Conan The Remake
Hopefully this will get some of the other members of the House to crawl out from beneath the rocks they’ve been hiding under, concocting their quizzes and playing their Warcraft.
Warner Bros. is going ahead with a Conan movie, set to start filming in 2007. The writer (and potential director) is Boaz Yakin, a lifetime fan of Robert E. Howard’s tales. He hopes to bring that devotion to Howard’s work to the big screen. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately for some, what this means is that this will be a remake and not a sequel. And not only will Schwarzenegger not be involved, but a large chunk of what many people consider to be part of the Conan canon will be obliterated. For example, Conan’s village wasn’t destroyed in the original stories, nor was he sent into slavery, worked as a gladiator or fought serpent men. Hell, in the original Howard stories Cimmeria was supposed to be a stand-in for Scotland, not Austria. In fact, many of the more familiar aspects of Conan the motion picture were actually lifted from other works of Howard’s, like King Kull and Bran Mak Morn.
It’s understandable why the filmmakers did this. Most of Howard’s stories were more like tales heard around the campfire. They had no real connection to one another, and no drive that pushed the narrative forward as a whole. In the short stories, Conan simply develops wanderlust after hearing tales of lands outside Cimmeria, and leaves to seek adventure. Not nearly as rousing as a tale of revenge.
As much as I love the original film and believe that it captured the essence of Howard’s creation, having read the original stories many times over I’m looking forward to this remake. If they do intend on sticking with the original text, they’re going to have a hard time making it work, not only because of the resistance from the rabid fans of the original, but also in adapting such a fractured tale.
