By Crom! A Review of the 2011 Conan the Barbarian film

Marcus Nispel’s Conan The Barbarian opened in Philippine cinemas last week and I caught it on its second day.  The film stars Jason Momoa as the titular barbarian with Stephen Lang as the warlord Khalar Zym. As a youth, Conan becomes the sole survivor of a vicious attack by Khalar Zym’s forces on his Cimmerian village. Zym seeks to reassemble an ancient mask of evil power to resurrect his dead witch-wife and gain otherworldly powers with the help of his witch-daughter, Marique played by Rose Mcgowan. Conan joins forces with Tamara played by Rachel Nicols whom Zym seeks as the only possible bodily host for his dead wife’s soul.

Jason Momoa makes for a great looking Conan, even better suited to the role than old Arnold Schwarzenegger. He does look like someone Frank Frazetta would paint. There’s just itsy-bitsy, teenie-tiny little problem.

By Crom! This is NOT Conan the Barbarian.

The story itself disregards any source material written by Robert E. Howard, or even the pastiches that have been made and instead “re-imagined” the titular hero. Don't get me wrong though. Anyone familiar with the Conan literature shouldn't expect anything more than brute action and uncouth sex but the story they came up with is so far removed from Conan to be immensely generic. What they came up with is a revenge story peopled by a cardboard cutout comrade in arms, damsel in distress and an ill-thought comic relief ally as well as beyond boring villains. The whole film was reduced to a series of “buts” for me. Rose Mcgowan looked cool BUT she was woefully underutilized. Khalar Zym seemed scary and driven BUT he ended up looking silly with spittle dribbling down his lips almost every time he gets a close-up. Rachel Nichols looks the perfect damsel in distress BUT she seemed tired and embarrassed to be in the film. The one caveat though is that she has a topless love scene. Sheesh, should’ve just waited for someone to post that clip. The battle scenes are uninspired even though Ron Perlman got to shriek at the sky while covered in blood and raising aloft the infant Conan. Ron Perlman as Conan’s father should have been a sympathetic character BUT Nispel fails miserably in eliciting any pathos even from such a capable actor. The writers must have checked out the Dark Horse Born on the Battlefield comicbook and liked the title BUT that’s about it. Change the name of the hero to Brak, Dorn, Cumal or whatever because this drivel could have been made into any sword and sorcery film. BUT not Conan.

What the writers and the director lost was the simple flavor of who Conan is. Their film is far from the barbarian defined by fiction as well as non-fiction writings made by the author as well as scholars of his work. They even used the line that sums up Conan’s worldview but screwed it up pretty bad nevertheless. Here, Conan is driven by revenge, a motivation that had very little to do with what made up the literary Conan. Second, his lethality becomes too vicious making him a seemingly murderous adolescent with father-issues. Yes, Conan slew a lot of people, but even he would refrain from torture and unorthodox and cruel means of killing. He even spouts off character statements like “ No man should live in chains, ” and “ I’ll follow you to the gates of hell” which would have been perfect for other cinematic heroes. But not Conan as he was written by Robert E. Howard. The literary Conan was
uninterested in forging any destiny. He was a man who sought the simple pleasures of life -- money, women, food -- and who frequently had to contend with an innate sense of right and wrong. His victories were morally unintentional but thrust him into situations that eventually brought him kingship of a kingdom. When I first heard of this film project, I immediately acknowledged the fact that adaptations and translations to film can and will happen, mainly because of the demands of the medium as well as the audience and message. But Nispel's Conan is more than a poor adaptation to film of a literary creation. It totally disrespected the source material.

The filmmakers act as if they looked at what was made before and arrogantly said “Fuck it, we can do this better.”

Well dear Messrs. Marcus Nispel, Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood, fuck you all because you haven’t.

Crom, I got fucked too with the movie ticket I had to buy. What this film succeeds in is in serving as a fitting reminder to other filmmakers of the dangers of hubristic directing and script writing. An online review says that that the novelization of the film stands up better but I'll leave that for another day. Now, I'll just calmly wait for that perfect Conan movie again.