CONAN
December 16th 2011 22:03
Category: Videos
“Know O Prince that in the years between when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the gleaming Sons of Aryas there was an age undreamed of…”
Based on the original character Conan created by Robert E Howard
Director: Marcus Nispel
Written by: Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer & Sean Hood
Producers: Fredrik Malmberg, Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson, Joe Gatta, George Furla, John Baldecchi & Les Weldon
Starring: Jason Momoa, Rachel Nichols, Ron Perlman, Stephen Lang, Rose McGowan, Said Taghmaoui, Leo Howard, Bob Sapp, Nonso Anozie, & Morgan Freeman
Released by: Roadshow Entertainment
Running Time: 108 minutes Rating: MA15
The other day I was just rummaging around in my local video shop seeing if there was anything worth purchasing when I came across this particular flick. Made this year I’d initially thought it was a remastering of the original work starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, he of the mighty thews and former governor of California, it was to my surprise that it was an entirely new version of this classic sword and sorcery hero. As a kid I quite literally grew up reading Conan in book and comic form and enjoyed his antics, quests, battles and style. So it was only natural that when I saw this particular flick sitting there on the shelf I was ready to dip into my wallet and hand over some spenduli to purchase it.
When I got around to watching the film I was on some levels impressed but on another level I could see one rather obvious inconsistency, which didn’t detract from the overall action and narrative of the film but did kind of spoil its efforts to remain authentic to the source material. When he originally created Conan Robert E Howard attempted to not only give his character a presence on the page but also the world in which he adventured, loved, schemed and fought. The Hyborian Age was a history that he wrote to flesh out this world in which Conan existed, and it serves to give the reader a fairly clear picture of the world and how it emerged. It also served as point between the world of one of Howard’s previous characters, Kull of Atlantis and the world of Conan. In essence what he was essentially showing with his history was that humanity since the earliest of days seemed doomed to repeat its mistakes – if there is any message in Conan it’s that those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat its mistakes…
But there are two problems to this rather grandiose and barking mad scheme of Zym’s, namely that the mask is in pieces and he needs to find them all and then when that is over and done with he then needs to find a descendant of the ancient necromancer kings of Acheron whose blood he needs to fill the mask with. Of course it’s the first part of his plan that brings him into confrontation with the Cimmerian’s, the northern barbarians whom Conan is part of by birth. It seems that Conan’s old man; Corin (ably played by Ron Perlman) has one of the pieces of the mask through his right as chieftain of the tribe. At this point in time Conan is but a boy, but one who has considerable skills as a warrior.
And as a result of this Zym and his minions have targeted the tribe in order to retrieve the last piece of the mask, the sad thing is as Conan later points out in the film they didn’t do a thorough enough job, they didn’t kill him and as a result he is left free to wander the world seeking out Zym in order to kill him in revenge for the death of his father and his tribe. So once Zym has his completed mask the story moves onto the efforts of a now fully grown Conan to hunt down Zym and exact his revenge in a suitably violent and terminal manner. From the shores of Zingara to the vast fortress that is Zym’s citadel he travels in order to seek to deliver this retribution, and as you’d expect in a Conan flick there is plenty of death dealing and carnage along the way.
Naturally the end result of this should be pretty obvious, in fact it should be pretty obvious right from the get go as it’s telegraphed early on in the piece. Strangely though that doesn’t detract from the ongoing action of the flick, you just end up with a sense of expectation as events head towards the climatic confrontation between Conan and Khalar Zym. And when the dust finally settled I came away feeling that it had been an enjoyable film that remained true to the general vibe of the character and his world. As I said though there was a rather obvious inconsistency; the bit about Acheron and the people who destroyed it. In Howard’s own history he describes Acheron as being destroyed by the Hyborians who at the time were a barbarian culture that would later become the dominant civilization in the world (hence the term Hyborian Age). All this happened before the Cimmerians ever emerged onto the scene, by the time they’d appeared Acheron was dead and buried and the Hyborian Age was at its apex. So how would a Cimmerian tribal chieftain have part of a mask from a land they’d never had any kind of contact with? That being said though Conan was an enjoyable flick…if you’re looking for some no holds barred action then you can’t go past Conan…
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