Masters of the Universe is playing at the Morris Theatre right now, and I was lured in. It’s terrible. It’s two hours of pointless reiteration of an intellectual property that was contrived in the 1980s as a tool to sell toys — it had a poorly animated cartoon show, a glorified advertisement, that played every afternoon in that sweet spot when kids were getting home from school. It was repetitive noise. Every episode had roughly the same structure: a squad of freakishly weird characters, led by a bad guy with a skull for a face, would try to take over a castle guarded by a squad of mostly human, muscle-bound leaders, and be inevitably defeated. The same characters fought each other over and over again, and each one was for sale at Toys’R’Us as an action figure. Mattel cleaned up. Every 8-12 year old boy wanted a set of action figures they could play with as they watched the cartoon, and they would bring them to the playground to battle with their friends’ toys.

I know because my kids grew up in the 1980s, and we had to buy all the toys. On their demands, we had He-Man and Beast Man and Moss Man and Man-At-Arms and Skeletor and Orko and others, and we also had the Castle Grayskull play set and various vehicles. This was also the time in my career when we were frequently moving to various places around the country, and one of the sadder things about that was frequently packing up everything we owned into a truck and driving to a different state, a different apartment. One of my memories was the final step in moving out, and that was going through the rooms and sweeping up the detritus and throwing it into one last box. It was always an assortment of He-Man figures and accessories that I had to rescue lest the kids yell at me.

So I had to go see this movie. It was my mental equivalent of tidying up the garbage in the corners of my brain.

It is a competently made movie. It’s got some good actors, Idris Elba and Alison Brie, and some new (to me) players, who did a good job, although I wish all of them were acting in good movies. I normally detest Jared Leto, but in this movie he’s unrecognizable behind a skull face and a comically affected accent, which is the only way to see Leto in anything. The plot is familiar: Skeletor and his weird pack of freaks take over the world of Eternia, He-Man shows up with a magic sword and beats everyone up (there is a lot more killing of bit players in the movie than in the old TV series), and the status quo is restored. Ho hum.

I kept wondering why this movie was made. It wasn’t for Art, because it’s entirely derivative and lacking in novelty. It wasn’t to tell a story that would resonate with viewers, because it could have been a cheap 20 minute cartoon rather than an expensive 2 hour movie. It wasn’t to provide moral instruction, although it did include an appearance by Orko at the end to briefly summarize the lesson taught by the show, just like the old cartoon. I don’t even recall what the message was, it was so perfunctory and so irrelevant to the movie I’d just watched. No, this was clearly the product of a thought by a marketing executive at Mattel. Let’s take another pass at the wallets of the 1980s generation that we successfully bilked 40 years ago! It’s a naked attempt to milk nostalgia.

They got me. I contributed to their $54 million box office on a movie that cost $200 million to make. Be smarter than me and don’t fall for it. The movie is not good enough to outweigh the bad faith premise behind its creation.