Conan movie review

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

A Quick Thought

On Saturday, I got back from the PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio, where I had the real pleasure of taking part in a panel on Robert E. Howard. I hope to write about my experiences later. For now, I just had a thought I wanted to share that's been bumping around in my mind ever since.

During the conference, we discussed that Lovecraft is more popular in our modern culture than Howard. People also made a few jokes about the way Lovecraft's influences keep appearing (and being credited!) in our modern society. As a result, I think I have one possible explanation why Lovecraft is more generally known. I think it's because Lovecraft's singular style can be mapped onto a whole host of things. Something can be "Lovecraftian" just because it invokes an unspeakable horror born from some madness-inducing impossibility, or even just because someone slapped some tentacles on it, particularly if those tentacles are "squamous," "ichorous," or "rugose." Because we identify so many things in modern culture, particularly modern horror and monsters, as Lovecraftian, we see Lovecraft everywhere.

As a result, I'm going to start referring to everything that even remotely involves a decadent civilization being opposed by strong-hearted and clear-eyed barbarians as "Howardian." With luck, this will eventually get picked up and used in popular parlance.

Just about anything can be Howardian, from Westerns to superheroes to video games. Whether I'm talking about Unforgiven or God of War or Sin City, I'm thinking I'm going to try to get one "Howardian" a day into my conversations....

What's your favorite Howardian text?

(I hope I don't have to add that I mean this entirely tongue-in-cheek, and I hope it will be received as such!)

Law and Chaos: Wendy Pini does Stormbringer

Here's the link: http://www.masque-of-the-red-death.com/law_and_chaos/index.php
Since I first read some Michael Moorcock, I've had a complicated relationship with Elric. It wasn't until years later that I read Stormbringer, but even my first reaction to Elric of Melnibone, his evil runesword, and his tragic Wagnerian fate was mixed. On the one hand, I love well-done operatic drama, and the sweeping war of Chaos and Fate, free will and destiny, life and destruction that is the Elric (and, in broader terms, the Eternal Champion) saga is in many ways irresistable. The themes are staggering, and the coolness of a tall, slender albino hero of an ancient race who relies on a soul-sucking sword to survive is all rock and roll. On the other hand, I found the actual Elric stories rather flatly written, the quality of the prose leaving a lot for the imagination to fill in of the cosmic visions and sweeping landscapes Moorcock portrayed.

My relationship with the work of Wendy Pini's work hasn't been as complicated. I'm unfamiliar with the rest of her stuff, but as a boy, I was awestruck by her work on Elfquest. I remember literally crying when I realized this world would never be as beautiful and good as that world. The boy has become a man, but my affection, tempered by the greater sadness that comes with greater maturity, has only grown stronger.

As such, it was a delight for me to discover that Wendy has put online a collection of art she prepared when she was younger than I am now and working on an animated project based on Michael Moorcock's Stormbringer. It's obvious from the beginning of (somewhat slowly loading) her presentation that she not only got Elric but she connected with him, in a way I feel I haven't been entirely able to do (in that way I dig Conan). The presentation is as much a reflection on her own self forty years ago and a meditation on the creative process as it is a loving memory of the work she put into Elric.

It hardly needs to be said that seeing one of my favorite artists rendering something I really enjoy was mind blowing. It was particularly moving for me to see how involved she got with it. The creative process is endlessly mesmerizing and mysterious, and never so much as when we look back on it from years down the line. She captures the tragic grace of Elric, the drama and the unforgiving angst. Even if you're not familiar with the Stormbringer story, this is a fantastic and enchanting visual representation. And if you are familiar with it, she stays remarkably true to the events of the novel.

Enjoy.

Happy Birthday, Robert E. Howard

Today is Robert E. Howard's birthday. I've already said a lot about why I love his work and why I'm so moved by his life, so I'm just going to say that much. Happy birthday, Bob.

Something Cool I Never Knew About

I was just bumping around the internet, reading about things that interest me, when I came across this:



Hey, awesome! Universal Studios had a Conan live show in their tours! And sure, it might be based on the movie, but it's Conan, right?

Wait a second... why does a weedy guy pick up a sword and turn into a big musclebound dude? Does he have the power of Grayskull? And why is Red Sonja involved? Exactly what is this based on, anyway?

Okay, so this has absolutely nothing to do with Conan, but it must have been pretty kick ass to watch back in the day. As I've said before, I love cheesy fantasy almost as much as I enjoy quality fantasy. Swords, fire, animatronic dragon. What else does a boy need?

Apparently someone recorded the whole thing on a crappy camcorder (did they have any other sort in the late 80s/early 90s?). Enjoy the campy awesomeness!

Dark Horse Solomon Kane, you're sitting in the naughty chair

(Note: not for the squeamish, and also plenty of spoilers)

I was a bit disappointed with the first volume of Dark Horse's run on Solomon Kane, but the second volume is making me want to drop the title. This isn't any sort of review, mind. This is how I feel. Results not typical. If you feel strongly about it, you're more than welcome to.

My primary complaint is the gore. As an avid fan of the writer's work, I don't mind pints of squirting blood and lots of violent action. But after a point it just turns my stomach. It's always a line between telling a story and just being unnecessarily gruesome. In the first volume, guts are spilled in liberal measure, including one scene in which a man's intestines are apparently twisted around Kane's sword as he pulls it out. The real turning point for me came when a monster tears off a named female character's face near the end of the story. I can take most things, but gratuitously graphic violence towards women makes me sick.

In the second volume, the gore dial got ratcheted up to 11. Practically every scene in which a monster gets shot or stabbed resulted in copious amounts of hanging (and/or splattering) red viscera. And they do get shot and stabbed frequently. And it's not just the monsters. In one scene, a man gets the top of his head cut off and his brains spill out. In another, a woman has her neck twisted all the way around, breaking her spine. A man who falls from a second-story window breaks both legs into a shredded mess with the bones sticking out. Feel free to call me a sissy, but this feels excessive.

Both stories are based around original fragments written by Howard, in the same way the Conan series has been doing in some of the volumes. The first volume deals with the fragment "The Castle of the Devil," which originally never even goes as far as to establish what the real nature of the conflict is. The comic pretty much makes up the whole story, beyond it involving Kane, a wandering Englishman, and a sinister baron's castle around which he likes to string up children for supposed crimes. I actually liked this story. The supernatural mystery and tangled strings of motivations made it an entertaining read.

The second volume uses a full Kane story, "The Rattle of Bones," and another fragment, "Death's Black Riders." Contrary to what I would have expected, "The Rattle of Bones" makes up a single chapter, surrounded by the fairly flat story built from the fragment. They really base it on a single line from the two page fragment: "They swept on, horse and rider a single formless black object like some fabulous monster." In this story, this is literal: the enemies are misshapen, vaguely centaurlike monsters. They're attacking people for reasons never clearly explained. It's suggested they were summoned by a gypsy to fight off bandits, but they stick around apparently just because they'd like a Solomon Kane sammmich. A monster gets a couple of lines about wanting to destroy the whole human race near the end, but by that point Solomon Kane has killed most of the other monsters, so that's a pretty optimistic goal. The story is mostly an extended siege of a tavern and a lot of fighting off the monsters as they try to get in. Not terrible, but nothing special.

(Aside: I like the way they did "The Rattle of Bones," but it felt rushed. It could have used a longer simmer to get the right spooky flavor.)

The dialogue isn't great, either. It's serviceable for the most part, with occasional awkward line: "Did your prayers stop that thing, priest? No! 'Twas this [the pistol], in my iron right hand!"

In the end, it's the gore that makes me pause. For a great story (and the first one is quite good), I can put up with even a lot of it. But the second story was pretty weak, and being constantly showered with visceral splatter makes me think I'm going to leave the rest of these volumes on the shelf.

(I should also mention that the coloring in the first volume was done by the excellent Dave Stewart, who also colored many of the Dark Horse Conans with art by Cary Nord. Give credit is credit is due, Stewart does a bang-up job.)

A Very Half-Assed Reaction to the Age of Conan Video Game

In the tradition of my very half-assed reactions to fantasy stuff, I will here review the Age of Conan MMO. There's a free to play intro, so I decided I'd take a crack at digital Hyboria.

First things first: the game needed to download 3+ gigs of stuff before it would play. That's in addition the ridiculously long install time. Even after that, it had to update itself for at least another ten minutes after I launched the game and got into the character builder. After I built my character, I had to wait ANOTHER ten minutes before I could actually fire up the game.

If you had any doubts that I was going to make a "Conqueror" class Cimmerian hero with the height and muscles maxed out, you haven't read enough of this blog. Surprisingly, the Cimmerians in this game are quite pale. Makes me wonder, considering how often Robert E. Howard refers to Conan as a "bronzed" man. Well, maybe he was just dipped in bronze at some point in his career.

First, the good. I kind of like the combat system of selecting to attack left, high, or right depending on where your enemy is defending. Since the screen shows you were best to attack (wherever the enemy has the fewest arrows), it's basically the world's easiest game of Simon Says, but it does get more interactive than just rick clicking something and going for a pee break while the fight unfolds.

I was hoping these three basic attacks would last me, but soon enough as I leveled up (the game threw levels at me the way I throw coins at dancing girls in Tarantia), I unlocked a bunch of abilities that have a short warm-up meter and then unleash an attack that takes a few seconds to cool down. So though I could say it's more or less like World of Warcraft, what I really mean to say it's more like World of Warcraft and less UNlike World of Warcraft. Still, the three basic attacks does work for me. It's kind of fun, forcing the player to take an active role in the fight... if you ignore that you're just swinging wildly away at each other anyway while you both stand still. Hack and slash, swashbuckling brawling this ain't.

NPCs have exclamation points over their heads when they have quests for you and question marks when you're ready to complete the quest. If you don't know why this is a criticism, you've probably never played a fantasy MMO.

After coming across a maiden in need of saving literally thirty seconds into entering the game (after someone bitched at me about me being a slave who just survived a shipwreck and told me to go into town), I killed a few beach combers, freed the maiden with a key one of them dropped, and then she started following me around, cheering and clapping every time I got into a fight. She became my very own personal cheering section while I got chewed on by baddies. Yay gender equality.

At this point I should mention the performance. My six year old computer (the retired Southern gentleman planter Colonel Aloisius Dell) did most emphatically NOT enjoy playing this game. I turned the settings all the way down until the graphics looked worse than World of Warcraft (flat textures, pastel colors, crude movements), but the screen would still freeze for a few seconds when there was too much going on--usually when I was getting stabbed in the nipples.

I beat up some pirates and their pet cats, found a few slightly less awful items (I started the game with a broken oar as a weapon--apparently I couldn't even find a whole oar), and beat up a fat guy who used to be my slavemaster. In this conversation, the game made sure to earn its M rating, making reference to "raping" my ears, calling the dude a "whore's son," and various other jargon Tarantino would have been proud of. It would have been a tense scene if our conversation wouldn't have drawn on so long, or if I could have just broken it off with a kick to the groin. He's all "Hey, my slave! Come be my slave again." I'm all "I'm going to kick your balls off." He's all "Don't be like that. Let's get you into town and I'll sell you." I'm all "I'm going to tear you a new asshole." He's all "There's no need to get bent out of shape. We can work this out. Here, put these chains on." I'm all "I'm going to tear off your head and shit down your neck." He's all "If you really feel strongly about it...." I'm all "CAN WE JUST START PUNCHING EACH OTHER ALREADY?" He's all "Well, if you REALLY want to." (Conversation paraphrased.)

After I beat up some Picts (hanging out in Tortage, in the Barachan isles? eh, it's a demo area), I headed past some vine-covered idols of dark gods (points) into a forgotten jungle-swallowed temple (more points) to fight some ghoul-type monsters. After doing my usual ass-kicking, I grabbed the key to a door and headed through the rest of the jungle. I punched some gorillas in the balls (REH loved using gorillas as enemies, so even more points here), then came across a flowing river of lava.

I really could have just gone over the bridge, but I decided to see what happens when I touch the river of lava. I gingerly dipped my toe into it, only to be told that I've been incinerated. A few seconds later, my character died, and I respawned. No biggie. My cheering section even found me a moment later and we continued with our day as though nothing happened. I talked to her, and she didn't even seem to notice that I, apparently, just died a horrible flaming death not thirty seconds ago and reappeared somewhere in the jungle. There was a gimmick about me being marked somehow and not allowed to die by the gods, but this really broke my sense of being immersed in a gritty fantasy world and reminded me I was playing a game.

When I arrived at town, I was told I couldn't go into town since I was wearing my slave chains. Instead of just putting on a really loose long-sleeved shirt, I was told to go talk to the blacksmith, who then told me he couldn't take my chains off until I helped him shore up a dam to keep lava from destroying the town. I had to go grab materials for him to help build the dam. Now, anything involving lava is awesome, so I might have forgiven such an obvious fetch quest, but this is a game with Conan's name literally all over it. It's not called "adventures in extreme engineering."

The blacksmith also reminded me of another complaint, which might seem trivial, but it really chapped my loincloth-clad ass. In character creation, I maxed out my character's muscles and height, and yet it seemed like every male NPC was A FREAKING HEAD TALLER than my guy. Maybe I get bigger as I level up or something, but nothing makes me feel weenier than having to crane my neck to look up at every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants me to fetch his widgets. And a Conan game should NOT be making me feed weenie, BY CROM!

And then I saw my first other player. He jumped out of the town, bunny hopped right by me, swinging his sword wildly, and disappeared around a corner. I wish I was exaggerating.

At this point, I exited the game to go pick up some library books, and when I went to boot it back up, I found out I'd have to download the entire three gigabytes AGAIN. I guess it just lost the first three gigs or something. In a fit of rage, I buried my axe in the monitor and shouted, "BY THIS AXE I RULE!" (Okay, that's a Kull reference, but it's close enough via "The Phoenix on the Sword" connection.)

The verdict? It's an MMO. It's got some gimmicks, but it's just another MMO. There are buff classes, healing classes, magic classes, and melee and ranged DPS classes. Maybe the graphics would be better if my computer was made during the Obama administration, but that's not really at issue here. An MMO is a grind. You fight the same enemies over and over. You execute pointless, grinding quests. You swing wildly at enemies until one of you falls over. You kill "weedy grunt enemy" and "slightly bigger, though only slightly less weedy grunt enemy" a thousand times before you finally start equipping things that aren't called "torn ragged brown-stained loincloth with a hole that lets the breeze through." You're not changing the fate of empires or thwarting evil wizards, you're doing the same linear kill sprees a thousand other players are doing at the same time.

If you're looking for the tight action, the thrilling swashbuckling, the intense emotion, the wild bloody exotic ADVENTURE that is Conan, a video game just won't cut it.

It's almost like I saw this coming before I even tried it....

Now if you'll excuse me, the necromantic ghost of Robert E. Howard is at the door, and he's got a knuckle sandwich he needs to give me.

(PS Yes, I did go back and play a little more, but it wasn't getting any better, so I got bored and did the blog. I told you it was half-assed.)

Brief Star Wars Thought

"A Jedi's strength flows from the Force, but beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side of the Force they are. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny."

I've been watching a lot of Star Wars these days, trying to reconnect with the reasons I've loved Star Wars since I was a kid, trying to separate in my mind the wise Muppet Yoda from the CGI lightsaber-wielding Yoda, and all that comes with both. The last line of the quote stood out for me.

Much has been made of "destiny" in Star Wars, and whether the paths of the characters are predetermined. The ability to see the future has been used to explain away lots of inconvenient plot points (although "always in motion is the future"), not to mention the giant plot device of the prophecy in the prequel trilogy. But this quote seems to present another type of destiny in Star Wars.

This quote suggests you choose your own path, and that path determines your destiny. Your destiny isn't a single line that's already been laid out, but rather a number of alternatives among which you choose by the paths you take. This feels much more like wisdom about the consequences our choices have rather than an assertion of predetermination. The two paths Luke's life could go play a big role in Episodes 5 and 6: will he choose to follow his father's path or forge his own? This is about choice, not a single destiny he's bound to obey.

The same thing applies to the Emperor's taunt of "I have foreseen it" and "it is your destiny" in Episode 6. It's possible the Emperor really has seen one possible path Luke's life could go, but his downfall is he doesn't leave room for Luke's own choices. He makes the mistake a lot of Star Wars fans (and EU writers, cough cough) seem to make: that destiny is something set for you rather than something you forge yourself.

Maybe I'm trying too hard to read into it what I want to be there, but I still find this encouraging, because on closer reading it doesn't seem nearly as deterministic as it does on first watching. Your destiny is the path you choose.