be heroic. Sometimes the good guy should simply be good. Sometimes the bad guy should simply be stopped. Sometimes the lesson really is that a man protects his family, defends his home, and refuses to let evil win.

He-Man wins because he understands the truth our culture keeps trying to forget: When evil will not stop, good men must make it stop.

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Justin Siegel is the executive producer of The Ben Shapiro Show.

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The New He-Man Movie Exposes A Dangerous Lie The Left And Right Both Believe