Topic: "Conan The Barbarian 2011" Review by Kyle.

Fuck Lord of the Rings.

There, I said it.  Fuck Lord of the Rings, fuck Peter Jackson, fuck Howard Shore.  We need to get that RIGHT out of the way before I can even start to review Conan, because if you don't accept the fucking of LOTR, then you're never going to get my defense of this movie.  Full disclosure: the Lord of the Rings trilogy comprises my favorite three films of all time.  I like them more than Star Wars.  I can't rank them by how much I like each one, they simply occupy my top spot together as one, high above anything else.  No other movie I've ever seen has stirred my spirit as much as any of those films does even upon the umpteenth viewing to this day.  And yet, FUCK LORD OF THE RINGS.

See, Lord of the Rings is so unfairly good that no other fantasy movie or TV show can do anything without being compared to it.  One of the latter episodes of season 2 of Game of Thrones features a siege battle, and I've read reviews from cumfarts on the internet complaining that it was a ripoff of Helms Deep.  Which is interesting, because everyone involved said they specifically tried to make it NOT Helms Deep.  But it's a fantasy series, and it featured people with swords stabbing one another near a wall, so it was inevitable that the comparison was going to be made.  But not every fantasy franchise, be it film or game or television or novel, is Lord of the Rings.  Some were even made BEFORE Lord of the Rings, believe it or not, and therefore don't even owe a single damn drop of influence to Tolkien's work.  And indeed there were also fantasy movies before LOTR was adapted, and some of them were kind of awesome.

Conan the Barbarian as a character came before Lord of the Rings, and Conan The Barbarian's 2011 remake is a film made as though the Lord of the Rings films were never made.  And that's good, because there's a difference between Lord of the Rings and Conan: the former is High Fantasy, the latter is Sword and Sorcery.  It's a film in the vein of 80's S&S films like Fire and Ice or Arnie's own take on Conan.  It's a straightforward tale of a man done wrong who really wants to stab some fellas, with a couple mystical villains with baffling motivations and unclear powers.  It has boobs, it has sex, it has gore, and it has action out the ass.

Yes, there are parts of this movie that are dumb.  There are also parts that are quite clever.  Both dumb and clever parts are just an ASSTON of fun to watch- and that's the point of a Sword and Sorcery tale.  This is not a movie designed to make you ponder the notion of good and evil, to wonder if mankind's industrialization has lead to the loss of magic and wonder in the world.  This is a movie designed to make you want to tear your shirt off, decapitate some bandits, steal their slavewomen, and then fuck their slavewomen.  Jason Momoa embodies the literary Conan more than Arnold did in my opinion, and there are several supporting characters, good and evil, that are just fun to watch do their thing.

There are some fun visual references made in the film- I think I counted three horses getting knocked out either on purpose or by accident, and when there was a need for a monster in the film they made damn sure it was as lovecraftian as possible (Conan is generally accepted to fit into the Cthulhu mythos).

I'm getting worn out trying to explain what this movie is and why I think by Down in Front's standards it absolutely qualifies as a perfect movie.  Conan the Barbarian is the fantasy movie that jerks off us dorks that were fans of fantasy movies before Lord of the Rings came in, classed up the joint, and made it okay for y'all to know who Elrond is.  Before that happened, the greasy haired sword collecting weirdos like me had Conan, and we had Fire and Ice, and we even had Gor, and we ate that shit up.   Hell, we gobbled up Xena and Hercules, said thank you, and meant it.  Conan the Barbarian (2011) was made for us, and I personally want to find whoever was responsible for that and sing them songs of battle around their turgid penis.

Last edited by Kyle (2012-09-06 00:12:13)

When.

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Re: "Conan The Barbarian 2011" Review by Kyle.

Sidenote: This ended up more ranty than I'd expected, but you've touched a nerve so I'm posting it anyway.

I could not more vehemently disagree with you if I tried. There is nothing of merit in this Conan reboot, nothing whatsoever. It is the Battleship/Transformers-2 of R-rated fantasy movies. The only way you could think this is a successful love-letter to B fantasy movies is if you've never seen any B fantasy movies. Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer shit all over this thing in every regard.

Conan’s journey is supposed to feel like a mythical, emotional journey. In this version, while the beginning is the strongest stuff, the father dying and village destruction still never “feels” the way it should in this story. I think a big problem is the music, which is garbage, and does nothing at all to give this movie any weight. But even that aside, Nispel seems to not even try to give the movie any sense of a journey. How about some shots of young Conan, standing tall overlooking the remains of his village, wind blowing across his face. Make us feel the weight of this moment. This should be a Luke Skywalker in beginning of A New Hope moment, but no, Nispel just handles everything like a plot-point and skips right over it.

I think I could forgive sloppy action scenes (I would say that the original Conan isn’t exactly a masterstroke of fight choreography, and there’s actually not a ton of action in it), if the movie had any sense of direction, or felt like it cared at all or had a pulse. This movie feels dead, completely dead the entire way through, like nobody involved cares.

Honestly I haven’t felt this pissed walking out of a movie since Terminator Salvation, which is a good comparison to this movie.

Just the look of the movie is ass-ugly, all murky shades of yellow and brown, compare that with the clean figure against a blue sky from the first movie: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_SbP_IL0U5TU/TCpqmmdYvLI/AAAAAAAAAn8/GW4QtMYn9Sw/s1600/conan+the+barbarian.jpeg

And this is not me comparing it to LOTR, which isn't really the same genre, this is me comparing it to the original Conan flicks, or even stuff like Dragon-Slayer and Army of Darkness. Gore on screen does not automatically make a movie good, just look at Pathfinder, the last movie Nispel did.

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Re: "Conan The Barbarian 2011" Review by Kyle.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I feel the need to clarify the "Perfect Movie" label, because I often see it mentioned by folks here on the forum but not quite the way it's intended.

The term as I first proposed it refers to an evaluation specifically of the storytelling construction -- in a "perfect movie," every major set-up has a pay-off. I say major because anything can be a set-up -- if a character sits down at a restaurant and orders a Coke, that could get paid off later somehow, but it's okay if it doesn't. That could just be an innocuous throw-away detail. A major set-up is something the film deliberately highlights and in the language of cinema states, "this is important, file it away for later." If a film pays off every major set-up (and especially if it pays all of them off AND some of the minor ones to boot), it's a "perfect movie." If it doesn't, it's not.

All that to say, the measure of a perfect movie isn't "I expected boobs and blood and it had those things." We've used the term imprecisely on the show to essentially mean "a movie that doesn't try to be anything more than it is," but that's not what "perfect movie" means.* It actually comes down to the structure of the screenplay. As I said, I haven't seen the film yet, so I can't say whether or not it qualifies. But given your review is essentially defending the film's right to not make sense as long as it gives you a satisfactory testosterone high, I'm guessing not.

You can have a great movie that isn't "perfect" and you can have a technically "perfect" movie that isn't great (the former is common and the latter seems more rare). It's just one of many metrics.

(* It's probably worth coming up with a shorthand DIF term we can use for "not trying to be anything more than it is," because that's a valid -- and in my view, often positive -- evaluation of a film.)

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Re: "Conan The Barbarian 2011" Review by Kyle.

I agree entirely, although I would modify "pays off every setup" to include the possibility for explicitly subverting expectations. As a recent example since I just watched it, the new Jason Statham action movie Safe builds up an antagonist character with people saying "he's the only one I know that's a better fighter than Statham's character", and the movie climaxes with a dramatic standoff between Statham and this antagonist. It's setting up the classic climatic martial arts fight, and the characters lower their guns and prepare to have an honorable fight, only for a secondary character to shoot the bad-guy in the leg, followed by Statham picking up his gun and shooting the bad-guy in the face 10 times while he's on the ground.

By your existing definition, this would be a mis-step that disqualifies it from perfect movie status (which I'm not saying it is), because it's not following through on something it has been setting up throughout the movie, even though it's an intentional choice to mess with the audience, and in a way is a payoff by not being a payoff.

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Re: "Conan The Barbarian 2011" Review by Kyle.

I found this to be badly directed and plotted, with an underwhelming climax, terrible performances by its female stars and shoddy action scenes (the opening battle especially). Worse, it has no tension at all.

The original Barbarian craps all over this in nearly every regard. This is Kull quality at best.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. - Carl Sagan

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