Conan the Barbarian on the Screen: Reflections

These past few years there was talk of bringing Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian back to the screen--but then there always is (live-action and animation, film and television, etc., etc.), with nothing much usually coming of it. So it seems to have gone with the latest plans for a TV series.

It may be just as well, since I doubt that anything they are likely to make would be very satisfying to fans of the franchise--with the 2011 film exemplary. I recall looking forward to it more than I usually did to revisitations of such material because I had recently read my way through the entirety of Howard, and in the process found out just how much John Milius' film differed from it. The stuff about Conan's childhood and upbringing, the rambling about "will" recycled from Milius' Apocalypse Now script (Why does no one ever notice this?), the use of Thulsa Doom (a Kull the Conqueror character rather than a Conan the Barbarian one), the whiff of '70s/'80s action movie formula I was later to discuss in my book on paramilitary action-adventure--made clear to me that, much as I liked the 1982 movie, and have tended to groan at the thought of new takes on old classics, there actually was room for such a take here.*

Alas, the makers of the later film decided to remake the 1982 movie rather than go back to Howard and do something with that, and the result fell pretty flat.

Taken as a simple action movie I remember it working well enough. Still, I didn't care to see more of Conan's childhood. (Indeed, I don't usually care to see action heroes "before you knew them," with this going especially for Conan, to the point that even though after finishing the Howard originals I was eager to read more, knowing that L. Sprague de Camp's tales turned in exactly that direction made me lose all interest in them. And they spent a quarter of the movie on exactly that.) Meanwhile, the vigor, the barbaric splendor, the epic feel that were for all the departures from the original true to Howard (and characteristically Milius) were gone, leaving something much more generic, much less memorable (with, I think, those who think the replacement of the "tangible aesthetic . . . and practical effects" right about this costing the film something).

So does it often go with remakes, which in eliding aspects of the old fail to come up with anything as compelling--the attainment of contemporaneity coming at the price of distinction, underlining the artistic pointlessness and commercial crassness that are hallmarks of the all too common enterprise. And certainly to go by what we have heard of recent remake attempts, it is hard to imagine material less likely to survive contemporary handling than Conan.

* Ironically, 1997's Kull the Conqueror actually used more of the Conan material, drawing heavily on the plot of the one novel Howard wrote, The Hour of the Dragon--to its benefit, though I would not credit it with doing that book justice. (I have said it before many a time but will say it again--for all their flaws the pulp adventures of old were way, way more satisfying reads than today's bloated pop fiction.)