CinemaBlend has what’s being called the first official image of Jason Momoa as Conan. Certainly beats the previous images. Got to say, judging by this, I think Momoa has made a pretty good transformation from the Galactic Rasta look he had going before. Definitely beefed up. Even though there are detractors for this project and those who simply can’t let go of Crown of Iron, I’m trying to keep some positive vibes going for this new adaptation. I know that Momoa can handle the swordplay just fine. Everything else is a tossup until some footage comes to light.
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Remember those shots in the 80s action movies where the camera would be on the floor, a foot woiuld step into frame, and the camera would go upwards before showing Arnie/Sly/Bruce etc to the excitment of the audience?
I'm not seeing Momoa pulling off a similar shot.
He's the same size as he is in the other pictures. He's just standing at a different angle now.
Erm….yeah. It's a guy wearing no shirt but one hell of a frown. With Michael Bolton's unbrushed unshampooed 90s hair.
This movie is doomed. Thulsa Doomed.
Wow, take a look at that eyebrow ridge…this boy was born to be a Klingon.
no one will ever come close to arnie, but i still want a conan movie, so i dunno about this.
He still looks pretty close to the version of the character drawn in the Marvel "Savage Sword of Conan" mag from the 70's-80's. It can't suck as bad as Kull, and it's probably won't be as good as Soloman Kane, which who knows when we'll get to see….
For the record, I saw Solomon Kane at TIFF, and it kind of blows.
Why is everyone so hung up on Swarchenegger as the quintessential Conan? They never did Robert E. Howard's source material even half of the justice it merits. Not even the Marvel or Dark Horse comic runs really did (and the original Dark Horse run had great writing that tried to go straight from the source).
All of this big, invincible muscle-bound action hero stuff is a hold-over from the 80s that really needs to die. Growing up in the 80s the best stuff to me was Mad Max trilogy and the original Die Hard . . . and those are more tonally similar to the original Conan books.
One of the people that most inspired Dashiell Hammett's ("The Maltese Falcon," "The Thin Man" books) writing was Howard. The original stories depicted Conan as a cunning anti-hero with equal parts temper, strength, humor, slickness, moral ambiguity/challenge, and mystery. Non of this "bash enemies silly, ugh!" sort of nonsense.
You combine that with the ever present Lovecraftian mythology and subtext (H.P. Lovecraft and Howard were correspondence friends and shared their mythologies with each other) and you get something that's rife with great adaptation possibilities. The problem is that, instead of taking a Paul Greengrass, Akira Kurowsawa, Sergio Leone, George Miller, or even a Sydney Pollack approach, we get people pumping out cookie-cutter action trash bent on displaying testosterone rather than the often subtle, strange, and ethically dubious plots that made the original Conan stories a sensation way back in the 1920s.
Sure, when I saw John Milius' "Conan the Barbarian" in the theater in 1982 I loved it. But you know what? I was also seven years old. If someone's going to adapt one of the seminal sword and sorcery properties, why not step-up the game? I mean, hell, we could have an anti-Lord of the Rings if it was done right (that or someone should adapt Poul Anderson's "The Broken Sword" which came out at the same time as LOTR).
I like Jason Momoa alright. Stargate: Atlantis was a guilty pleasure during it's run. That all said, I have no hope for this latest adaptation. Conan is a property that's been pretty much abused in every incarnation outside of the original material. I'm no purist either, I'm one of the few people that — even after reading the graphic novel more than a dozen times over a 20-year period — thought the movie version of the Watchmen was just a little better than the source.
Rant finished.
This is the filmmaker that made The Pathfinder right? ?If so, then that's very likely not a frame from the final movie. Not enough ART DIRECTION!!!!!
It's a good thing they don't test actors for steroids.
No one can compare to Arnie. He's simply too stellar an actor. Honestly, though: Shut up. Arnie is easily replaceable by any mound of muscle's that can't act.
he's definitely got the forehead.
#9 – I read all of Howard's original Conan stories, and while they're fun, they all pale in comparison to what Milius put on the screen. The original stories can best be described as Arabian Nights tales with the smallest dash of Lovecraft and one short paragraph (each) of bloody combat.
I have a good feeling this film is going to suck, true to source material or not, Marcus Nispel is just a shit director and I can't imagine this will be as un-PC and raw as the movie or original stories. The movie took quite a few liberties with the stories, but it was brilliant and captured the spirit of Conan regardless. This looks to be just another 300 cash-in, even if they are close to the source material.
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