Movie: Conan the Barbarian (2011)
Release Date: 19 August 2011 (USA)
Directors: Marcus Nispel
Writers: Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer
Genres: Action | Adventure | Fantasy
If nothing else, “Conan” deserves respect for having the balls to quote Nietzsche at the beginning of the film. A sword and sorcery film that doesn’t go for the easy and obvious option of extreme cheese is very rare. Indeed, Conan the Destroyer, this film’s mutant half-sibling, falls into that very trap. Having set this curiously ambitious standard, Conan veers wildly from pole to pole. Visually, the film is very impressive. The desert landscapes of Spain; Thulsa Doom’s intimidating temple; the party to end all parties and Conan’s rippling muscles are all pluses. Basil Poledouris’s score is excellent. But there are times when the film is just silly. Sandahl Bergman’s endless cries of “Do you want to live forever?” are a needless modernistic touch and always sound rubbish. Witness when she comes back from Valhalla at the end to save Conan’s ample butt from being wasted. The film’s silliest moment, though, is ultimately its greatest. A sublime moment that encapsulates everything about this film: brute strength and insanely cruddy dialogue. Conan, asked by a wise Warrior master to describe “what is best in life” philosophises: “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women”. What self-respecting Republican could want more?
I hated this movie when I first saw it in a theater upon its initial release in the spring of 1982. I almost walked out on it in disgust. I *did* step out in the lobby and smoke a cigarette in the middle of the movie, but I went back and suffered through the rest of it.
I hate it even more now that I have another relatively FAITHFUL adaptation of a classic work of heroic fantasy — _The Lord of the Rings_ — to compare it to. The people who made that movie actually *respected* the original source material a little bit, and actually *tried* to tell somewhat the same story.
I blame writer-director John Milius primarily. He has done a lot of other very fine things, but he sure fouled up here. My impression is that what he *really* wanted to do was make a movie about the historical Genghis Khan and the Mongols, which would have been a perfectly okay thing to do, but they wouldn’t give him the money for that, so he just grafted or spliced the name “Conan” onto his (Milius’) pet Mongol story.
Plus he threw in some elements clumsily lifted from *another* series of Howard stories, those about the adventures of the Atlantean Kull, who usurps the throne of mainland Valusia, and has to contend with the remnants of the pre-human Serpent Men civilization (not snake-worshipping *cultists*, but actual intelligent humanoid reptiles), and an *undead*, *skull-faced* sorcerer (*not* a circa 1978 Jim Jones-type cult leader) named Thulsa Doom.
Get this: as Conan’s creator Robert E. Howard wrote it, Conan the Cimmerian (*not* to be confused with Sumerian, please) never had his tribe or his family wiped out by any snake worshipping Jonestown-style cultists. The teenage Conan just got bored and restless in the chilly, gloomy, backwards, and isolated hills of Cimmeria and *left* to see “civilization” and to find out if there really were girls without hairy chests.
He *was* very *briefly* enslaved but soon made his escape. Subsequently he wandered his world widely and had various adventures, motivated variously by curiosity, greed, a thirst for excitement, a sheer love of fighting, and *occasionally* by a desire to avenge himself upon some human or supernatural enemy. In no sense was his whole career one big, long, wearying revenge quest.
Also, he was not merely a dumb muscle-man. Although a bit green at first about the ways of civilization, he was naturally intelligent and cunning, and quickly became not only fluent but literate in a long list of languages, and knowledgeable about a wide range of topics.
Howard wrote *only one* novel-length Conan tale. All the rest of Conan’s adventures were told of in a number of short stories and novellas. These were not written in the chronological order in which they were supposed to have occurred, but the chronological order can be roughly worked out, with “The Tower of the Elephant” taking place when Conan is about seventeen, “The Queen of the Black Coast” when he is kind of thirty-ish, and the novel-length _Hour of the Dragon_ (a.k.a., _Conan the Conquerer_) taking place when he is about forty-five, and starting to get a little slower than he used to be.
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Anyhow, the original stories written in the 1930s by the tragic Texan, Robert E. Howard, are still where it’s at. Read those, if you can still find ‘em, and forget this mockery of a muscle-man movie.
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