This is just my opinion, and I don't claim to be an expert in movies or in Conan, though I love both. If you thing I'm wrong, please don't comment about it, but you're welcome to share your opinion. I welcome discussion, but I'm not interested in an argument, and I'll just delete such comments.
(I try to avoid spoilers, but no promises.) (Another note: I watched this movie in 2D since it wasn't available in 3D in my town, and considering how messy I found some of the scenes in 2D, I can only imagine how it must look in 3D.)
It's pretty inevitable that after coming back from the first showing of Conan the Barbarian in Lincoln, I should sit down at my computer and write up some of my thoughts while they're still fresh in my mind. I have been reading Conan stories since I was a kid. I'm a huge Conan fan, and I presented a paper about Robert E. Howard (the writer who created Conan in the 1930s) at a conference last Spring. I am fully aware and sensitive to the issues in the work, especially the ethnic and gender-based ones that don't sit well with me as a modern person, but Conan and Howard stir something in me that I can't deny.
They showed the movie in the biggest theater, clearly expecting it to be the weekend's biggest movie. I got to the theater an hour early and sat in the best seat in the house, dead center and right in the aisle where I could stretch my legs. By the time the film started, there were perhaps ten people in the theater. At least three of them walked out, including a mother and her perhaps 13 year old son after a grisly torture scene. (A brief note: some of the gore really does get over the top. If you have a sensitive stomach, stay away.)
First things first: there was a lot of talk about whether Jason Momoa could play a good Conan. By what I could tell, he put some his whole heart into the role. I tip my hat to him. He was alternately funny, scary, and badass, just as Conan should be--he had gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths. Though they didn't digitally give him blue eyes, as some Conan fans endlessly demanded, I see no problem with that. Jason Momoa played a great Conan, and Jason Momoa has brown eyes, so that's the eyes they gave him in the movie. I really don't think anyone could have done a better Conan, and his performance is miles better than Arnold's. I really can't say enough about how good he was in this movie. It's a shame that the adventurous, fun-loving Conan he gets to play early in the movie eventually gives way to a hard-edged killer of men whose demeanor stays a little too constant, which I felt was more the fault of the writers than the director. Really, I can't say enough what a good job he did with the character. He looks and acts like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. If this movie doesn't do well in the box office, I certainly don't think Jason Momoa should blame himself for it. He gave it his all, and it really shows.
The movie gets off to a great start after the intro. The first thing we see is battle. The scene is bloody, intense, and went right for the gut. Ron Perlman does a solid job as Conan's badass father, and the kid who played young Conan looked plain dangerous. About twenty minutes into the movie, I was starting to have hope that they actually got it right. I could see myself texting (if I had texting) my friends that this could be a Conan movie well worth seeing. They were doing so well. After a bloody childhood filled with emotional twists, Conan becomes a wandering warrior, and we get to see him raid a slave camp, kill the slavers in a blood-drenched free-for-all brawl, sweep a beautiful (and topless) woman into his arms, and celebrate in a tavern. For better or worse, that's what a Conan movie should be, and my hopes were high.
But after the intro, things really slow down. There are long sequences where just about nothing happens. I felt like the movie sprinted out of the gate and got winded before it was even a quarter done. I blame part of this on the way it was filmed, in which CGI and too-close camera work is used to make up for the lack of broad, stunning landscapes and interesting locations, probably for budget reasons. Instead, we get a lot of moving from place to place. A more than two hour action-adventure flick is pretty rare, and this one had a lot of fat that should have been cut.
The film makes copious references to Robert E. Howard lore. It references the siege of Venarium, mentioned as Conan's first battle against the Aquilonians in "Beyond the Black River," and it also talks about Conan stealing the Heart of the Elephant and slaying the sorcerer Yara, from "The Tower of the Elephant." That being said, I didn't see much color in the actual film. There are a few rough-and-tumble cities where Conan spends most of his time in taverns, but not much happens there, and most of the fights take place either in the woods, in stone rooms, or in hallways/tunnels. In a world that should be stunning and exotic, the locations that really matter feel generic, which no adventure movie should ever be.
Many of these locations are forgettable, including a room at the top of an abandoned citadel where the villains taunt the captured damsel (if you think the fact that the girl gets captured is a spoiler...). They taunt her and then they leave. Nothing happens, and the bare-bones set of columns and polished stone floors felt like something whipped up half from a sound stage and half from CGI. The final fight takes place in a cave complex that really didn't have much going on, either. It's just a lot of random stone tunnels leading nowhere. It sure did have a lot of guardrails, though. Seriously, if you watch this film, watch for all the chain railings over the yawning chasms. They might be a bunch of evil psychos, but they take safety very seriously. Earlier in the film, the ruined city turns out to be just a single city square. If only they would have had the budget to do more. It's like the filmmakers didn't know what the audience would want to look at. During the ruined city scene, every time one of the sand monsters gets killed, we have to stop, zoom in close, and watch it fall apart. Every. Single. Time. It was cool the first time, but come on! I get it. They're made of sand. I didn't think the fifth one would be made out of cotton candy or something.
Jason Momoa does a bang-up job, but the rest of the cast is a mixed bag. They threw in two sidekicks for Conan: a black pirate and a one-eyed thief. The pirate did a great job with his dialogue, though he felt like he was there more to provide background for Conan than to play an actual role in the movie. There was one utterly pointless fight scene with him in it that I felt was probably there just to give him something to do other than talk about what a hard character Conan is. The other sidekick was pretty worthless, and didn't do much at all apart from trying keys into locks until he found one that fits. That's a lockpicking skill even I have. Plus he had an outrageous accent that he seemed to lose when he got excited. Ugh.
I know the damsel, played by Rachel Nichols, was supposed to be eye-candy, but she wasn't even particularly good at that. They dressed her character, Tamara, up in costumes that were neither flattering nor imaginative. Though they tried to involve her in the fights, it felt so half-hearted that I would almost have preferred to see her in the back hiding or clinging to Conan's leg. In one scene, she gives up her wimpy dagger for a sword Conan tosses her, which she then uses to kill a guy. In the next scene, she's right back to the dagger. So much for character development. I felt the filmmakers made a major mistake letting her perspective take over halfway through the movie. Her character is just boring, and she never seems to have much motivation beyond surviving, and she doesn't even seem all that concerned about that. I know Conan needs a woman, but the original world of Robert E. Howard has quite a few strong, powerful women, and Tamara just doesn't cut it.
As the villain, Stephen Lang does well... sometimes. Sometimes he is menacing, bombastic, and scary, and I ate it up even though he is over-acting to the hilt. But other times, I felt he is just delivering his lines. It's like he decided he would put in a solid half-hour of screentime and make up the rest with just being there. Then Rose McGowan, as the villain's evil daughter, is pretty cheesy-awesome, weird yet sultry, except that she was just too obsessed with the silly finger-knives she wears . Whether she is cutting someone with them, scraping the furniture with them, or just waving them around, she just can't keep her hand at her side like a normal person. I swear half the character description must be "evil crazy sorceress" and half "finger knives."
I have two more major complaints. The first is the writing. The dialogue is okay at times, but just flat in others, partially because it rarely carries a sense of real urgency. Conan stories are known for their adrenaline-fueled frenzy, but I was never sure what the movie's plot really meant. Was it more about Conan avenging his people or about the villain taking over the world? How, exactly, did he intend to take over the world? What happens if he's successful? Howard's dialogue can be clunky at times, but it's always heated with emotion, and some of the conversations about the fate of the world felt a bit like guys deciding what to have for dinner.
Speaking of Howard, the pervasive themes of barbarism vs civilization that Howard is known for only appears in a few lines of dialogue, spoken by the pirate, which only reaffirms my belief that he was added purely to build up a Howardian hero. We never even get to see a civilized city; the only cities are a pirate town and a city of thieves. There's also a monastery, which seems pretty copacetic, and there was none of the decadent, fading civilization that Howard does so well in his stories.
The film could still have been really solid, budget and generic problems and all, if it hadn't been for the way the movie never really let me see what was happening in the action scenes. Overall, I can deal with poor sets and shallow dialogue. It's a sword-and-sorcery flick; that's expected. But the filming style (cinematography? I don't know terminology), particularly in the fight scenes, is just awful. I've complained before about modern cinema's tendency to string together a fight scene from a series of half-second shots from all different angles, but it was particularly bad in this movie. I yearned for even a single glimpse of a wider shot to establish who was where and what was happening. Instead, I got plenty of shots of faces, swords, biceps, and blood, but it all felt so disconnected that I just couldn't enjoy it. On top of that, it was so zoomed in I couldn't even enjoy the choreography, since if you zoom in far enough even a couple of kids knocking sticks together can look action-packed--though you have no idea where they are or who's winning. For a movie that put such emphasis on the fights, I was hugely disappointed.
There's one especially egregious fight scene in which Conan battles a guy on a giant wheel. It was very nearly something out of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. After a while, two guys swinging swords at each other just gets boring, because you know neither is going to get the other until the over-elaborate fight scene comes to the conclusion.
I'm not sure if the action sequences were due to bad editing, bad direction, or just bad luck. During one scene, I was thinking: "Now she's fleeing the bad guys... wait, Conan is there... where are the bad guys? ... now she and Conan are talking... okay, there are some bad guys, about time they showed up ... now the bad guys are chasing them ... now Conan is killing bad guys ... wait, how did the bad guys get in front of them? ... now she's being attacked by bad guys. did Conan leave? how did the bad guys get past him? ... never mind, there he is, fighting some other guy in some other location ... no, wait, he's back again and saving her!" There was a scene in which we get repeated shots of Conan fighting someone and Tamara standing there watching. The sequence cuts back and forth between her watching and him fighting, and then she hands him something. Hang on! You mean she was five feet away the whole time? What I wouldn't have given for some wide, long shots to wrap my head around what was going on.
There's a scene in which Conan fights a tentacled water-monster that features prominently in the trailer. Conan has to negotiate saving his friend, fighting off enemy warriors, and dealing with the monster. I felt it was quite good, though the camera work left me feeling confused. I felt that what could have been a brilliant set-piece was wasted. The elements were all there: a scary enemy, a cool monster, an intimidating set, and a bunch of tasks for the hero to have to juggle, all with dire consequences. It's a shame I couldn't just sit back and watch it unfold. The camera was constantly shoving my face into someone's armpit or sliding it down the blade of someone's sword.
Also, where is Crom in all of this? I was expecting Conan's god to get a proper shout-out, but it just never happens.
The movie ends with what feels like a rushed and disappointing culmination. Perhaps if they had made the film shorter, they could have focused on the good stuff instead of trying to stretch their budget and resources across so many different elements, many of which end up feeling flat and half-assed.
Overall, I wouldn't say it's a bad movie. It's easily better than the second Conan movie and could even be better than the first. But there was something in the old movie, a giddy exuberance, that seems to have been buried under all the CGI and the rapid shots between weird camera angles. Jason Momoa's performance and obvious dedication to the role should have deserved better work than this, and it feels like a film with all the right intentions but without the traction to really make them count. It has a lot of good ideas, but also a lot of generic ones, and by the end what was a promising blood-and-guts adventure flick turns into just another fantasy movie. I harp a lot on the way it was shot, but if that kind of Transformers-style rapid-cut action is your thing, you might even enjoy it.
Personally, I enjoyed it. I went in wanting to enjoy it, and for all its warts, it had enough to keep me, if not happy, at least content. There was enough there for me to walk away feeling like I had seen a Conan movie. The atmosphere (when it wasn't generic fantasy blandness) was brutal, just as it should be, and some of the locations do look cool. As the biggest highlight, Jason Momoa really nailed the character, and that alone was worth the price of admission. I came to see Conan, and I got quite a Conan.
At the start of the film, Stephen Lang's character commands an army of hundreds that devastates a village of hard-bitten warriors in a truly epic fight sequence. At the end, his entourage seems to have dwindled to two dozen men who disappear halfway through the scene, with no signs of his army or even of a colorful world beyond the dusty, dimly-lit set. I think this sums up the film as a whole for me
