Conan

[calzephyr]

Pulling from my watcher's notes...

I can't believe I'm writing that there's a movie Jason Momoa can't save, but it was definitely Conan.

I love Jason Momoa! He's a beautiful man inside and out, but I moved on after about half an hour.

Honestly, the movie lost me in the first few minutes when baby Conan is born during battle (get it???). His mother is a warrior and wants to see her son before she dies. Her husband takes her knife, does a 2-second C-section, and lifts baby Conan to her so she can name him, and then she dies. It is the most ridiculous thing! I can suspend my disbelief for a lot of things, but not that😄

The first part of the movie is brutally hard to watch (get it???), toned almost entirely blue and black where we see young Conan as the best of the best! He can finish his chores and have time to participate in a young warrior's marathon, where he single-handedly takes down a group of baddies that made his companions flee. Ugh.

After a battle where Conan is orphaned, it moves to the present day in full colour (get it???) where Conan and his companion free a group of slaves. Conan later spots someone who ransacked his village and gets arrested so he can get closer to the man. I gave up when Conan stuck his finger in the man's missing nose.

Although this movie is in no way related to the Arnold Schwarzenegger films and is a new interpretation of the books--and not having read the books, I don't know how faithful either adaptation is--the original Conan movie is so good because the characters have so much depth. The film is as disciplined as Arnold's workout routine and every time I watch it I enjoy the storytelling and cinematography so much. It's not easy to take pulp content and make it a action masterpiece.

This Conan movie is sadly kind of cheap and visually messy. A terrible movie can still be enjoyed if it has some redeeming qualities--but I knew after half an hour this movie was not one of them.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[trepkos]

Shame - he does seem like a nice chap.

[calzephyr]

Yeah! I adore Jason Mamoa. He has a great sense of humour. I did buy the Jason Mamoa colouring book, tee hee!!

[full_metal_ox]

I’m pretty sure I recced this to you; sorry to hear that it wasn’t to your liking. I suspect that neither would the books be.

(And then there are the circumstances of fellow Howard hero Turlough O’ Brien’s birth: his people, according to tribal custom, tossed him newborn into a snowbank to test his fitness to live. I’m ashamed of the amount of time it took to occur to me that this obstetrical practice—which I’ve not found anywhere in anthropology—was thought up by an only child and childless bachelor living in a warm climate.)

[calzephyr]

Oh, if you recommended it, I forgot :-D It popped up as a recommendation on the TV.

Throwing a child in the snowbank seems like one of those ideas new writers come up with--he probably wasn't the first :-D

[full_metal_ox]

For a while, I misremembered the incident as having been Conan’s backstory (understandable, since Howard’s heroes tended to be stamped from a black-haired blue-eyed Celtic or proto-Celtic template…prompting the greater-than-zero possibility that I may unthinkingly have told this story about Conan O’Brien.

(A meteorological impossibility, even had Brigham and Women’s Hospital (1) gone in for such shenanigans; the weather on 18 April 1963 in Boston was “Light Rain, Drizzle, Drizzle with Fog, Drizzle with Smoke, Fog”, with temperatures between the 40s and 60’s.(2)

(1) Where Conan O’Brien’s physician and researcher father worked, so I’m hazarding a guess that that’s where he was born: https://brookline.news/thomas-and-ruth-obrien-long-time-brookline-residents-leaders-in-medicine-and-law-and-parents-of-conan-obrien-die-at-ages-95-and-92/

(2) https://weatherspark.com/h/m/26197/1963/4/Historical-Weather-in-April-1963-in-Boston-Massachusetts-United-States#Figures-ColorTemperature