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The film starts out bad and proceeds to get worse. A queen bargains with Conan to escort his daughter to find a key that’s written about in a prophecy of some sort. As the journey requires a visit to an evil wizard’s place, Conan seeks the aid of a wizard. Wizard, thief, princess and princess’s guard (played by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain) escort the princess (somewhat mysteriously called “Jenna”) to get the key. Along the way they run into a warrior played by pop star Grace Jones. To a certain extent the mixture of different personalities gives the story that feeling of ancient legend (or at the very least Basic Dungeons & Dragons,) but to a certain extent it also feels like you’re watching a bodybuilder and a pop star and a basketball star wandering around in Arizona in the early 1980s. As good as the artistic direction and cinematography are in places, their art is only limited to a few shots. The film feels very much a big budget adventure that is quite firmly rooted in the early ‘80s.

The story actually plays out pretty well. Much of the acting is actually pretty bad, but the director frames everything well enough (combat scenes aside) that the exceptionally bad acting in places isn’t a problem in every single scene. The story progresses. The princess gets kidnapped by a wizard. The party goes off to rescue her. They do. There’s a semi-classical, semi-comic scene with a monster in a red cap and a bunch of mirrors. The wizard is killed and the group goes off to escort the princess to her destiny. The whole thing ends pretty predictably, but not without its moments. The princess retrieves the key, which turns out to be a horn meant to bring about the end of the world. The princess is to be a virgin sacrificed in the process.

Okay, so it’s not a bad fantasy story. Some of it may come across as alarmingly cheap, but there’s some particularly good art direction here. There are a few really nice set pieces and so on, but the overall epic saving-the-world-from-its-own-destruction thing ends up linking the thing up as more of an epic fantasy story than the sword and sorcery adventure stories that defined the character Robert E. Howard created.

Conan The Barbarian (2011)

From the start, the 2011 Conan The Barbarian is pretty clearly aimed at being something of a mix between the original prose fiction, comic book and film versions of the character. In a relatively well-executed intro, quite a bit of back story is executed leading into a scene between Conan’s parents on a battlefield. In what has to be one of the more grizzly childbirth scenes ever to make it to film, we see Conan born on the battlefield. Ron Perlman (in the role of Conan’s father) holds aloft the newborn Conan and there’s the opening title. Cute.

What follows is an extended half hour or so outlining some pretty crucial moments in the childhood of a young barbarian. As a young child he kills and beheads a couple of people who were evidently trying to kill him and his friends. It’s kind of a weird fusion - sort of a Batman Begins by way of 300. And though the combat is a lot more beautifully choreographed than either of the original films, it pales in comparison the intensity of some of the combat seen in films like 300.

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