Well I finally got around to writing this. I’m not even sure it’s still in the theaters. Probably not. In any case I hadn’t actually seen the original film until after I saw this remake. In that sense I’m not sure I can justly compare the two. But how did I feel about my first outing into the Conan Universe? Let’s Review Conan the Barbarian.
The Negative
Not so much a complaint, but something that I noted throughout the film, Conan sounds like he is doing a voice. I wouldn’t say it’s as bad as Christian Bale’s Batman voice, but it is a fake voice all the same. I have a hard time taking him seriously when I keep thinking he is only using that voice to sound more buff and menacing. It simply never felt real and took me out of the movie several times. At least with Batman it’s used to explain him covering up his real voice, but in this film it just comes off as silly.
Another problem that stuck with me while watching the film was how often people’s blood exploded from them when they were killed. Once again the problem was how unrealistic it looked. I get that it’s a gore factor, but when you want to have that gore factor at least make it look real. I remember one scene in particular where the main villain bashes a monk's head on a stone staircase and it looked like a giant packet of fake Halloween blood exploded off of his face. Most characters killed in a gruesome manner similar to this also had exploding blood packets. Once again the problem was realism. I know that’s asking a lot from a fantasy film, but these are very simple requests. Make sure his voice doesn’t sound forced and the gore isn’t cartoonish in nature.
As a minor complaint, the final couple of fight scenes jumped around too much. This is more of a problem with editing. It started around the fight scene with the sea beast in the dungeon and it doesn’t stop for the rest of the film. The camera jumps around so often that it becomes disorientating. I lost track of what was going on in the fight and the movie for that matter. I finally caught back up with the film when I saw Conan walking away victorious. I feel like I missed out on a really cool fight scene because I saw it through the eyes of a flailing idiot who was running around trying not to get killed.
The Positive
This was by far the best fantasy film I have seen in a long time. I truly thought the genre was dead after I watched the car wreak that was Clash of the Titans, but this film has renewed my belief that good fantasy films can still be made. This was everything that a fantasy film should be, and I loved every second of it. It could just be the drought of good fantasy films lately, it could be that I didn’t see the original until after the fact, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film and hope for more from it in the future.
Something I want to note is that I really enjoyed the opening off this story. I loved the origin of his birth on the battlefield, his life as a child in a village of barbarians, and the tragic fate of his loved ones by a ruthless conqueror. This is kind of why I was disappointed by Conan’s voice when we first meet him as an adult. It just felt like he was trying to compensate for something, while the story went out of its way to build up how awesome he was as a child that I didn’t need a deep burly voice to try and convince me he was awesome. My favorite moment in the film is literally his entire childhood before they jump into the future. It was the best part of the movie.
Another thing I want to praise is the scenery. Every single one of the sets were beautifully put together and brought me to a foreign exotic world that was far distant from my own. This is one of the reasons I praise it as an outstanding fantasy film as it actually had the look to pull it off. So many films have very bland and generic backgrounds that it was nice to see some fascinating architecture and beautiful geography appear regularly through the film.
In Conclusion
I’m not entirely sure why this film received so many bad reviews when I think that it was one of the better films in its genre as of late. I only have some minor complaints but I wouldn’t really say they ruined my enjoyment of the film. I just think that it could have used better blood effects, less Batman voices, and cleaner editing, other than that I’d recommend this film to anyone who enjoys the fantasy genre in films. 3.8 out of 5.
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