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: 
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.