Well I am hoping that this version will remove the bad taste I've had in my mouth ever since I sat in the theater for the first showing of the Ah-nold version of the barbarian. It was so bad that I never bothered to watch the second all the way through... I did NOT see it in the theater because I didn't want to waste my $$... nor did I see Red Sonja when I heard it was Bridgett Nielsen playing the part and then Ah-nold doing some other beefy character.
All the films were a quest to make $$ and the hell with the story.
One HOPES that this time around it'll be a quest for a great story.
Wonder if they're going to waste the first 15-25 minutes on introducing Conan
Yup, they are. The kid playing Young Conan is the kid who played Young Snake Eyes in GI Joe. The kid's got good Karate and TKD so it might make for some interesting scenes. I hear they are also using the same BS reasoning as the first one where the Cimmerians are killed and he is getting revenge.
My ideal Conan movie would be this. Opening scene we see a battle on the Steppes, in the middle of all this a woman gives birth. Skip ahead to when he's 16 and going on raiding parties to other villages and becoming the genius strategist and leader he is. Next he's struck by wanderlust and stories of wealth in the south from his southern grandfather so he leaves his village to take on the world ... then right into the story. All that can be done with no dialog, almost a montage and you get Conan's real story.
The Cimmerians were never defeated. The movie people seem to think that since they don't figure into the story after he leaves his village that they must be dead, or they think it's easier for the general audience to understand a revenge motive rather than the wondering samurai/mercenary/pirate/thief motivation.
John Milius' Conan got so much wrong, but I don't blame him. He never read a Conan book, he admitted as much and he was highly influenced by Frank Frazetta's art, which as great as it is, made Conan too big. After all, you don't end up looking like The Oak growing up scrambling over rocks, shooting arrows and riding horses. He was big but not that big. He frequently faced enemies way larger than him but he wins because of his smarts and unmatched skill.
{As an aside, if you check out Robert Jordan's Conan novels he is described at "giant," "massive," etc. But one has to take that with a grain of salt since Jordan's first book was Conan The Destroyer, the novelization of the movie. If that's your starting point then of course the whole series is gonna be screwed, heck, his Conan time-line of events does not even match up with REH's time-line, which is funny since his books are written in a way to have taken place in the gaps between REH's stories. Kinda like when Raymond Benson took over writing the James Bond series from John Gardner, suddenly IFP forced him to write to books closer in line with the movies, ad the female M, and just generally suck for his entire run.}
I would like to see Conan the eloquent speaker, the Napoleon meets Art Of War battlefield mastery, his charisma that turns even enemies into allies.
