Running Time: 2 hours and 9 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Marcus Nispel
Quick Impressions:
When I first started seeing Conan the Barbarian previews, I had absolutely no desire to see it. Then my husband realized that Conan was being played by Jason Momoa, who also played my soul-mate, Khal Drogo, in the HBO series Game of Thrones. (I’m convinced that somewhere deep inside, Khal Drogo and I are the same person. He has the physique; I have the rage. My life’s ambition is to be able to snarl defiantly in the face of someone challenging me and continue walking closer, contemptuous of any threat. One day…)
Anyway, when we heard that Jason Momoa has already written a sequel, we were definitely in. I mean, sure we’d already heard that the movie was bad, but if it makes enough money, maybe the studio will make his sequel. So we were just trying to help out Jason Momoa (because you do not want to get on Khal Drogo’s bad side).
I don’t really remember the original Conan movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Technically, I’ve seen them, but I was a little kid and not paying attention. My mother loves to tell the anecdote of me at four watching Conan on HBO and saying sadly, “They sure don’t make men like they used to.” And then my Dad went down to the basement and started lifting weights.
As far as I’m concerned, the movie wasn’t that bad. It’s not trying to pull a fast one. The title tells you what to expect. Conan the Barbarian is about Conan. He’s a barbarian. And while it isn’t a perfect movie, it’s probably about as good as a movie about Conan, the Barbarian is going to get. Watching it, I had to admit, This is not a good movie. Still, only one logical answer presented itself when I wondered again and again, What could have made this movie better?
What could have improved the movie? A different premise.
Conan is simplistic and at times ridiculous, but it is what it is. If you watch it and don’t like it, then a safe conclusion might be that movies about barbarians named Conan really aren’t for you. Taken on its own terms, it’s pretty good. (Of course, from time to time, you might feel you’ve cheapened yourself by accepting those terms, but it will all be over in two hours.)
The Good and the “Good Grief!”:
The performances are actually pretty solid. Of course, the human relationships have the same level of complexity that I perceived in movies around the time the original Conan the Barbarian came out—when I was three years old. To appreciate the human interactions in this movie, you have to view it through the eyes of a child. Children always see themselves as the heroes, those opposing them as evil, parents as crucial, witches as scary, and romance as boring but mysteriously necessary. Clearly any woman who is not evil wants to be loved by the large muscley man who is good-natured enough to endure her affection, even though she spends most of the movie being talkative, dull, and for a number of reasons, inconvenient. Any child who grew up with 1980s action movies could tell you that they’re all sort of like Conan in their sensibilities.
As a kid, I found movies like this vaguely boring but pretty standard. As an adult, I felt the same way, but noticed a delightful loophole.
Conan the Barbarian was filled with several wonderfully thought-provoking scenes, points in the film during which you could zone out completely and let your mind wander happily without worrying about any negative consequences. In action sequence after action sequence, the fighting seemed to go on indefinitely, even though the outcome of the encounter was clear from the first blow. I call such moments thought-provoking because nothing of consequence was happening on screen, forcing the audience to think about something else.
During the opening scene when we witnessed Conan being battle-born, I thought, This certainly establishes a very violent, gory tone for the movie, but at the same time, this is a much more realistic take on labor than I just saw in Spy Kids. (Probably no woman ever has used ninja-like assault moves to attack spies while she’s having contractions, but I’m sure lots of people have felt just like Conan’s mother as they endured a difficult labor.)
After I saw young Conan lop off a bunch of heads and then watch in horror as his father was threatened by an enemy, I thought, I’d feel sadder for the boy losing his father if he hadn’t just murdered and decapitated a bunch of people himself in the previous scene. Why is it that the enemies attacking are always deformed, demonic weirdos who seem to deserve to be killed?
In another early scene, the adult Conan and his new allies attack a slave colony. Watching that scene was like looking at abstract art. First huge, round boulders rolled down the hill into the camp. Then a cart full of oranges exploded everywhere, filling the screen. At the end, we feasted our eyes on the jiggling breasts of a swarm of enslaved young women. Surely that was some kind of intentional artistic statement, I thought. All that round stuff rolling around—from rock, to plant, to flesh? See the progression?
See what I mean when I say the movie is thought provoking?
And there’s one more question, one that I still have not been able to answer.
Why was Morgan Freeman narrating Conan the Barbarian? And (even more mysterious) why did he stop narrating? (He doesn’t just narrate the opening sequence. He actually inserts himself into the narrative again later on. So then why doesn’t he come back at the end to wrap things up? Did he do something to make Conan mad? Is his head on a pike some place? Did he get eaten by that giant snake monster thing that lives at the bad guy’s hideout?)
Your guess is as good as mine.
Best Joke:
I don’t think either of these moments was supposed to be funny, but I couldn’t help laughing. When the ship docks and Tamara follows Conan to shore, the line she uses on him sounds like something out of a cinematic singles bar in the 1970s. Later when Marique tries to inspire terror by going on and on about Cimmerian steel as her captive is lashed to the wheel, Tamara looks not terrified but bored and slightly annoyed. Imagining potential responses based on the look on Tamara’s face amused me far more than it should have.
(Oh yes. One more thing. There was also a scene really early on where Conan’s father played by Ron Pearlman sends his son off to be a barbarian and looks after him fondly. I swear, the way the scene was framed, he looked just like Michael Landon in the opening sequence of Little House on the Prairie. Just like him!)
All of these unintentionally comic moments really spoke to me, and I was completely sober when I watched the movie. Imagine the potential for great comedy if you’re not!
Best Action Sequence:
The scene at the end kind of reminded me of some of the most exciting parts of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, except there were no mine cars, and I don’t remember a voodoo doll (though there was certainly a lot of black magic in the air). I thought the 3D was more effective there than at any other point in the story.
Overall, this movie is rated R for a reason. It offers up a feast of blood and gore. If you like killing, and gutting, and throat-slitting, and beheading, and torturing, and…
Well, I think I’ve made my case.
Best Scene Visually:
I think the best action sequence was probably also the best visually—the battle between Conan and the dust warriors raised by Khalar Zym and his sorceress daughter.
Best Scene:
I actually liked the scene set around Conan’s father’s forge. Young Marique’s entrance was beyond welcome. The villains of this piece were far more alluring than the hero. (Don’t get me wrong. You didn’t like them. But they were interesting. By being so evil, they made the rather dull leading man far more charismatic and appealing.)
[Light spoilers in this paragraph only] I also thought the scene where Khalar Zym and Marique attacked the monastery had such potential. Suddenly we discovered more about Zym’s motivations and learned that he lashed out against people who had murdered his innocent wife. I actually thought this opened the door to a kind of complexity I’d been hungering for earlier in the movie. Unfortunately, that door got slammed pretty fast when the guy he was torturing insisted that Zym’s wife hadn’t been innocent at all. She’d been a rotten, evil, wicked, enslaving sorceress and had completely deserved her death, and everyone else in the entire world agreed. So that settled that.
Best Surprise:
I knew nothing about the plot and remember the old Conan movie only as something I didn’t want to be watching on TV but was because my parents controlled the TV.
The first few scenes of Conan were mind-numbing and blood-spattered. So imagine my delight when Marique showed up. She was the first element of the story that actually won my interest. The little girl playing her, Ivana Steneva, was sort of deliciously evil. And then when she turned into Rose McGowan, she became all-out creepy.
The Performances:
Jason Momoa is great as Conan, certainly better than creepy-little-boy Conan. (I’m not blaming young actor Leo Howard. He does a good job. But he’s such an eerie little killing machine. In his single-mindedness, he’s easily as chilling as young Marique.) Momoa has tremendous charisma. His character is not that complex, but he’s very sincere, and he’s certainly someone you want fighting with you instead of against you.
Stephen Lang was something else as Khalar Zym, a scene stealer who always seemed to be angry (perhaps because he lost the part of Gargamel in the Smurfs movie to Hank Azaria). Lang is very sinister, almost cartoonishly so. And he’s kind of creepy, too, except that’s hard to notice because he’s always hanging around with his daughter Marique, so creepy to the core that she makes every other bad guy in the scene look like Mr. Rogers.
Rose McGowan brings an edge to everything she plays, but Marique clearly fell over that edge a long time ago. She’s as evil as they come. She’s so wicked that she’s not even pretty, though thanks to the uniting powers of cyberspace, I’m confident that if Marique fell through some wormhole into our time she’d never have to spend a Friday night alone. McGowan seems to be having a lot of fun making her character as creepy as possible. In some movies like this, the evil sorceress tries to seduce the hero, but in this case, Conan would surely reply, “Are you kidding? I didn’t even know you were a girl!” If somebody told me that McGowan made this movie for free, purely out of love, I would not be surprised. Clearly she is having the time of her life playing the strangely-compelling-while-undeniably-repugnant wicked witch. She’s evil!
Rachel Nicols as Tamara is like the antidote to McGowan’s Marique, running around in a wispy white robe with an unspoiled countenance and innocent blue eyes that proclaim, “It’s okay to love me because I’m not evil.” Her main function in the movie is to hang around being good. As someone of pure blood, Tamara is also useful as a plot device. Nichols is very pretty and does a good job of making the character somewhat feisty, too. Sure she can’t slice open innocent people’s throats like Marique or set in motion evil blood rituals like Marique, but she can roll her eyes and laugh at Marique, and that takes more guts than most people in the movie have. (In Conan, minor characters don’t keep their guts on the inside for long.)
Ron Perlman is always good in movies like this. If you’re casting some kind of fantasy or comic book adaptation, you just cannot go wrong with Ron Perlman. He’s very solid as Conan’s father, and if he did remind me of Michael Landon at moments, it’s probably because he’s like the Michael Landon of dark comic book adaptations.
I loved Nonso Anozie as Conan’s loyal friend and ally, Artus. I kept wondering, Why isn’t he narrating? He actually has relevance to the story, and he has such a wonderful voice! I love Morgan Freeman, but I really have no idea why he was in this movie. I’m hoping that he doesn’t know, either.
The Negatives:
Aside from the off-putting narration and Conan’s baffling need to leave at the end, I honestly didn’t find anything wrong with this movie except that the whole thing’s dumb. It’s also needlessly bloody, but I think that’s kind of the point.
Conan is a very visceral film, and, I’d imagine, a strangely satisfying one if you’re in the right mood. (In me, it awakened a desire to go to Mongolian Grill and eat without utensils.) (But I didn’t actually do that.)
I know that Jason Momoa read the comics and loves the character, and I have a feeling that the people who made the movie are probably quite satisfied with the results (with the possible exception of Morgan Freeman who probably signed a contract while enchanted by Marique).
Overall:
If you accept the movie for what it is, Conan the Barbarian is actually fairly enjoyable to watch. The villains are really evil, the heroes are really pretty, and the CGI really is not half bad.
At the beginning of the movie, I often found myself bored, but by the climax, I was hooked. The whole effort is kind of like a throw-back to a more innocent time when action films were allowed to have a heart without a brain.
Conan’s heart is really bloody and gory and freshly ripped out of a living body and then dissected and then eaten and then ripped out of that person’s stomach and then roasted and then eaten again. If you got increasingly excited as you read that last sentence, then do not wait. Go see Conan the Barbarian now!