Conan the Barbarian (Review)
Aug. 30th, 2011 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davywavy"Between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Arius there was an age undreamed of, when badly CGI'd kingdoms lay spread across the world..."
And so begins the latest Conan film (or with words something very like them) narrated by Morgan Freeman whose warm and welcoming tones make the introduction sound like the start of a cheery documentary about penguins. Freeman, although an immensely charismatic actor, does not possess a voice which makes me yearn to hear of the days of high adventure. He possesses a voice which makes me fancy sitting back in an armchair and engaging with something heartwarming featuring either picturesque wildlife, Tim Robbins, or both. Getting him to give the opening narration is the first misstep in this film, but by no means the last. To segue straight from Freeman and his associations with fluffy antarctic wildfowl to Conan's birth (via an impromptu caesarian on a battlefield - hence 'born on the battlefield') is a trifle jarring.
Conan, you see, is a Cimmpleton - sorry, Cimmerian - a tribe of Barbarians who in ages past defeated the sorcerors of decadent and evil civilisation and captured the magic mask which gave them necromantic powers. However, rather than destroying said mask they simply broke it into pieces and hid it so nobody could ever wield such power again.
You can see where this is going, can't you?
However, the Cimmpletons plainly couldn't see what might happen next because they needed a prophecy that one day a villain would try to reassamble the mask and use its dark powers to conquer the earth anew to being them up to speed with what the rest of us twigged during Morgan Freeman's heartwarming and sadly penguin-free opening narration.
What follows is fairly familiar from the opening of the Schwarzenegger Conan from thirty years ago; the young Conan sees his tribe and family murdered by a villain (called something like 'Lord Evil', just for the slow on the uptake) and his rogues gallery ofend of wave monsters henchmen (there are a few references to the 'riddle of steel' in the dialogue to remind us that a better version of this story already exists) who are seeking the pieces of the mask o' evil. The young Conan is dragged off into slavery and generally swears revenge, blah blah blah.
What follows is less of a film and more of a videogame adaptation. The 1980's Schwarzeneggar film had a rousing score by Basil Poledouris (one of the best movie scores of the era, in my opinion) and occasional diversions into Nietzschean philosophy to carry us along, as well as a star-making turn by Arnie himself. Here we have Jason Mamoa as Conan giving it his all (as he clearly sees it as his big chance to break the big time) and a selection of supporting actors hamming it up with gusto, coupled with one of the worst scripts it has ever been my displeasure to encounter.
The ancient land of Hyborea is one of those fantasy lands where deserts, snowy pine forests, jungles, tropical oceans and deciduous woodlands all sit within easy walking distance of one another, and it is dotted with CGI cities which are differentiated by their cultural style - we have the ancient Greek City, the Tibetan Monastery city, the Cambodian Angkor Wat city and so on, none of which appear to influence the culture of any other despite being about five miles apart. Moreover, there doesn't appear to be much sign of farming going on to feed the populations either, but maybe it's only me who worries about that sort of thing.
Conan wanders this land seeking Lord Evil by tracking down his various henchmen in a strictly linear, on-rails plot which will translate perfectly to the Xbox. He travels to a new location, fights a few guards, and then has a boss battle with the next most powerful henchman before acquiring the plot token which will allow him to progress to the woodland zone or whatever. There's even a platform level during which Conan leaps about on scaffolding fighting sand golems. Achievement unlocked there, Conan.
To give you an idea just how all over the place the script is, allow me to outline the final reel. Don't worry about spoilers, because really I couldn't spoil it if I tried.
Conan and his new best friend, a professional thief, have tracked Lord Evil to an Angkor Wat-style city with a recurring skull motif where he is now king. You'd've thought that in seeking a villainous necromancer going by the name of 'Lord Evil', checking out the chap called 'King Evil' who lives in a skull-themed city would have been a great place to start, but it took Conan twenty years (in story time. It just seems like it in film time) to get to this point.
Conan and thief break into the city by entering a cave/sewer where they find a secret door to which the thief just happens to have the key. This secret door opens into a sewer/torture chamber/prison where one of Lord Evil's henchmen hangs out with a pet giant octopus.
I'm just going to digress a moment here. Quite seriously, this guy is just sitting on a throne in a big room with a watery pit in the middle with a hungry giant octopus in it when Conan walks in. Has he no social life? Or hobbies? Is it just coincidence that he is in the room that Conan enters? Or does he spend his life sitting there, doing nothing else? Perhaps so many people use the secret door to which everyone has the key to break into the city that they need someone on constant duty in the Octopus room? Or could it be that the script just said he was there and nobody asked any questions at that critical 'making the film not suck' stage?
In the 'making of' documentaries for the Lord of the Rings films, fight coordinator Bob Shaye says that every fight should tell a story. Well, the story being told by the fight here is 'We need to sell another thousand units of the game adaptation'. Or maybe 'We have no respect for the intelligence of our audience'. Maybe both.
Anyway, digression over.
End of wave villain and pet octopus dispatched, Conan and the thief set off up a flight of stairs which brings them out at the top of the tallest tower in the city. Bidding the thief farewell, Conan sets off walking along the battlements and we cut to him walking along a beach towards a skull-shaped cave on a cliff which is apparently where King Evil hangs out. Why? And how did Conan know? I didn't care by this stage, and nor will you.
Entering Skull Cave, Conan disguises himself as an evil priest (the only people who live in Skull City, it seems. No farmers or merchants or even guards who don't have pet octopi). A fight scene happens round a chasm hundreds of feet deep with a river of lava at the bottom.
Now, should you still be awake at this stage you might start wondering about that. Skull Cave is about fifty foot up a cliff bordering a shallow sea. How does the geology work? You might be even more confused when it turns out that a huge network of tunnels and caves strething hundreds of feet down exists for Conan and King Evil to fight in below Skull Cave. By this stage I was just wondering about the logistical problems of building these without the sea getting in to concern myself with the climatic sequence, but King Evil shouts, the tunnels start collapsing, the villains fall to their doom in the seashore lava chasm, and Conan goes home. The End.
For reasons I don't understand, the words "THAT'S TWO HOURS OF YOUR LIFE YOU WON'T GET BACK" don't appear before the closing titles.
Now, don't get me wrong. There is some stuff to like about this film. Mamoa puts everything he's got into playing Conan, and does so creditably. The design aesthetic is good, especially the costumes worn by King Evil's sorceress daughter. The cinematography is really beautiful, and I reckon the director has a bright future in front of him shooting films run by people who have a clue about all the other, trickier aspects of filmmaking. But that's it. Everything else is pretty much risible. Even the sound mixing sucks, so critical lines of dialogue are drowned out by thumping and instantly forgettable music.
I went in hoping for a remake of Conan the Barbarian, but the film I'd compare it to most is the 1990's big screen adapation of Mortal Kombat, but without the humour. Oh dear.
And so begins the latest Conan film (or with words something very like them) narrated by Morgan Freeman whose warm and welcoming tones make the introduction sound like the start of a cheery documentary about penguins. Freeman, although an immensely charismatic actor, does not possess a voice which makes me yearn to hear of the days of high adventure. He possesses a voice which makes me fancy sitting back in an armchair and engaging with something heartwarming featuring either picturesque wildlife, Tim Robbins, or both. Getting him to give the opening narration is the first misstep in this film, but by no means the last. To segue straight from Freeman and his associations with fluffy antarctic wildfowl to Conan's birth (via an impromptu caesarian on a battlefield - hence 'born on the battlefield') is a trifle jarring.
Conan, you see, is a Cimmpleton - sorry, Cimmerian - a tribe of Barbarians who in ages past defeated the sorcerors of decadent and evil civilisation and captured the magic mask which gave them necromantic powers. However, rather than destroying said mask they simply broke it into pieces and hid it so nobody could ever wield such power again.
You can see where this is going, can't you?
However, the Cimmpletons plainly couldn't see what might happen next because they needed a prophecy that one day a villain would try to reassamble the mask and use its dark powers to conquer the earth anew to being them up to speed with what the rest of us twigged during Morgan Freeman's heartwarming and sadly penguin-free opening narration.
What follows is fairly familiar from the opening of the Schwarzenegger Conan from thirty years ago; the young Conan sees his tribe and family murdered by a villain (called something like 'Lord Evil', just for the slow on the uptake) and his rogues gallery of
What follows is less of a film and more of a videogame adaptation. The 1980's Schwarzeneggar film had a rousing score by Basil Poledouris (one of the best movie scores of the era, in my opinion) and occasional diversions into Nietzschean philosophy to carry us along, as well as a star-making turn by Arnie himself. Here we have Jason Mamoa as Conan giving it his all (as he clearly sees it as his big chance to break the big time) and a selection of supporting actors hamming it up with gusto, coupled with one of the worst scripts it has ever been my displeasure to encounter.
The ancient land of Hyborea is one of those fantasy lands where deserts, snowy pine forests, jungles, tropical oceans and deciduous woodlands all sit within easy walking distance of one another, and it is dotted with CGI cities which are differentiated by their cultural style - we have the ancient Greek City, the Tibetan Monastery city, the Cambodian Angkor Wat city and so on, none of which appear to influence the culture of any other despite being about five miles apart. Moreover, there doesn't appear to be much sign of farming going on to feed the populations either, but maybe it's only me who worries about that sort of thing.
Conan wanders this land seeking Lord Evil by tracking down his various henchmen in a strictly linear, on-rails plot which will translate perfectly to the Xbox. He travels to a new location, fights a few guards, and then has a boss battle with the next most powerful henchman before acquiring the plot token which will allow him to progress to the woodland zone or whatever. There's even a platform level during which Conan leaps about on scaffolding fighting sand golems. Achievement unlocked there, Conan.
To give you an idea just how all over the place the script is, allow me to outline the final reel. Don't worry about spoilers, because really I couldn't spoil it if I tried.
Conan and his new best friend, a professional thief, have tracked Lord Evil to an Angkor Wat-style city with a recurring skull motif where he is now king. You'd've thought that in seeking a villainous necromancer going by the name of 'Lord Evil', checking out the chap called 'King Evil' who lives in a skull-themed city would have been a great place to start, but it took Conan twenty years (in story time. It just seems like it in film time) to get to this point.
Conan and thief break into the city by entering a cave/sewer where they find a secret door to which the thief just happens to have the key. This secret door opens into a sewer/torture chamber/prison where one of Lord Evil's henchmen hangs out with a pet giant octopus.
I'm just going to digress a moment here. Quite seriously, this guy is just sitting on a throne in a big room with a watery pit in the middle with a hungry giant octopus in it when Conan walks in. Has he no social life? Or hobbies? Is it just coincidence that he is in the room that Conan enters? Or does he spend his life sitting there, doing nothing else? Perhaps so many people use the secret door to which everyone has the key to break into the city that they need someone on constant duty in the Octopus room? Or could it be that the script just said he was there and nobody asked any questions at that critical 'making the film not suck' stage?
In the 'making of' documentaries for the Lord of the Rings films, fight coordinator Bob Shaye says that every fight should tell a story. Well, the story being told by the fight here is 'We need to sell another thousand units of the game adaptation'. Or maybe 'We have no respect for the intelligence of our audience'. Maybe both.
Anyway, digression over.
End of wave villain and pet octopus dispatched, Conan and the thief set off up a flight of stairs which brings them out at the top of the tallest tower in the city. Bidding the thief farewell, Conan sets off walking along the battlements and we cut to him walking along a beach towards a skull-shaped cave on a cliff which is apparently where King Evil hangs out. Why? And how did Conan know? I didn't care by this stage, and nor will you.
Entering Skull Cave, Conan disguises himself as an evil priest (the only people who live in Skull City, it seems. No farmers or merchants or even guards who don't have pet octopi). A fight scene happens round a chasm hundreds of feet deep with a river of lava at the bottom.
Now, should you still be awake at this stage you might start wondering about that. Skull Cave is about fifty foot up a cliff bordering a shallow sea. How does the geology work? You might be even more confused when it turns out that a huge network of tunnels and caves strething hundreds of feet down exists for Conan and King Evil to fight in below Skull Cave. By this stage I was just wondering about the logistical problems of building these without the sea getting in to concern myself with the climatic sequence, but King Evil shouts, the tunnels start collapsing, the villains fall to their doom in the seashore lava chasm, and Conan goes home. The End.
For reasons I don't understand, the words "THAT'S TWO HOURS OF YOUR LIFE YOU WON'T GET BACK" don't appear before the closing titles.
Now, don't get me wrong. There is some stuff to like about this film. Mamoa puts everything he's got into playing Conan, and does so creditably. The design aesthetic is good, especially the costumes worn by King Evil's sorceress daughter. The cinematography is really beautiful, and I reckon the director has a bright future in front of him shooting films run by people who have a clue about all the other, trickier aspects of filmmaking. But that's it. Everything else is pretty much risible. Even the sound mixing sucks, so critical lines of dialogue are drowned out by thumping and instantly forgettable music.
I went in hoping for a remake of Conan the Barbarian, but the film I'd compare it to most is the 1990's big screen adapation of Mortal Kombat, but without the humour. Oh dear.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 12:15 pm (UTC)I think its time to watch it again
no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 03:54 pm (UTC)Frankly, its a lot better than it has any right to be.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 12:50 pm (UTC)Jez tells me this shouldn't have confused me at all and the fact that I spent so much time frowning at the screen during this section says a great deal about my naivete.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-30 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-05 06:01 pm (UTC)Might be worth getting the Rifftrax for the DVD when it comes out. ;o)
Or make your own.