Conan (just saw it)

[Gawen]

So maybe it just wasn't your cup of tea.

Oh no, I love a good revenge movie (Death Wish, Gladiator, Sudden Death). I love good vs evil stuff Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, V for Vendetta).

[Tristan Jay]

I found it to be a bit vanilla; not very innovative, nothing screaming greatness.  Still, I was mildly entertained for a couple of hours.  Jason Mamoa was fine as Conan, and I like good ol' Arnie, but I'm not hung up on which is better.  One thing I will say is that this movie gets closer to the feel and spirit of the 1930's pulp fiction from which the Conan stories originated.  Like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the cliffhanger serials on which those are based, that are the cinematic equivalent of their literary counterpart, pulp fiction short stories.  When this new Conan movie gets going, it's just going from one set piece to another; the 80's Conan the Barbarian movie had action yet was much more deliberate in pace.

Eh, it's a step closer, but still a little shy of seeing the literary incarnation of Conan.  I never got the impression he was initially driven by revenge; it always seemed like he kept adventuring to drive out the memories of his homeland because it was a depressing, cheerless and melancholy land.  As opposed to a cataclysmic personal tragedy.  Someone else I talked to commented that Robert E. Howard's Conan was often not really too proactive, we're usually catching up with him in each story as he's trying to get out of one scrape or another.  He still kicked a#$ though, always.  Thematically, Conan was often a character which enabled Howard to explore the clash of values and attitudes between barbarism and civilization (developing the premise that civilization was an unnatural construct of humans, and barbarism would ultimate prove a superior way of life).  I didn't pick up on that in the movie, though, if it was there at all.