“Arnold who?!”
Sometimes it seems the rarest thing in Hollywood is a new idea. No-one will have missed the upward trend in film sequels following sequels, rebooted TV classics, and perhaps worse: re-makes of the classic films we enjoyed as kids. At last count, there are at least twelve re-make/reboot projects slated to hit your TV or cinema screen in the next two years alone. Who can keep track?
Welcome to Re-make Mondays, a new weekly feature that will take a look at a remake/reboot currently being waved at audiences. I’ll feature the remake, and also what footage or content I can from the original, and then leave the helpless victim for you all to tear apart or cuddle up to in the comments. So, let’s get started:
This week we take a look at another cult classic dragged from the mists of time (the early 1980s…), rebooted with some big effects and bigger chests (as many D-cup pecs as D-list names) and presented in a cinema near you, in glorious 3D nogal. Conan The Barbarian.
The original Conan the Barbarian hit US cinemas in 1982, and was the break out hit that established the Austrian Alp himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Hollywood’s newest man-mountain-to-watch. Not Terminator, not Predator, but Conan – a classic, over-produced swords and sorcery epic where mud-covered people with unpronounceable names charged around a wild-looking part of California on horses, waving swords and shouting at each other unintelligibly. Okay, that was mostly Arnold.
The film capitalised on the fantasy kick that then film audiences were craving. Bloated by space opera, they wanted fantasy epics a little more down to (middle) earth, and Conan The Barbarian delivered that in spades.
Here’s the original trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1XmZ9_ckdw
It’s unclear what the motivation was to re-make Conan other than Hollywood’s un-halting locker search for every slightly high-grossing film of the 1980s. With Arnie bogged down by middle-age and marital woes, the big sword falls to up and coming Hollywood himbo, Jason Momoa (a strapping side of Yankee beef last seen chewing the scenery and the protein shakes in TV’s Game of Thrones.)
On the re-make itself, there’s little to report other than that. “Oh hey! It’s that guy from Game of Thrones!” Unlike the subtle genius of the HBO show, here the plot is unintelligible, the effects overwhelming, the women crazy/beautiful and little more than accessories since Momoa has bigger boobs than all of them. Additionally, the sets are wild-looking parts of someone’s iMac and well… That’s about it. It’s Conan 1982, without Arnie, in HD and 3D.
Here’s the trailer for the 2011 version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptC_KlAP_Ko
My verdict: What’s missing here is that camp, nostalgic feeling of hammy effects crossed with Arnie’s garbled English and the film’s overblown big-man-on-a-mission premise. Perhaps in twenty years we’ll look back and cheer at this remake. More likely we’ll exclaim “Oh hey! It’s that guy from Game of Thrones!”
