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THROWBACK SF THURSDAY: The Next Conan Movie Should Look More Like Mad Max – castaliahouse.com

THROWBACK SF THURSDAY: The Next Conan Movie Should Look More Like Mad Max

Thursday , 3, August 2017 14 Comments

We deserve another Conan movie.  One that is more 1982 Conan the Barbarian and less Conan the Destroyer or 2011 Conan the Barbarian.  (I posted short reviews of the three Conan movies over at Every Day Should Be Tuesday.)

Making a good Conan movie brings certain challenges.  Not the least of which is the difficulty of finding an actor who can credibly portray a character as physically imposing, athletic, and charismatic as Conan, and the difficulty of finding a director/writer remotely as unconventional and brilliant as Robert E. Howard.  But I am specifically referring to what I call the “Stump Problem.”  Rick Stump lays it out, and says a great bit more, in this blog post.  The gist of what I am concerned with is that the 1982 and 2011 movies are origin stories that revolve around Conan avenging the killing of his parents; this is both non-Conanical and hurts the prospects of future movies (if Conan has achieved his life’s purpose, why do we care anymore?).[1]  Everything must be personal.

This is a particular problem for a couple reasons.  The first is that the 1982 movie looms large over any adaptation of Conan.  It is that movie, and not the original Howard stories, that did the most to fix the image of Conan in the mind of today’s movie viewer.  The second is that contemporary movies are simply obsessed with origin stories and making it “personal.”  The modern superhero boom brings with it a weird obsession with origin stories.  A large chunk of the MCU movies are origin stories.  It gave us a Spider-Man origin story just ten years after we got a (very successful) Spider-Man origin story.  The obsession of every studio in creating their own version of the MCU only makes things worse.  At the same time, studios have forgotten that it isn’t always personal.  Hence, James Bond cannot act merely out of love of queen and country, and Arthur will only seek the crown to avenge his friends.

Given that Hollywood only copies existing success, is there any hope?  Yes.  In seeking a successful model to copy imitate pay homage to, look not to either Conan the Barbarian, but to Mad Max.  Max, of course, has an origin story.  I’m thinking less of the original Mad Max movie than of The Road Warrior and Fury Road (of Beyond Thunderdome, as of Conan the Destroyer, the less thought of, the better).

Many of the Howard Conan stories are not driven by Conan.  Conan disappears for long stretches at times.  Several are really the stories of some third-party, with Conan just caught up in the action.  In A Witch Shall Be Born, a queen in usurped by her sister.  Conan gets caught up because he is the captain of the queen’s palace guard.  In The Pool of the Black One, Conan is found adrift by pirates sailing for a mysterious island.

This is the opposite of the usual approach.  Movies are typically the story of the main character.  Wonder Woman gets pulled into the story by Steve Trevor, but Wonder Woman is driven by her character arc.  Wolverine gets pulled into the story by Laura, but Logan is driven by his character arc.  Mad Max: Fury Road breaks that pattern.

Max has no initial agency or goal beyond escape.  He is only in the chase because he was captured and then dragged along as a blood bag.  The story is driven by Imperator Furiosa and the wives.  If we define “protagonist” as the character who wants something, Furiosa, not Max, is the protagonist.  Similarly, in The Road Warrior Max gets dragooned into someone else’s story.  This allows Max to play the heroic role without being a hero, which is exactly the position in which Howard loved to put Conan.

There lies the solution to the Stump Problem.  Give someone else the story that drives the movie.  Let Conan swoop in as the random adventurer who happens to be in the right place at the right time.  The viewer is given a compelling story, but Conan loses nothing after its completion.  He can walk off stage to the next adventure, just like Max.

 

H.P. is an academic, attorney, and “author” (well, blogger) who will read and write about anything interesting he finds in the used bookstore wherever he happens to be for the moment.  He can be found on Twitter @tuesdayreviews and at Every Day Should Be Tuesday.

 

[1] Stump is a little too hard on the 1982 movie.  I have to agree with Vlad James that it is a masterpiece.  John Milius and Oliver Stone are—like Robert E. Howard—unconventional geniuses, and that, more than anything else, is what matters.

14 Comments
  • Andy says:

    IIRC, one of the things that really hampered the 2011 movie was that it was seemingly impossible to find anyone willing to adapt Conan from the original stories instead of just remaking Arnold. They ended up settling for a hack director who simply liked Frazetta paintings and got predictable results.

    I hate to be cynical but I just don’t think Hollywood has anyone on hand right now who’s capable of doing justice to Conan either from an acting or directing standpoint. Even Fury Road had to be made by an elderly Australian man who learned his craft before the dark times. Maybe if someone lets Mel Gibson out of director prison in the near future…?

    • deuce says:

      I think Mel could do Conan justice.

      Maybe we need Frank Miller to adapt a Conan yarn into a graphic novel and THEN have Snyder or Rodriguez translate that to film. I wouldn’t trust them to do it on their own.

      • Alex says:

        The guy who does the Hellboy comics might be a better choice (Mignola?)
        I didn’t read it closely, but I did thumb through a Fafhrd & Mouser comic he did that really captured the Lankhmar vibe.

      • deuce says:

        Mignola didn’t write that. Chaykin did. Mignola’s adaptation/completion of Howard’s “Nestor Fragment” into a Conan comic story was underwhelming, though I am a fan of Hellboy.

        I brought up Miller because he IS a Conan/REH fan and he seems to be about the only comic creator capable of having his work faithfully brought to screen. Rodriguez is also a big REH fan. With a Miller graphic novel template to rein him in — and to help boost/promote the movie, just like Sin City and 300 did — Rodriguez might do a good job and make a commercially successful film. I guess we’ll know more when the Fire and Ice movie comes out.

        • Andy says:

          I love Mignola/Hellboy but he’s not really a Howard fan. He seems to like it okay but he has that classic dismissive “it’s just dumb strong guy stuff” attitude toward Conan.

  • deuce says:

    I’ve always pointed out the “Man With No Name” movies as being fairly Conanic/Howardesque. ZERO “origin story”.

    • JonM says:

      Funny you should say that. I’m currently reading James Alderdice’s latest book, “Brutal: An Epic Grimdark Fantasy”. It’s basically, “A Fist Full of Dollars” if Conan came to a mining town instead of Eastwood to a cow town.

    • E. A. says:

      Surely you mean Yojimbo instead?

  • Aaron B. says:

    Yes, it’s hard to imagine anyone measuring up to Arnold’s Conan. Watching that movie today, or Predator, I’m struck by just how huge he is. Not just physically (as the Rifftrax for Predator says, “He’s smuggling softballs in his biceps!”) but in his entire presence. I don’t think they make actors like that anymore.

    I think your idea for how they could go a different direction could work, but I’m afraid it would still fall flat for me if Conan didn’t seem like (movie) Conan. I might be too old, though; it might work well for younger viewers who don’t remember Arnold’s Conan.

    • HP says:

      That’s always been the weird thing about Arnold. He’s not a great actor, but he has that weird charisma.

      The 1982 movie is awesome, but it would be better for the new movie if there wasn’t that baggage. So if most of the 18-34 tranche has forgotten about it or never seen it, that’s somewhat of a feature.

  • grr says:

    Didn’t red Sonja do the drive by?

  • 2Bfree says:

    There are a couple decades of good Conan stories that could be adopted for movies in the old magazine sized “Savage Sword of Conan” that have Conan as star and/or costar.

    It was a magazine not comic to get around the Comics Code Authority.

  • Durandel says:

    I’m still waiting for. Conan the Musical to be made and for it t take over Broadway, another industry that ran out of ideas over ten years ago.

    https://youtu.be/OBGOQ7SsJrw

    This video still cracks me up.

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