Director: Marcus Nispel
Cast: Jason Momoa, Rachel Nichols, Stephen Lang, Rose McGowan
Have I Seen It Before?: There is literally nothing in this film that has not been seen before.
Did I like it?: It’s probably unfair to expect a good Conan movie, but Milius ruined that for everyone who followed. Even a hypothetical late-stage Arnold King Conan would probably be something of a letdown, after one was subjected to Conan the Destroyer (1984). I’ve been intermittently reading the Robert E. Howard canon of stories since recently re-watching Conan the Barbarian (1982) and from a laundry list of muddled, droning sword and sorcery tales, films like this one are what Conan adaptations probably ought to be. At least this film sports a solid R rating, and doesn’t continue the trend of making the stories suitable for children, starting with Destroyer. Movie series like Robocop can’t seem to shake of the need to smooth rough edges to a dull, PG-13 shine.
That preceding paragraph may sound like some sort of absolution for the film, but it isn’t. This film tries for nothing, nearly to the point where I began to wonder if the production was an ashcan attempt by some half-baked production company to keep the rights to the character. Momoa has proven himself since to be a charismatic movie star, and he is probably closer casting to the original character than even Schwarzenegger was, but he barely appears in half the movie here—the first third of the movie consumed by a needless prologue that the original Milius film dispensed with in a few minutes. Where the formation of Conan’s sword makes a visceral experience out of the opening titles in the original, here it is barely-rendered and boring CGI, tossed off because it is a list of things a producer wanted included in the movie, not something that serves the story.
Scenes that hardly needed to be shot in front of a green screen are, giving the film an antiseptic feeling, where a Conan film should be anything but antiseptic. It should be positively septic, bordering on gangrenous. Oh, and it was converted to 3D at the last minute, which was probably useless beyond the tanked opening weekend, and makes it pretty much in line with every film released during the era*.
Eventually, I was consumed by noticing things that couldn’t possibly work, even in the context of the film. The battlefield c-section that brought Conan into the world? Dubious. Conan freeing a village of slaves, and then carrying off one of their women? Counterintuitive. The henchman who had his nose cut off by Conan, and the rails about the injury while sounding like nothing might be altering his speech? Likely the only thing I will remember about the film.
*The new trend in film releasing in the 2020s? Skipping the theater altogether.