Conan: Legions of the Squid Hat

There had been movement on another Conan film for a long time before this saw the light of day. After all, we are in the age of reboots and remakes, and there had not been a Conan movie released since the disappointing Conan the Destroyer in 1984 – that’s 27 years between releases, and these days, when every conceivable property is being made into a movie or a TV show, an unexploited IP like Conan is just sitting there going to waste. Thus, in 2011, Hollywood forces gathered and spent $90 million making a new Conan the Barbarian, and it's easily the worst Conan movie ever made.

There is almost nothing here that is not just painfully bad. The only aspect that works at all is Momoa, who has the right look and the physicality to make for a great Conan, but is given almost nothing to work with. He glowers, he spends most of the movie shirtless, and he throws himself into the action with a lot of gusto, but he is surrounded by levels of incompetence that are almost absurd.

On a surface level, there is already so much wrong here. The art direction and costuming are flat and boring, with all the actors save the leads wearing painfully cheap-looking wigs. The prop weapons are thick and awkward-looking, resembling plastic props you’d buy at a costume store. The fight choreography is bad, with a lot of shaky-cam and quick-cuts meant to stand in for action, and director Marcus Nispel seems addicted to slow-motion. If you look at movies made by Zack Snyder (which Nispel clearly has), you can see how slow-mo can be used to enhance action, but here it deadens it and slows everything down. The editing is shameful, often so bad that you literally can’t tell what is happening or where people are in relation to one another.

Some of the digitally-painted vistas used for backgrounds look quite evocative and cool, but most of the actual set dressing is just bad. One of the signal questions you have to ask yourself, when watching a Sword & Sorcery film, is: Does this look better than an episode of Xena? Sadly, between the cheap costumes, bad wigs, and bland set design, this does not look any better than any given episode of Xena. The special effects are also poor, with digital monsters that have no weight and obviously are not really there – the CGI seriously looks like a relic from 2001, rather than 2011.

Director Marcus Nispel clearly had no idea what he was doing. Some people saw Pathfinder and thought maybe he could do a good job with this, as Pathfinder is a very good-looking movie. But we see the same problems he had in that film, magnified by having $90 million fucking dollars to throw at them. The pacing is slow, the action killed by terrible editing and ill-advised slow motion. A graphic artist, Nispel can create some very cool images and knows how to frame a shot, but he hasn’t got any idea how to direct action or maintain tension, and the actors all show signs of being given no real direction by the person who had that as their fucking job. This is what happens, I guess, when you give a big-name franchise to the guy who used to direct music videos for Mariah Carey and C+C Music Factory.

The characters all speak in a melange of random accents, and nobody has any real good stuff to work with. Stephen Lang seems to be having fun, and Rose McGowan actually manages to find a character in her creepy witch, capitalizing on her weird hair and really leaning in on a strange, alien way of speaking and moving. Momoa is left with his broad American accent and a lot of anachronistic dialogue. Remembering how iconic and forbidding he was as Khal Drogo just makes this all the more painful to watch, because you can imagine what we could have gotten.

But the real disaster is the script, as if it were any good at all maybe this could have been salvaged, but it is fucking terrible. Nobody usually pays attention to screenwriters, but I am going to shame them here: This script is by the team of Thomas Donnelly and Josh Oppenheimer, with some additional work by Sean Hood. Now, Donnelly and Oppenheimer were responsible for the cinematic turd of A Sound of Thunder, and Hood’s biggest credit at this time was for Halloween: Resurrection, so we are not dealing with any real big talents here. This is scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as writers, and it shows.

The first misstep is the movie wasting like 30 minutes showing us Conan as a kid, and even though this was carried over from the original film, I will say right here that I don’t give a fuck about what Conan was like as a kid. We don’t need to see his mom and dad, we don’t need to see his stupid home village. Just, don’t do it. Plenty of characters get introduced in movies without needing to start us with them in the fucking womb.

So then we get to Conan as an adult, and he leads some raid on someplace we don’t care about and which never comes up again. Now we’re like 45 minutes into this movie and it has gathered no momentum at all, and now the story is kind of, sort of, going to get moving.

Like in the 1982 film, Conan here is driven by REVENGE, since Stephen Lang killed his whole village. Lang is looking for the pieces of this mask that looks like a squid and doesn’t cover your face, but rather seems to sit on top of the head. You know, like a mask. I know this character has a name, but I just watched this movie an hour ago and I can’t remember it, so who cares. The dude wants to reassemble his Squid Hat and with it he will have the power of some ancient necromancers and can bring his dead wife back from the grave. I guess this would be bad, but it’s not really made clear why.

So, he found the last piece of the Squid Hat in Conan’s village and now, some 20 years after, he is finally getting going on his Evil Plan. Nice of him to wait while the protagonist grows up, I guess. Maybe he could have moved faster if he was not traveling around in a ship his army drags around on land. No, really. The evil dude travels in a ship that has no wheels or anything, his guys just drag it everywhere, and this is never explained or even mentioned. Nobody seems to think it is weird.

Now he is after Rachel Nichols as “Tamara” - and can we pause to appreciate just how modern-sounding and immersion-breaking that name is? That’s a name for someone who owns a yoga studio, not a character in a Conan movie. Anyway, she is the “pure-blood” descendant of the ancient necromancer kings, and so Steve will use the powers of the Squid Hat and her blood to resurrect his wife and then something something he’ll be a god. Like, we are specifically told that his wife was burned alive because she was so evil, so I don’t know why he thinks she’ll do any better this time around. And when he finally puts on the Squid Hat it just seems to. . . do nothing at all, really. Conan rescues the girl, throws him off a bridge, roll credits.

That’s largely it, the running time being filled out with loooong sequences that are supposed to be action set pieces but just drag on and have no interest and don’t have anything to do with the story. There are a bunch of elaborate fights in this movie that are just there – they don’t change anything, they don’t develop character or advance the plot, they just take up space. The worst one is when Conan and his goofy thief sidekick infiltrate the evil palace, have a massive and tedious battle with CGI tentacles, and then find that Evil Stephen has already left. They look over the battlements and the thief guy says – he really says this - “Looks like he’s going to the skull cave.” And sure enough, there’s a cave on the horizon shaped like a skull. So the whole sequence and everyone in it was utterly pointless.

The whole movie is pointless. There are so many characters and elements that serve no purpose at all and go nowhere, and the movie wastes so much time doing useless crap that when you strip the story down to the bare bones it is really just nothing. It has no respect for the actual history or locations of the Hyborian Age, no respect for Conan’s story or his character. The original Conan was a $16 million movie that made $100 million. This is a $90 million movie that manages to look like $16 million, and the great mixed blessing is that it flopped as hard as it did. On one hand, bad filmmaking should be punished. On the other, the failure of this probably means it will be another 27 years before Conan gets another shot.