2011 Conan the Barbarian

[monitor_ep]

OIP - 2025-10-05T190257.833.jpg

Tonight BF decided he wanted to watch the 2011 Conan. After rewatching it I cannot understand why the fandom wasn't behind it. While not as bloody as Arnold's, the action was there.

Got me wondering what others thought of this movie

[KingKickass1983]

Momoa was good...but it relied on too much cg effects...I liked the bro/frat type of humor Conan got up to as a lot of people just seem to forget Conan cracked jokes and had a sense of humor in the books. But the plot was just so....cliched. The main character could have been ANY barbarian...

Altogether not a TERRIBLE movie, just...watchable.

[MRP]

The cast was good, but it had a poor script, was terribly directed, had horrible cinematography (especially in the third act) which when combined with the overall poor CGI effects (or perhaps the bad lighting was deliberately chosen to hide the bad CGI and poor fight choreography) dragged down what could have been a good movie. I felt bad for Momoa. He was the right actor coupled with the wrong director and handed poor material to work with. The best scene in the whole movie was the opening scene with young Conan, but it was the scene that deviated from the Conan mythos the most.

I'm waiting for a Conan project where they actually use and trust the original Howard material rather that trying to write bad pastiche that misses the Conan character in a screenplay (the '82 Millius movie is guilty of this too, it is a great sword & sorcery film but it's a terrible Conan story and the elements that draw on Howard the most draw on his Kull stories not his Conan stories-Thulsa Doom was a minor villain in part of one Kull story and had nothing to do with Conan in the Howard stories). A story using a resurrected sorcerer from Acheron could have simply drawn on the Howard stories that used that motif, instead they tried to do their own thing and missed who Conan was and the themes that were at the foundation of Howard's world to make bland generic action film with tepid action scenes you could barely see on the screen at some points when it degenerated into dark blobs fighting against a dark background because of the cinematography and poor CGI.

I had high hopes, but ultimately it was utterly disappointing, which is a shame, because Momo looked the part and had the chops to do Conan and his giant mirth and melancholies justice if he had been given good material to work with and had a director who had a clue as to what Howard's stories and worldview were about and who Conan was in Howard's material.

-M