Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was barely 30 when he shot himself dead in 1936. The proximate cause appeared to be the fact that his mother, who had suffered from tuberculosis for all of Howard’s life, had entered a terminal coma. She died the day after her son.
A Texan with an unsettled childhood, Howard sold his first stories to the pulp magazine Weird Tales at age 18, and continued writing pulp stories in varying genres until a year or so before his death. It was in the later years of his life that he thought up the figure of Conan, the huge (but lithe) black-haired barbarian from somewhere called Cimmeria.
Conan was the very avatar of a violent, sexy, guiltless ur-masculinity. His fighting and roistering were set in a mythological age (between the sinking of Atlantis, apparently, and any recorded history we know), though in its specifics this imaginary era was a mix of ancient and medieval cultures and goings-on, from Babylon to Mongol hordes, with some hocus-pocus thrown in.
Howard is credited with sparking off the “sword and sorcery” genre, and Conan was such a successful character that Conan stories continued to be written long after Howard’s death, by L Sprague de Camp and others. Conan comics first appeared in the 1950s and are still produced today. And then of course there was the hit Arnold Schwarzenegger film in 1982, which got a cheaper, crappier sequel, Conan the Destroyer, two years later. (It’s awful but wins camp points for the presence of Grace Jones.)
Whistles and bells
Now we have a new Conan in the form of director Marcus Nispel’s Conan the Barbarian — in 3D, nogal, though one can’t see anything in it that couldn’t have been done just as well in 2D.
Oh well; it’s said that kids today won’t go to anything in old-fashioned 2D. Presumably asking them to see an old black-and-white movie would be like asking them to read a bit of Sanskrit.
Apart from a few pointless horror remakes, Nispel made Pathfinder, about native Americans fighting off Viking invaders in about 1?000AD. It has savage barbarians, some slightly less savage barbarians to pit against them, and plenty of sword-wielding, spear-chucking, arrow-shooting, limb-severing action.
Nispel’s Conan is in much the same vein. It hasn’t done very well at the American box office, but it’s not entirely a bore. Schwarzenegger was always preposterous, except when playing a robot, so I think Baywatch alumnus Jason Momoa is a fine update as Conan; he had some practice in the excellent HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones, in which he played Khal Drogo, the chief of a Mongol-type horde called the Dothraki. Yes, another barbarian.
As Conan, Momoa has been relieved of the heavy eyeliner that was such a key part of the Dothraki-warlord look. He has also been relieved of the heavy barbarian accent, so he can actually speak English rather well when he wants to. Howard’s Conan didn’t say much at all, and Schwarzenegger’s Conan had an actor’s-own barbarian accent, but this Conan comes across as fairly well spoken.
The gentle barbarian
Despite all the limb-severing and so forth, not to mention the lugging about of shapely wenches, Momoa’s Conan doesn’t seem that barbaric. His fighting moves, too, owe more to the past decade’s explosion of martial-arts movies than they do to the average beserker’s hack-and-swing technique. Mind you, this Conan does do a bit of roaring now and again.
We get a good deal of background to tell us how Conan became Conan, or how he got more barbarised than he was already: his tribe seems okay, a pretty peaceable (if dirty) lot. His furry dad appears to be a good guy — and eloquent too, going by the speech about honour et cetera he delivers to the young would-be warriors of this particular Cimmerian tribe.
In due course, young Conan’s family is massacred, which isn’t a spoiler because it’s in all the two-line synopses, and the rest of the movie (after the portentous voice-over transition) is about Conan seeking revenge against the man responsible. That isn’t a spoiler either, because it’s one of the most-used plots in movies, including the first Conan.
Nispel and his scriptwriters follow the basic outlines of the 1982 movie, though they do without the religious element. The cult of Thulsa Doom, a kind of prehistoric Jim Jones in Sun Ra drag, is gone, and they probably thought that having Conan crucified and then magically resurrected was just too much in 2011.
Freed of such symbolism, the story charges along from fight to battle to fight, pausing only for a little roistering and one sex scene so under-lit you might as well have your eyes closed. The narrative hasn’t much shape, and the action gets rather repetitive. Some of the fighting is reasonably well done, with Momoa looking like a natural, but much of it is edited in that confusing way that alternates whooshing shots of something leathery and/or shiny, whoosh whoosh clang, with quick close-ups of ripped flesh and spurting blood.
Well, not too much spurting blood, because Conan the Barbarian must find its core audience among late-teen males, and they are not supposed to see too much spurting. That wouldn’t be civilised.