Conan the Barbarian

• Director: Marcus Nispel
• Release Date: August 2011
• Writers: Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer
• Run Time: 112
• Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Tagline: Enter An Age Undreamed Of
Review: The first Conan is one of my favorite movies of all time. The Destroyer sucks although I did like it when I was a kid. The new one sucks too. There are too many battle scenes and they are all dull. There is absolutely nothing new here. What made the first movie so great was the poetry of it all. The land felt barren. Conan was not another cookie cooker hero on a cookie cutter George Lucas hero quest but a true nomad, a man who wanders from one encounter to the next, a witch, a snake cult, getting drunk and laid, punching a camel, happening upon the man who murdered his father, killing him, the epistemological space in which the first Conan takes place is that of a senseless premodern universe in which magical events succeed each other without ever truly fusing into one overarching narrative. Meaning is always somewhere over the horizon and the gods never deign to show themselves.
The movie is filmed, scripted and scored in such a way that we feel the radical foreignness of Conan’s universe. In the new film, however, there is no alterity at all, no imagination, no sense of being transported, no attempt to depart from the vaguely ideological boilerplate superhero narrative in even the slightest way, no mythical resonance, the new Conan struts and smirks like something out of the Fast and the Furious and has none of the cruel charisma of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although the movie is incredibly violent and gory, the pat coziness of the narrative renders all of this violence absolutely sterile. Nothing real is ever at stake and the movie has nothing to say about anything. It practically evaporates off the screen it is so ephemeral. Don’t waste your time with this one, watch the first one again.

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