Hyborian twilight

Like its predecessor, Conan the Destroyer didn't set cinema on fire. But in an industry of marginal profits, the film's considerable success at the box office made a third film set in the world of Robert E. Howard all but inevitable. That film, Conan the Conqueror - the long-promised story that shall also be told, of how Conan became a king in his own hand -, never left development hell; and for that we can thank the ignominious failure of the series spin-off Red Sonja.

Red Sonja's production was rushed compared to the two-year gap between the Conan films. I've remarked on the breakneck pace the Italian film industry was capable of in its glory days, and if Richard Fleischer did not quite match Mario Bava's feat of releasing two of his films twelve days apart, it's still worth noting that Conan the Destroyer left cinemas in August 1984 and principal photography for Red Sonja took place that same November, for a summer 1985 release. That sort of pace may be common in low-budget horror, but it's quite something for sword and sorcery, which calls for massive sets, landscape photography and epic battles.

Those three months during the autumn of 1984, however, saw the release of The Terminator. That film's massive success - a worldwide gross of $78 million, comparable to the Conan films but nothing to sniff at considering it had only a third of the sword-and-sorcery films' budget - suggested to Schwarzenegger that he had a legitimate, loincloth-free career ahead of him. When Red Sonja bombed, taking in less than $7m on a $17.9m budget, he abandoned the barbarian genre and became the action/comedy star - and eventually the politician and philanderer - we know and possibly still love today.

When Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen) rejects the lesbian advances of the evil queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman), Gedren has her family murdered while Sonja is raped by her soldiers and left for dead before being revived by a spirit voice. (It's never revealed who this spirit - who speaks to Sonja only twice in the course of the film, never in a plot-relevant function - is, which strikes me as one of the tell-tale signs of a script that was butchered and stitched together again by some literary Leatherface.)

Later, somewhere else, a group of priestesses tries to destroy a dangerous talisman, but they're attacked and killed by the goons of Gedren, who wants the power of the talisman for herself to rule the world. Sonja's sister Varna (Janet Agren) manages to flee, but is shot in the back before being rescued by random hero-lord 'Kalidor' (Arnold Schwarzenegger). It remains one of the film's mysteries why it was felt necessary to create a character who is clearly Conan with the serial numbers filed off: legal reasons, perhaps. Anyway, Kalidor messily kills several of Gedren's goons (Red Sonja cranks up the gore to Conan the Barbarian levels again, after the tamer Destroyer) and carries the dying Varna off to Sonja, who has been trained as a mighty warrior by a vaguely Oriental sword-master (Tad Horino).

When Sonja finds out what's going on, she decides to stop Gedren, initally leaving Kalidor who nonetheless, as Tim Brayton puts it, 'just pops in like a wacky neighbor on a sitcom' during the film's first half. She fights and kills the warlord Brytag (Pat Roach) for no discernible reason and encounters Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr.) and Falkon (Paul Smith), a child prince and his manservant who have lost their kingdom to Gedren's newly powerful forces. Eventually, the four make it through the wilderness, encountering exactly no people, and square off against Gedren and her magic tricks.

Though undeniably very bad - if Schwarzenegger's jest about punishing his progeny by subjecting them to this film were true, it would constitute child abuse - Red Sonja is at least as 'good' as Conan the Destroyer, and feels a lot better by mercifully coming in under ninety minutes. Written by two Britons, Clive Exter (who later wrote no fewer than twenty-three episodes of Jeeves and Wooster, if you can believe it) and George MacDonald Fraser (who co-wrote Octopussy), Red Sonja's plot is as unsteady and aimless as that of the preceding films, but it's a whole lot less padded, avoiding the cosmic tedium of Destroyer's sleepy second half. The worst thing you can say about is that it introduces that shopworn trope, the Annoying Kid; but at least Tarn turns heroic fairly early on.

At the same time, the casting departments must have been mad as a hatter convention, for the sheer number of series veterans re-cast in totally different roles makes viewing a profoundly baffling experience. Besides Schwarzenegger - who, as the film's most bankable star, is billed above the then unknown Nielsen - there's Bergman, who played Conan's true, sadly nameless love in Barbarian, rendered less recognisable by a mask covering half her face, a fairly terrible black wig, and a deliciously hammy performance. The casting of Pat Roach, who played the illusionist Toth-Amon in Destroyer, as the villainous Brytag is less justifiable, especially since his cameo is mere padding. Danish bodybuilder Sven-Ole Thorsen, however, takes the cake, with his third character in as many films.

Schwarzenegger's performance is, well, vintage Arnie: no-one could make a line like 'She's dead. [Pause.] And the living have work to do' sound quite so earnest yet hilarious. But let's consider Brigitte Nielsen for a moment. Twenty-one years old, with no real acting experience, her uninflected, wooden performance is truly horrendous in exactly that oddly fitting Schwarzeneggerian mould, and they're perfectly matched on set. But where the Austrian reached superstardom, Nielsen briefly became Mrs Sylvester Stallone, met Ronald Reagan, appeared in Playboy a couple of times and has lived out the rest of her career on reality television. Just a few weeks ago, Nielsen won the German version of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!.

Richard Fleischer, returning to the director's chair after Conan the Destroyer, largely keeps it steady. At some point, though, he must have decided to prove that a leopard can change its spots and also why it shouldn't, by serving up a couple of absolutely nonsensical first-person shots during sword-fighting scenes. It's in the special effects department that Red Sonja is a real let-down, however. Whether it was time or money, the film resorts to mattes - gorgeously painted mattes, I grant - where John Milius in his Barbarian days would probably have built a full set. Contrast the visuals of Conan the Barbarian with the pretty but totally artificial look of Red Sonja:

The costumes and sets, alas, are the series' weakest by far, preposterous without once looking striking. In one battle scene - I'm not making this up, I swear - one mook wears blue jeans, which I'm fairly sure were not invented in the Hyborian Age. And speaking of battles, the swordfighting - choreographed by stunt coordinator Sergio Mioni, I presume - is noticeably worse than in either of the earlier films. Saddled with a leaden script, poor effects and an extraordinarily lazy Ennio Morricone score, Red Sonja cannot help being terrible; but while not as rousing as the first film, it is at least less infuriating than Conan the Destroyer.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Conan: the LARP years

Films don't have to be spectacular box office successes to inspire legions of knock-offs. Conan the Barbarian doubled its $20 million budget domestically, grossed almost $69 million worldwide and turned Dino de Laurentiis's flagging fortunes around for a few years, but it was by no means an international smash. What attracted the vultures, instead, was Conan's readily replicable formula: wizards, leather-clad strongmen, and fanservice in furs.

In the 1980s, Conan copies like The Beastmaster and the Ator films multiplied on both sides of the Atlantic. The great Italian rip-off machine, no stranger to casting bodybuilders in garish adventures since the 1950s, was particularly reinvigorated by the Styrian's signature role, but Conan's influence was widespread and long-lasting. From Hercules: The Legendary Journeys to - just maybe - The Lord of the Rings, John Milius's film changed history.

It was inevitable that there should be a sequel. 1984's Conan the Destroyer enjoyed healthy box office takings, a fact that directly led Schwarzenegger to team up with Dino de Laurentiis for the following year's ill-fated Red Sonja. It was, however, widely disliked upon release - and rightly so, for Conan the Destroyer is a very bad film. It feels in every way like a made-for-TV knock-off rather than a sequel to Conan the Barbarian.

An unspecified amount of time after the events of the first film, Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his new sidekick Malak (Tracey Walter) are ambushed by goons who try to capture them in nets. After some slaughter, Conan is approached by the enemies' leader, Queen Taramis of Shadizar (Sarah Douglas), with a proposition: he is to escort her niece, Princess Jehnna (Olivia d'Abo), on a mission to retrieve the horn of the sleeping god Dagoth. Learning that this will involve confronting the wizard Toth-Amon, Conan initially refuses: 'What good is a sword against sorcery?' (That's a question which I thought the ending of Conan the Barbarian answered sufficiently, but whatever.) He relents, however, when Taramis promises that she will resurrect Conan's dead love interest Valeria. (In one of the oddities of continuity, Valeria is never named in Conan the Barbarian but regularly name-checked in the sequel.)

Conan accepts, and sets off on his quest - without having sex with Taramis, which I suppose counts as character development - accompanied by Jehnna, Malak, and the captain of Taramis's guard, Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain). On their way to the evil sorcerer's castle, they pick up the wizard Akiro (Mako) of the first film, as well as the warrior woman Zula (Grace Jones). The party thus complete, they confront the illusionist Toth-Amon, defeat him, and retrieve the jewel that will allow access to Dagoth's jewelled horn.

This is about forty minutes in, and there's enough material left for perhaps fifteen minutes. Bombaata's real task is to kill Conan and abduct Jehnna so she can be sacrificed to Dagoth, but instead of getting on with it the padding kicks in: now our heroes have to travel to a temple where Dagoth's horn is kept, and this gives the filmmakers time to put us through long, gruelling dialogue and 'comic relief' regarding Jehnna's crush on Conan. That slack second half is in precise contrast to Conan the Barbarian, which accomplished its bumbling early on and then gained steam.

Conan the Destroyer feels less like the 1982 film than its knock-offs because, of course, it was penned by knock-off writers. No, not screenwriter Stanley Mann of Damien: Omen II, Firestarter and little else, but the duo who developed the story, Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, who'd previously churned out the animated sword-and-sandal picture Fire and Ice and, in Thomas's case, worked on the television series Thundarr the Barbarian. Their work is inferior to that of John Milius and Oliver Stone in the original film in every respect, but let's start with the villains. Conan the Barbarian had Thulsa Doom, a terrific baddie played to perfection by James Earl Jones. In Destroyer, our heroes are menaced by this guy:

He turns into this when he wants to be extra-terrifying:

Need I say more?

Did Thomas & Conway - or anyone else, for that matter - really leave Conan the Barbarian thinking, 'This was pretty cool, but I wish Conan talked more/had a bunch of sidekicks/made more jokes?' Dino de Laurentiis apparently thought the first film's box office take had been hurt by its R rating, and subsequently worked hard to make Destroyer PG-13 by removing the nudity and gore of the original, but that's not where the problem lies. That would be sticking Conan into a tedious, padded story with limited personal stakes (no real effort is made to convince us of Conan's desire to bring Valeria back), and the sidekicks.

Ah yes! For this film replaces the mostly silent trio of the original (Conan, Subotai, Valeria) with, well, a party. It really does feel like a particularly unimaginative role-playing campaign, although at least they don't all meet in an inn. There are scenes that feel particularly Dungeons & Dragons: the ape-man at Toth-Amon's castle, for example, who can only be defeated by smashing all the mirrors in the room.

Mako as the wizard Akiro is a welcome presence, as is Wilt Chamberlain's Bombaata. I'm on the fence about Grace Jones as Zula: she's awesome, but her archetype - the savage warrior woman - is pretty racist, especially when contrasted with the exceedingly Aryan princess Jehnna. Malak, however, is perhaps the most wretched comic relief character before Jar Jar Binks. Tracey Walter, who's since carved out a very respectable career on television, is visibly miserable and unconvinced by the role. No-one could blame him: it isn't easy for actors to find work. Blame, instead, falls once more to Thomas & Conway, who should have remembered that comic relief is generally intended to be funny (hence 'comic').

Undone by an awful, meandering script, Conan the Destroyer holds up pretty well in other departments. Richard Fleischer, director of The Vikings and other sword-and-sandal pictures of the 1950s and 1960s, does his best to make the film no more boring than it has to be, and he's helped by the director of photography, fellow Vikings alumnus Jack Cardiff (who also shot the 1951 Bogart-Hepburn classic The African Queen). There is, in fact, a whiff of a last hurrah for the old guard surrounding Conan the Destroyer: the sword-and-sandal film of a previous generation going down in a blaze of sleepy non-glory. But in any case, they go down with some honestly pretty pictures:

Conan the Destroyer's budget was less than Barbarian's, and it seems more than once that being unable to afford something like the first film's majestic Mountain of Power they settled for a bunch of people bumbling around cheap-looking sets. But again, it's the fault of the writers who decreed that there must be crystal castles and temples covered in runes. In truth, Pier Luigi Basile's production design is good, great in the case of Queen Taramis's impressive throne room; and the same goes for the costumes, although there are some unconvincing wigs.

The single most disappointing aspect of the whole affair is that composer Basil Poledouris apparently zoned out. Poledouris's score for Conan the Barbarian has become a classic in its own right, but his work on the sequel is just tired. When he isn't plagiarising himself - the music from Barbarian's human soup scene is recycled for Destroyer's offering to Dagoth - it's just decidedly less exciting. Where Barbarian's music screamed epic!, the Destroyer score mutters, 'I was made for Saturday afternoon reruns'.

It's as if they went out of their way to remind the audience that Barbarian was a better film. When Malak says, and I'm quoting from memory here, 'LOOK, CONAN, IT'S A CAMEL, JUST LIKE THE ONE YOU PUNCHED IN THE FACE IN CONAN THE BARBARIAN' it would just be a clunky continuity nod - were it not for the fact that, being kicked off by a character not present in the original film, the scene suggests Conan boasts of his ignoble history of animal abuse to his companions.

If ever the title of a film improved upon Conan the Barbarian, surely it was Conan the Destroyer; but alas, reality proves otherwise. Not only does the promised destruction fail to ensue, we still don't learn how Conan became a king by his own hand, let alone what manner of crown he wore upon a troubled brow. The film's thorough failure is perhaps best summed up when Queen Taramis says,'What is there, Conan? Think!', and her suggestion does not strike us as self-evidently ridiculous. As for Thomas & Conway: fine writers you are - go back to juggling apples.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure

Thirty years on, 1982 self-evidently appears as a peak of genre cinema. What other year, after all, saw a slate that included the likes of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, Blade Runner, First Blood and The Thing? As in any age, few of these masterpieces were recognised as such at the time: not every film could rake in the cash and critical accolades like E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.

None of those films would affect the world quite the way a certain sword-and-sorcery picture would, though. Conan the Barbarian put an Austrian bodybuilder on the road to running the world's eighth largest economy and being the only voice of reason in the Republican Party, and it did so by putting him into a leather loincloth. It's not just Schwarzenegger that got a career boost out of Conan, though; for while it's an exaggeration to say the film put Oliver Stone on the map, there might well have been no Platoon without it.

In the interests of full disclosure I must admit that Conan the Barbarian is one of my favourite films in the world, its heady mix of great and bafflingly awful unmatched in cinema otherwise. What other film aspires to such lofty excellence in some aspects while plumbing the depths of incompetence in others? It was for this reason that I found the 2011 remake so dispiriting. It was just bad, but in none of the gonzo inspired ways of its hallowed predecessor.

Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger as an adult, Jorge Sanz as a boy) is raised by a tribe of Cimmerians who worship Crom, the god of steel. One day, his village is overrun by the forces of sinister warlord Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), who murder his parents (William Smith and Nadiuska, an Italian softcore actress). The tribe's children are put to slave labour pushing a giant wheel in the middle of nowhere. Over time the other children die from starvation and hard labour, and Conan alone grows into ridiculously muscular adulthood.

Eventually, he is trained to fight as a gladiator and becomes a champion in the arena. After being set free by his owner, Conan begins to search for Thulsa Doom. He's pointed in the right direction by a witch (Cassandra Gaviola) who subsequently transforms into a monster and attacks him during sex. Conan teams up with the thief Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and the warrior woman Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), and they're hired by King Osric (Max von Sydow) to retrieve his daughter, who has fallen in with a doomsday cult led by Doom.

The first half of the script is littered with plot holes and baffling non-sequiturs. Why did Thulsa Doom attack Conan's village? What purpose does the massy wheel of toil serve? Why was Conan freed? What's up with the witch? In several instances the voiceover narrator openly confesses his ignorance ('Who knows what they came for?'). Before growing tauter in the second half - when Conan and his crew infiltrate Thulsa Doom's cult at his Mountain of Power -, the story consists of no more than a succession of bizarre and hilarious incidents (Conan finds a sword after stumbling and falling into a cave! Conan punches a camel! Conan exclaims 'Crom!' at random intervals for no discernible reason!)

There's just a lot of weirdness in Conan the Barbarian, things that are not so much bad as totally puzzling. It's compulsively watchable in a so-bad-it's-good way. Take the odd scene in which Conan and Subotai earnestly discuss fictional theology by a campfire, or the mere fact that our hero does not speak at all until twenty-four minutes into the film. Perhaps the intention is to avoid drawing undue attention to Schwarzenegger's thick Teutonic accent, but it doesn't work too well. This, for example, is how Conan and Valeria first meet, while breaking into one of Doom's temples:

CONAN: You are not a guard.
VALERIA: Neither are you. [...] Do you know what horrors lie beyond that wall?
CONAN: No.

This is how Conan meets his one true love (although, tellingly, Valeria isn't named until the credits). More or less all human interactions are howlingly incompetent. Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast in his total inability to act, giving us the sort of convincing performance as a barbarian Jason Momoa never could. He does get a couple of good lines: 'What do you see?', he is asked while peering into a fountain disguised as a priest, and he replies, 'Er... infinity'. Max von Sydow also makes the most of his cameo by chewing on the terrific line 'What daring! What outrageousness! What insolence! What arrogance!... I salute you.'

James Earl Jones seems to be in a different film altogether. His portrayal of a warlord turned charismatic cult leader is absolutely compelling, and the scene in which he demonstrates to Conan that 'flesh' (owning hearts and minds) is more powerful than steel is easily the film's best in an unironic way. Jones's amazing performance leads us straight into the plus column, and to the film's most important asset: it looks great.

 

Yes, Conan the Barbarian had one heck of a budget, and director John Milius splashes every last penny on the screen. The production design is lush, with pretty great costumes - even though Doom's Viking henchmen look oddly like early-eighties metal musicians, with Thorgrim in particular a dead ringer for Iron Maiden's Dave Murray. Duke Callaghan's landscape photography is terrific and atmospheric: heroic is the word I'm looking for, and the same goes for Basil Poledouris's rousing score.

That, then, is the enigma of Conan the Barbarian: it is one part so-bad-it's-good, a laughably acted random events plot; and a second part - the thrilling fight scenes, the production values, the music, James Earl Jones - genuinely great. These halves cannot be separated: they exist together in every scene of the film, and in John Milius's earnest vision they belong together. Conan's idea of a good time is 'to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women', and that is what Milius genuinely believed. If that ideology is wrongheaded, even contemptible, it nonetheless led to a maddening, baffling, and oddly endearing film.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Just Roman around

The ancient epic revived by Gladiator collapsed under its own weight after Alexander, Troy and Kingdom of Heaven bored, bothered and bewildered audiences in 2004-5. It's no coincidence that semi-legendary director Ridley Scott should have been the genre's father as well as its gravedigger: at its height it attracted talent and money of a kind otherwise only seen in comic-book adaptations.

To all appearances the ancient epic was dead, but green shoots soon appeared. 300 proved that classical antiquity could still sell tickets, and the film's basic ingredients - a middling budget, a relatively junior director, over-the-top masculinity - became the building blocks of the revived revived classical picture. No longer epics but mid-range action-adventure flicks, films like Pathfinder, Clash of the Titans and Conan the Barbarian have not yet stopped making money.

Excepting 300, there hasn't yet been a single good film in the subgenre. Sadly Centurion proves no exception to this rule, but the film's thorough failure is especially frustrating considering its potential. Let's quickly run through the factors that ought to make Centurion utterly awesome. It was directed by Neil Marshall, he of The Descent (which, to my enduring shame, I haven't seen); it stars a post-Hunger Michael Fassbender, one of the greatest actors on this earth, as well as Dominic West of The Wire; it's set along the spectacular Caledonian frontier of Roman Britain; and oh yeah, there's the little matter of Olga Kurylenko wearing warpaint. But instead of being great or even diverting, Centurion just flails around wasting its potential for an hour and a half, and then ends.

We open with credits, and what ugly credits they are! As we're treated to a long aerial shot of Scottish mountains (beautiful in themselves), the credits woosh towards us in the most aggressive way possible; and if you like hideous fonts you're in luck, because the monstrosity in which everyone's name is presented will later double as subtitles for the Picts' barbarian tongue. My jaw dropped at the sheer atonal artlessness of this sequence: it looks like a computer game trailer from 1996, and I first assumed Centurion must be designed to be viewed in 3D like those early 80s films in which the credits seem out to stab you in the eye. But no, it's all two dimensions.

Anyway, we now get a shot of a half-naked man running through the snow-covered Caledonian wilderness, hunted by barbarians; in voiceover, he introduces himself as Quintus Dias, a Roman centurion. And with that we're back to sometime earlier, when Dias's fort is overrun in a Pictish surprise attack, all the soldiers are killed and Dias himself is captured and brought before the Pictish king Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen). Some heated words are exchanged, and then Dias escapes offscreen. Got all that? Don't worry if not: everything I've just told you is irrelevant, and any information contained therein will shortly be repeated.

Anyway, Marshall cuts away to York, where General Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) is ordered to take his Ninth Legion north of the border and defeat Gorlacon. He's assigned the mute British scout Etain (Olga Kurylenko) to guide him north of the border. During the expedition, Virilus saves the still-fleeing Dias from the Picts. The cheerful camaraderie does not last long, for like you and I Neil Marshall saw The Last of the Mohicans, wherefore Etain leads the Romans into an ambush where they're slaughtered by the Huron Picts. (On the plus side, West gets to shout 'It's a trap!'.)

All, that is, except for Dias himself and a ragtag bunch of misfit soldiers including Brick (Liam Cunningham). Dias leads these survivors to save their captured general, but their rescue operation is a fiasco: not only do they fail to rescue Virilus, but one of the Roman soldiers kills Gorlacon's son, leading the enraged Pict to swear blood vengeance on the fleeing legionaries. Before long, they're pursued across the harsh mountains of Caledonia by a posse led by the wrathful Etain.

Centurion's most crippling flaw is the absolutely wretched script, penned by Marshall himself. Let's not dwell for too long on the fact that it's relentlessly derivative, playing like a wacky mash-up of The Last of the Mohicans, Apocalypto, and Cold Mountain; nor will it do much good to groan at the plot holes, or the awkward way in which the mysterious disapperance of the Ninth is shoehorned in at the end. (And by 'mysterious disappearance', we of course mean 'failure to appear in the very patchy extant documents we have, although many of its officers do turn up in various places').

No, let's focus on the stuff that leaves the actors stranded. Fassbender's character, for example, has a backstory (his father was a gladiator) that's referred to exactly once and never impacts the plot; most other characters are not granted even that luxury. (Kurylenko gets an origin that opens the film's largest, most amusing plot hole.) As a result, Marshall is guilty of criminal negligence in wasting a very capable cast: I hesitate to use a phrase like 'career-worst performances all round', but anyone who's seen that already legendary dialogue scene between Fassbender and Cunningham in Hunger can only weep.

Surprisingly, Marshall's direction isn't much better than his script. He's so keen on Dutch angles one might think he was filming a Bizarro-World prequel to Battlefield Earth. His action scenes are best described as uninspired (they're shot and edited in the same choppy, disorienting way we see everywhere now). There is a stunningly tasteless zoom shot of Kurylenko screaming that lovingly shows off her tongueless mouth, too; and while this is a low point, it's not alone in this film.

The historical inaccuracies I complain about, but I can live with: I liked Gladiator, after all. I like the fact that the Picts are speaking Scottish Gaelic (although Arianne, played by Imogen Poots, goes for broad Scottish-accented English instead). Sure, it's not quite right: no-one knows for certain whether the Picts spoke a Celtic language, and if they did it was probably more closely related to the Brythonic languages of southern Britain rather than the Goidelic languages of Ireland and Dal Riada - from which Scottish Gaelic is descended - but I appreciate the effort.

That Roman soldiers in films forever use their gladii to slash away at their opponents, rather than viciously stab them in the gut as they should, is by now expected; that the Roman soldiers carry the wrong spears - hastae, thrusting spears used both in the early Republic and in the late Empire, rather than pila, heavy javelins - surprised me a little, but I'll take it as a bold attempt to draw attention to the fact that Roman equipment was not uniform throughout the empire. And I rather adore the film's earthy tone and the use of English regional accents to represent Vulgar Latin.

My tone has, I think, been somewhat harsher than Centurion really deserves: it's not totally incompetent. As a dully entertaining genre flick, it mostly works. The problem is that it's such a disappointment: filmed in the absolutely gorgeous outdoors of Scotland and northern England, the film should look amazing, but cinematographer Sam McCurdy can't hack it. Instead, its wintry landscapes quote the visual vocabulary of King Arthur, surely the most dire film ever made on similar subject matter. Its other flaws - strange fade cuts, the gruff growling that seems to be mandatory for male actors in these films - are forgivable; what makes Centurion especially appalling is the sheer sad, ruinous waste of talent and opportunity it presents.

Brad Paisley and American masculinity

Y'all know that I'm a serious man pondering serious matters, so this post's descent into frivolity may shock and sadden you. Rest assured that I feel your pain, for it is mine. *clears throat*

I love country music. That's often considered unusual, even embarrassing on this side of the pond (and, I'm told, in parts of the US). And while I do like the classic stuff - Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and more modern Americana artists like Dave Alvin - I'm also into some fairly gaudy, poppy acts. Case in point: Brad Paisley. In many ways, Paisley ought to be the antithesis of all that I like in music: his stuff is often shallow, calibrated to produce chart-topping singles, carefully produced into the tiniest detail, and shamelessly pandering to the perceived prejudices of his audience. He's sober, happy, and entirely devoid of the inner torment that is the lot of most great country artists.

Much of what needs to be said about Paisley has been, in this masterful instalment of Nathan Rabin's Nashville or Bust series. Rabin points out that Paisley is very much a 'guy's guy', making music for men. It so happens that I've finally decided to get in touch with my inner man this past year. It was an occasion of some joy to discover he did, in fact, exist, having somehow survived The O.C. marathons and a good amount of Dungeons & Dragons; and I nurtured him by hitting the gym, discovering the joys of beer and whiskey and reactivating a dormant interest in sports that involve being hit in the face.

Paisley's own turn towards guy music was somewhere between his third (Mud on the Tires, 2003) and fourth albums (Time Well Wasted, 2005). He ditched the collared cowboy shirts and went from being a nice young man playing neotraditional country to a much more populist act incorporating plenty of pop influences (including a number of collaborations with Carrie Underwood). But as I will argue through scattershot references to a couple of his songs, what underlies his work is a renegotiation of traditional masculinity in the twenty-first century that includes deconstructing treasured male behaviours.

'Ticks' is one of a number of songs in which Paisley deconstructs men's attempts to pick up women ('Me Neither', an adaptation of the 'Like a weasel' exchange in Hamlet 3.2, is another excellent example). The song's narrator, eager to see 'the other half / of your butterly tattoo', contrasts himself favourably with 'every guy in here tonight', who merely 'would like to take you home'. He, of course, has nobler aims: namely, to 'check you for ticks' after a trip to the countryside. The song deconstructs men's crude designs, but it does so with a tongue-in-cheek yokel charm that has become Paisley's trademark.

'Online' is one of Paisley's more controversial songs. Kevin J. Coyne thought Paisley was cruelly mocking all those less handsome, wealthy and successful than him: cyberbullying, if you will. And at first I was convinced. After all, the song's protagonist 'work[s] down at the Pizza Pit' and lives in his parents' basement, is '5'3'' and overweight' as well as 'a sci-fi fanatic' who has 'never been to second base'. It is only in the magical world of the internet that 'even on a slow day [he] can have a three-way chat with two women at one time' by pretending to be a wealthy Hollywood single who 'drive[s] a Maserati' and is 'a black belt in karate'.

But then, just when I was thoroughly appalled at Paisley, I discovered that he's 1.74m tall - an inch shorter, in other words, than even my little sister. Totally irrational and patronising though it is, this made me think he couldn't be a bully: surely he must have struggled with his Cruisean height. So I re-examined the song, and voilà! It actually celebrates its protagonist. The hilarious video, starring Seinfeld veteran Jason Alexander as the nerd and William Shatner and Estelle Warren as his parents, certainly plays a part in making the protagonist sympathetic (and he gets the girl!) while depicting the bullies as despicable and empty-headed.

It also serves to make Paisley's character, the superstar our protagonist would like to be, seem like a jackass jock. Combined with the nerd's infinitely more fun-looking hobbies (lightsaber fights! playing the tuba!), 'Online' perversely becomes an ecstatic celebration of the transformative possibilities of the internet. True, it does not offer a critique of underlying models of success: the nerd's chances lie not in alternative models of success to the handsome, wealthy Hollywood playboy, but in the possibility of plausibly mimicking the latter. But who am I to nitpick the mind of Paisley?

Moving steadily into more awkward territory, we have 'You Need a Man Around Here' from Time Well Wasted. The song's narrator finds himself exasperated by his girlfriend's interior decorating, which lacks 'a mounted bass', appropriately manly magazines, or a telly of unusual size. He concludes that 'you need a man around here... someone to kill the spiders, change the channel and drink the beer'. This would be offensive if it wasn't for - well, okay, it is offensive. Like many male musicians, Paisley can be quite patronising towards women, who often look 'so darn cute' to him (the Springsteen equivalent would be the ubiquitous address 'little girl'). But it's somewhat mitigated by the sheer worthlessness of the slob boyfriend's decorating advice and the shallowness of his taste, which certainly outdoes the candles his girlfriend is so liberal with.

It's on 'I'm Still A Guy' that Paisley finally goes too far even for my forgiving judgment. The protagonist's girlfriend is proud of having domesticated him, but he is keen to assert that he's as masculine as ever: 'These days there's dudes gettin' facials / Manicured, waxed and botoxed / With deep spray-on tans and creamy lotiony hands / You can't grip a tacklebox. /  Yeah, with all of these men linin' up to get neutered / And headin' out to be feminised / But I don't highlight my hair, I've still got a pair / Yeah honey, I'm still a guy.'

And this is the distinctive male identity Paisley's so proud of: 'When you see a deer you see Bambi / And I see antlers up on the wall / ... Oh, my eyebrows aren't plucked, / There's a gun in my truck / Oh, thank God, honey, I'm still a guy.' Well, with the greatest respect: frak you, Brad Paisley. Those masculine traits are designed to appeal to the imagined audience, but I'm a vegetarian, and while guns may be necessary in some situations there's nothing to be proud of in tools for murder (not to mention that pride in firearms doesn't travel across the pond very well).* Of course there's affectionate parody in the primitiveness 'I'm Still A Guy' implicitly accuses men of, but I'd not be quite comfortable drunkenly singing along to this - unlike most of Paisley's songs.

Paisley, then: an artist who de- and reconstructs traditional models of masculinity. Most of the time he does well, poking holes in the lies men tell themselves and others. But there's something just a little too comfortable about gentle ribbing that allows men to laugh at themselves without challenging them to change. Bring on revolutionary feminist country music!

*Yes, I fully acknowledge guns are awesome, but they're also terrible, and the sooner the world is rid of them the better.

Somehow, barbarism should be more fun

I'm not ashamed to call Conan the Barbarian (1982) one of my favourite films. Aside from Arnie's most iconic performance outside the Terminator franchise, Conan the Barbarian benefits from being a truly unique beast. It's not, I've realised, so bad it's good: rather, it is a great film and a terrible film rolled into one, and the result is glorious and dreadful to behold.

John Milius really did believe that to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women was to live fulfilled; and so he set about making a film embodying that philosophy as earnestly as he could. Conan the Barbarian absolutely would not work as camp; but because Milius wanted to make it good, he made sure he had fantastic production values and music, so that the film is so earnest and well-crafted in its total preposterousness that one cannot help loving it.

But enough of that; I was supposed to talk about the new Conan film,  starring Jason Momoa. While comparisons with the Milius film are inevitable, I regret to inform you that Conan the Barbarian (2011) bears rather more similarity to director Marcus Nispel's wretched 2007 effort Pathfinder, a picture against which I hold a particular grudge because it ruined Indians and Vikings, two of the things that are best in life, at once.

Anyway, the plot, which is unrelated to the Schwarzenegger Conan continuity: Conan (Jason Momoa) is born on the battlefield and taught the ways of the Cimmerian barbarians by his father (Ron Perlman). When Conan is still a child, his village is overrun by the evil warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang) and his daughter, the witch Marique (Rose McGowan). Conan alone escapes and eventually becomes a mighty barbarian warrior adventuring with the pirate Artus (Nonso Anozie). Through a series of contrived events, Conan discovers that Khalar Zym is alive and attempting to become all-powerful through the ritual sacrifice of the nun (or 'monk', according to the film) Tamara (Rachel Nichols). Conan becomes Tamara's protector and pursues Khalar Zym, seeking vengeance.

Right, time for a head-on comparison between the old and the new film. Let the barbarian-off begin!

The lead. It's hard to better Schwarzenegger's brilliant-awful performance in the 1982 film, and Jason Momoa does not quite make it. He's hampered by his ability to speak English and, improbably, the fact that he's a better actor, as his excellent work as (you guessed it) a barbarian on Game of Thrones proves. So Momoa makes the mistake of trying to develop a take on a character that is not so much underwritten as just not written. That said, I still rather like his Conan, and he's certainly got the physique down: Momoa's body is a work of art, as I noted with considerable jealousy. Schwarzenegger is funnier, but Momoa is more human.

The supporting cast. I can't express how disappointed I am here, but the odds are firmly stacked against our ragtag bunch of actors. Their characters are either totally flat or screaming stereotypes. The 1982 film was made by James Earl Jones's riveting performance as Thulsa Doom, a warlord turned cult leader; Stephen Lang, though absurdly badass in Avatar (and hilarious in The Men Who Stare At Goats), does not know what to do with his boringly power-hungry baddie (neither does the script). Rachel Nichols is totally flat, Rose McGowan suffers from a poor character, and Ron Perlman is not given enough scenery to chew.

The script. The 1982 film had a charmingly absurd story. The new film makes no more sense, although at least one storyline is followed fairly consistently. Nonetheless, the script is full of bizarre choices, such as plenty of mini-bosses who are simply never established as characters, yet the audience is expected to care when Conan fights them. Ultimately the plot here is strictly formula. There are a few good, if clichéd lines: 'No man should live in chains' would be better if it was at a more meaningful point in the narrative, but 'I live. I love. I slay. I am content' (from the Howard stories) really pleased my inner barbarian.

The production design. Khalar Zym travels overland in a ship carried by eight elephants, which is precisely the sort of glorious-terrible idea Milius might have had. Apart from that, the production design is unfortunately strictly formula and, once again, many of the props seem to be leftovers from Pathfinder. The cinematography is nothing special.

Direction and style. Frankly, Marcus Nispel's hyperactive directorial style does not appeal to me at all; one sometimes wishes the stately action direction of the eighties would make a return. There's rather too much cutting, and while the fights are well-choreographed, they're hardly exciting. And I was distressed to see just how blatantly Nispel was stealing from the climactic battle of Jason and the Argonauts in one particular scene (I suppose it's a 'homage'.)

Barbarity. Ultimately it's not called Conan the Barbarian for nothing, and if you're anything like me you can appreciate some good barbarity. While the 1982 film was really quite violent, it's rather outdone by the sheer amount of blood here, and yet only some of the slaying is, strictly speaking, awesome. (Although one scene, in which Conan smeared his enemies' blood on his face, had me squealing in delight.) There's quite a bit of naked flesh on display, and in an early scene Conan is followed and, er, entertained by female slaves he has freed. As for the peaks of barbarity, the new film references the Milius picture's infamous camel-punching scene with a shot in which Conan hits a horse in the face with a chain (although the rat-kicking scene is unfortunately not revived). The mood of the moment, however - grim and gritty - , is quite different from the cheerful, drunken animal abuse of the original.

The verdict. Conan the Barbarian (2011) has its rewards, but they're buried beneath a tedious story and virtually non-existent characters. While the film is slicker than the original (not for it the earnest terribleness of parts of the 1982 picture), it is also much flatter and interchangeable with any other sword-and-sorcery film you might have seen recently - say, 2010's similarly uninspired Clash of the Titans remake. I wanted preposterous and barbaric, but Conan the Barbarian simply will not go over the top, condemning it to mediocrity. All I wanted was to find out how Conan became a king by his own hand; but I fear we will not see that story in our lifetime.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)