Was that the sword of Conan?

I've been a fan of Conan the Barbarian since childhood - I loved the stories, the comics and the feature films with Arnold Schwarzenegger, pretty much everything.

So imagine how tickled pink I was last night when I sat down with family and friends to see the new Schwarzenegger film The Last Stand when the Barbarian's sword suddenly showed up.

The movie is a modern day action film wherein a sheriff named Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) must stop a terrifying criminal from escaping the US through his small Arizona town.

The film is a pretty fun action-fest, lots of over the wall explosions, gunfights, etc., but there comes a moment where the team is loading up with weapons to protect their town and one of the sheriff's deputies, Figgy (played by Luis Guzman) picks up a pretty familiar sword... (pictured right).

The original creator of Conan, Robert E. Howard wrote an essay during the 1930's called The Hyborian Age in which he places the world of Conan the Barbarian into our own history.

So I'm just saying - that could be a pretty old sword...

Conan sequel?

Genre Character of the Week: Douglas Quaid

For my birthday last weekend, my wife and kids took me out to see the new Colin Farrell film Total Recall, a remake of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name.  The movie was pretty cool, there were a lot fun action sequences and the scope of many of the sets did work better on the big screen than they might have on my television at home.  Unfortunately, I just kept thinking how much I preferred the original.

So today let’s look at one of my favorite genre characters, Douglas Quaid.  (Pictured left, and right)

Quaid (as played by Schwarzenegger) is a construction worker living on Mars (yes - I know he starts on Earth and then goes to Mars but I didn't want to do too many spoilers), or (as played by Colin Farrell) is a factory worker living in Australia (called The Colony in the film).  Basically he’s a regular Joe doing a hard days work for little pay and is married to a lovely wife who is subtly stressed by the filmmakers (of both versions) as being a little too good for him.

Quaid wishes his life had more to it, whether that be more excitement, more adventure or honestly, more anything.  So he takes advantage of the services of a local company called Rekall, which allows false memories to be transplanted into the mind therefore allowing the user to feel as if he or she had done everything or anything they can dream up.

Then, because it wouldn’t be a good story if everything went well, everything goes wrong.

Both films follow Quaid as he desperately attempts to understand why everyone around him (including his wife) seems to want to kill him and why he suddenly has the ability to kill with his bare hands.

What I love about the character is his journey of self discovery, and although this arc is done well in both films, I prefer the earlier one as the idea seemed fresh at the time and it was set on Mars.

In the new film, Quaid even mentions at one point that it would be nice if he were on Mars and I couldn’t help but lean over to my wife and say “I couldn’t agree more.”

Genre Character of the Week: Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer

One of my favourite things about showing my kids classics of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction is when they see something that is pretty amazing and it blows them away now just like it did me years ago when I first watched/read/played the thing.  Case in point?  Predator.

A year before he would direct my favourite Christmas movie of all time, John McTiernan directed a film that followed one of the simplest premises you can do in horror.  Man vs. Monster.  The monster is some sort of alien, which has come to Earth to hunt us, and the man in question is the leader of a team of army specialists, a man who never loses his cool, Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Dutch leads a team of five men specialized in rescue missions, and it is for this reason that they have been called to Guatemala.  A Cabinet minister has been kidnapped by guerrillas and needs to be quickly and quietly brought home.  The problem is that the mission is a little more complicated than that, and oh yeah, there is a horrible alien running amok hunting humans.

Here’s what I love about Dutch.  The guy is incredibly good at his job – yes he does overlook one obvious plot hole about the creature, but other than that he is a man limited to his own abilities in fighting a clearly superior enemy.  After twenty-five years the film still totally holds up, and yes, I hope when they’re old enough I can show it to my (potential) grand kids.