Conan The Barbarian at 40: An early Arnold star turn pumps up a Nietzschean superman
John Milius' self-serious, social-Darwinist effort remains the best take on Robert E. Howard's iconic character, even if it's best enjoyed as goofy fun
Film Features Conan
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger” is such an overworked cliché at this point that calling it trite would be understatement. So to watch Conan The Barbarian now, 40 years after its release on May 14, 1982, and to see those words emblazoned across the screen in bold text—with their correct attribution to Friedrich Nietzche—well, it’s understandable if laughter is the reaction. But director John Milius isn’t kidding.
A more complicated philosopher than often depicted, and coiner of the concept of the superman, Nietzsche is a favorite philosopher among libertarians and others who believe might makes right. Due to his sister’s selective publishings after his death, Nietzsche has been associated with fascism, though he also voiced opposition to nationalism and organized religion. The appeal to Milius was clear: One of the writer-director’s defining characteristics as a writer, by his own account, was being rejected from the U.S. Marine Corps on medical grounds. Like Conan creator Robert E. Howard, he wrote about warriors because he was not one, but longed to be. It’s no stretch to imagine Col. Kurtz’s monologue in Apocalypse Now, about the ideal soldier being both a loving family man and an emotionless killer, to be an embodiment of screenwriter Milius’ own daydreams, or even unfulfilled ambitions.
Likewise, when Conan speaks his first words onscreen—“To crush your enemies! Drive them before you! And to hear the lamentations of their women!”—the moment everyone hears that, they want to be Conan, at least according to Milius’ commentary on the film’s Blu-ray version. Again, he’s not kidding. And indeed, in the penultimate scene of the movie, Conan does all three of the things he said he would. Everyone with an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation (which is pretty much everyone) does that line now, usually with the ironic quality that came to define the actor in later years. But he was a relatively unknown quantity at the time; a charismatic bodybuilder cast for his looks. And he said it with the straightest face he’s ever given.
In 1982, critics called out those perceived fascist undertones in the film. In an otherwise positive review, Roger Ebert described the climax of the movie thusly: “I found myself thinking that Leni Reifenstahl [sic] could have directed the scene, and that Goebbels might have applauded it.” He added thereafter, “Am I being too sensitive? Perhaps. But when Conan appeared in the pulps of the 1930s, the character suggested in certain unstated ways the same sort of Nordic super-race myths that were being peddled in Germany.” Today, Arnold’s Conan seems downright noble and charitable compared to the fascist daydreams and eliminationist rhetoric we hear pouring out of the cybernetic fever swamps. At least the people he kills are genocidal cultists and actual cannibals.
The big-screen version of Conan came about in the wake of Star Wars, which cannily married sci-fi with sword and sorcery, via lightsabers and the Force. It was a combination many tried to duplicate: George Lucas’ most direct inspiration, Flash Gordon, returned as a live-action movie and Filmation cartoon. Hanna Barbera created Thundarr The Barbarian, set on a post-apocalypse Earth. Filmation’s Blackstar cartoon combined elements of Buck Rogers and J.R.R. Tolkien, a formula they’d refine to greater success when called upon to create a series based on Mattel’s new Masters of the Universe toys. (Contrary to urban legends, Masters of the Universe were developed independently of Conan, though Mattel briefly considered a Conan toy line as well.)
But not everyone could afford the special effects of Star Wars. The Beastmaster, originally based on a science-fiction novel, dropped all the sci-fi references to create an exclusively barbarian tale (The novel’s author, Andre Norton, had her name removed from the film adaptation). Conan’s original script, by Oliver Stone, was set in a post-apocalypse world and deemed prohibitively expensive. With Milius aboard, the story changed completely to one representing his own obsessions, including Japanese cinema, Viking mythology, the history of Genghis Khan, and bits and pieces of several of the original Howard stories. Kids expecting the Marvel Comics version were presented with something that undoubtedly made some parents cover their eyes.
But it’s that solid commitment to Milius’ social Darwinist, anarcho-libertarian worldview and the objectification of both men and women that has made Conan The Barbarian a movie that prevails, long after the likes of Ator and Deathstalker faded from the conversation. Milius cast his leads purely for physicality: besides Schwarzenegger, who actually had to drop some muscle mass to perform all the stunts, professional surfer Gerry Lopez played Conan’s friend Subotai, dancer Sandahl Bergman his lover Valeria, with bodybuilder Sven Ole-Thorsen and football player Ben Davidson as the two primary evil henchmen.
Conan’s dialogue was kept to a minimum, save many now-familiar Arnold “Auughhh!” grunts; Lopez was completely overdubbed in the final cut. These were ancient warriors cast to look like oversized pieces of fascist architecture, not Shakespeareans. And unlike in so many similar films, the director understood that concept, keeping their battles on the field of combat rather than with their own tongues.
Balancing out the heroes’ untested thespian skills, James Earl Jones, Max von Sydow, and Mako were cast in key roles to add gravitas whenever exposition was required. Jones and von Sydow had recently been Darth Vader and Ming the Merciless, respectively, so their credentials for the genre were impeccable. And a good thing, too—not everyone could pull off Jones’ monologue about the differences between steel and the flesh. It’s ridiculous on one level, yet deadly earnest in intent. And it’s that kind of self-seriousness that distinguishes this Conan film from its two follow-ups. Schwarzenegger’s sequel, Conan The Destroyer, played things campier under the less distinctive direction of Richard Fleischer, while 2011's Jason Momoa vehicle focused mainly on imagery serving a forgettable story. Neither of them really meant it the way Milius did.
Yet when people tout Conan The Barbarian as a classic now, they aren’t necessarily responding to any of the ideology, as much as the commitment to character and tone. In the intervening years, filmmakers as ideologically different from Milius as the Wachowskis have talked about making a King Conan film as a belated sequel. Schwarzenegger would go on to embrace a pointedly tongue-in-cheek persona onscreen, one that fans often mentally retrofit over his earlier, more serious roles. It makes Conan easier to appreciate semi-ironically—of course, we, the virtuous viewers, would never aspire to hear our enemies’ women lament, but how cool is it to see Conan do it in a fantasy setting? With that signature accent, forever associated with pithy putdowns? Many a liberal pacifist who acknowledges how complicated solutions can be in real life can enjoy a simplistic good vs. evil brawl in fiction.
To draw from a more recent, similarly misunderstood film, it’s like Fight Club in reverse. Author Chuck Palahniuk and director David Fincher made a movie specifically about selling macho self-mythology to gullible, impotent men as a hypocritical power fantasy. Not shockingly, a significant proportion of fans took it literally and missed the satire completely. John Milius, however, made the sort of movie Tyler Durden would sincerely love, selling that same power fantasy to folks he thought were like-minded. Instead, 40 years on, the movie’s exaggerated politics feel like satire, allowing us to appreciate the sex and violence as a heightened opera, or extreme pro-wrestling.
Crom, Conan’s Cimmerian deity who only likes to watch, would undoubtedly approve.
150 Comments
The soundtrack still slaps.
Man, it is crazy to suddenly be reminded of both how old Conan the Barbarian is and also how much I absolutely love it as a movie. Don’t get me wrong, it has several flaws, but where I disagree with the review here with about is that what makes the movie so iconic and enduring is that it succeeds in being ultimately that more complicated film. There is an actually good character journey at the heart of it and some pretty interesting twists.
For example not only does Valeria give her own life in sacrifice to bring back Conan, but then comes back even from beyond death to save him in the final fight. Which is actually a pretty meaningful difference when looking at the ubermensch fantasy stories of the era.
It is classic Hero’s Journey shit and wonderfully straightforward. The stakes get sufficiently raised throughout. There’s a ton of character development. The thematic resonance is there but stays subtextual. Even the more expository dialogue is so artfully written…As a guy who has studied screenwriting his whole life, has worked as a script reader, has done his own writing, and now teaches people the craft of screenwriting, there are few purer examples.
I’m a fan of ‘Destroyer’, myself, but ‘Barbarian’ kicks ass too.
Wilt Chamberlain on a horse cracks me up every time I see it. And I love the design of that statue turned monster. Other than that, Grace Jones, and how damn cute that princess was, I don’t remember much of it.
You should rewatch it: It’s the first Dungeons and Dragons movie and it’s still the best.The only thing ‘Barbarian’ does better is having James Earl Jones as the bad guy.
I like Destroyer for what it is but it does not have this speech, thus its inferior
On the other hand:
On the other other hand:
This brings me joy everytime
Deep down, every man hopes Grace Jones grabs them and takes them
During the 80’s I was so into her, Destroyer, A View To A Kill, I’m Not Perfect(but I’m Perfect for You)
Grace in Destroyer combined with Thundercats’ Cheetarah in my fevered pre-pubescent brain to create a long-standing crush on tough women who fight with a staff.
Nice call on Cheetarah.
My primary pubescent trio was Cheetarah, Baroness, and Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman. (WW I only saw in occasional reruns)
I love this little nod they did to Lynda Carter in Justice League
In contrast, I really disliked what they did with The Baroness in the live-action film from a few years back. Sienna Miller was… *fine*, I suppose. (C’mon, Gemma Arterton is at least a natural brunette) But the whole weird “Duke’s ex fiancee filled with nanites” thing was soooo dumb.I haven’t watched Snake Eyes but I’ve seen pics and read a synopsis. An improvement, but still not the Baroness I’d like.Honestly, throw on some thick rim glasses and take out the vampire teeth and you’re almost there with Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies. Just make her less “undead romantic lead” and more “Faith Lehane in Buffy Season 3″. (I may have a thing for fictional “bad girls”…)
Someone (maybe you?) brought this up when I mentioned Arnold not having prolonged speeches, particularly early in his career. Seeing it again, now, it’s fun to see how Milius managed it, even at a stage in Arnold’s career where he was frequently “moodilating” the English language. The whole thing’s done in ADR, and much of the speech is delivered as voiceover while we see his enemies riding toward him. Arnold’s only on camera for the beginning and the end, and those match up well enough that I wonder if Milius had him record the speech first so that he could match the timing on camera. Nice work.
All of Gerry Lopez’s lines were dubbed by another actor
Honestly they could have names it Conan the ADR Barbarian. I don’t think Arnold had a single line of dialog that is not dubbed in post. I can imagine hours in the record booth having him run the lines over and over until they could be understood. It’s a credit to him as an actor that he put the work in and was able to go from barely able to speak English to fluent and able to speak with his trademark accent in a few short years.
I’d say Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was the first D&D movie
No. Everything ‘Barbarian’ does is better.
It is 100% a DnD movie. Never thought of it that way. It totally fits, and viewing it with that lens makes it better actually. Also, I always think Thor: the Dark World would have been a much better movie if it had used Conan the Destroyer as a more direct template. (Also, The Northman is basically the best Conan remake we could hope for.)
Yep, I realized it was a D&D movie sometime back in the ‘90s One day I’m gonna run a short campaign that totally rips it off.You’re probably right about that.
Wilt Chamberlain being in charge of the virginity of a young woman cracks me up even more.
I like to think that was some intentional casting.
That’s Olivia D’Abo in her debut role!I don’t want to make this icky, but if her stated birthday of 1/22/69 is accurate, she was like 14 or 15 when Destroyer was filmed.
If you want icky she was also 14 in Bo Derek’s Bolero. But personally I was miffed that Sarah Douglas’ freaky topless dance got cut in the name of a PG rating.
Yeah, Destroyer is a guilty pleasure but Conan is on a whole other level for reasons stated in this article, as well as an incredible soundtrack.
I’m guessing you and I are of a similar … ahem … vintage, because I too prefer Destroyer. I was 8 years old when Barbarian was released, AND it was Rated R to boot. So as much as I wanted to see it, Mom and Dad said “no.” Destroyer, on the other hand, came out in 1984 and I was then 10, almost 11, and this bad boy was Rated PG! All of the kids in my generation rejoiced!
I’m a little younger than you and my family couldn’t afford to go to the movies, but ‘Destroyer’ was on TV a lot more and once I started playing D&D I realized that there’s a real good chance that it was someone’s homebrew quest turned into a movie.
I never realized Destroyer was PG.I saw Conan young because I had 80s parents and my mom LOVED Arnold. My wife’s Mom was the type to edit movie for the kids so when we watched Conan as an adult she was amazed at how much she missed. Her Mom cut the entire witch fucking scene for one thing
Damn if he was on set Arnold or someone else should have put him in the movie
Destroyer is a better adventure movie and a better D&D movie, but Barbarian is a better movie.
The thing I like about Destroyer is that it feels more like a story you’d get from the Marvel comics (helped no doubt by the story treatment by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway*). Barbarian is the better movie, but Destroyer feels slightly more true to the character.*Yes, I realize their story was heavily rewritten, but the bones of the plot are there.
Kids expecting the Marvel Comics version The comic did feature some mature content, especially the black and white Savage Sword of Conan series.The 1982 version is a fun movie, but I was a little disappointed how different it was from the source material. It makes me wonder what the original version of the story, written by Conan writer Roy Thomas before John Milius and Oliver Stone took over, would have been like.
I have around 200 conan comics and have read the novels. It is actually pretty damn close to the source material. Valeria is a character from the comics and a ton of the themes made it in. I think it is actually a really good adaptation.
Didn’t Thomas come back and write the sequel?The movie does not match the source material but I feel like it does get the spirit of Conan. He is not a hero or a villian. He is just a dude out for himself. He is loyal to his friends but he cares little for conflicts of the world. Early D&D owes a lot to Conan as well. Its worlds are Tolkien influenced but the early pre-made adventures very much felt like Conan level character motivations. IE less about helping others and more about getting rich
The film wasn’t much of an adaptation of Howard’s work, but I bet Howard would have loved it on its own merits.
I re-read the Howard stories recently, and I was struck by how chatty Conan is. The man doesn’t shut up.
His Destroyer script is readily available online
Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway worked on the script for Destroyer, but it was heavily rewritten. They ended up turning their version into a graphic novel called The Horn of Azoth.
I have to check it out. I’m a big fan of Roy Thomas Marvel Conan run
This would’ve been the perfect time for Universal to release this on 4k. See that giant snake in all its rubber glory.
Aw, no mention of Basil Poledouris’s legendary score for the film? It practically makes the movie. Conan’s prayer to Crom intercut with Thulsa Doom and his riders closing in as the sweeping music plays always gets to me.
Agreed! His music really plays such an important part in making the audience immersed in the fantasy and romance of it all.
Sounds like he was heavily influenced by Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Definitely. And Prokofiev, too.
Seeing as Milius lifted several shots directly from Alexander Nevsky for the film, is it such as surprise that his composer was inspired by Prokofiev’s legendary score?
Basil Poledouris seems to be underrated as a film score composer. Such great work in the ‘80s. But yeah, Conan has to be my favorite from him. The music plays a huge part in my enjoyment of this sword and sorcery epic.
100% agree. The soundtrack is perfect and really does elevate the movie, taking it from great to all time classic. This was the CD I would listen to while studying for finals when I was attending college.
He used Holst, which is the best classical music!
Yep.
Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then the HELL with you!
Greatest. Soundtrack. Ever.
This movie is blessed with a soundtrack that’s better than it has any right to be.
Theology/Civilization makes me want to run in the middle of nowhere so damn bad.
I’m not sure the movie is espousing a might-makes-right philosophy. It’s just a lawless world where might equals survival and possibly power. And Conan’s the baddest motherfucker in it. It’s more Road Warrior than Triumph of the Will.As a kid I also had a church league basketball coach who pulled out the legendary quote at halftime to motivate us to victory. We were like 9 so he probably cracked himself up a little with the “lamentations of their women” bit.
Yeah my agreement as well. The world is soo shitty and brutal. Everyone is just struggling to survive when everything wants to kill you. I really never thought about it being a fascist play.
Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?
Milius is a right-wing bore so we have to pretend his movies are more right-wing instead of just goofy trash
Conan the Barbarian is not goofy trash. It is fucking AMAZING.Destroyer? Ehhhh….. Destroyer has Grace Jones as a horny badass staff fighter, which is kind of the best thing about it.
Also, realize that the movie was co-written by Oliver Stone. Stone has issues and some of his attitudes haven’t aged well (we are supposed to dislike and distrust Tommy Lee Jones’ character in JFK because he was a flamboyant gay man, I guess?), but in general he’s on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Milius.
Yes, this
Yeah, Road Warrior is a good comp. Conan isn’t looking for trouble, but trouble keeps coming his way. There are a hundred classic Westerns with the same basic premise. And I would add that the crypto-fascism interpretation doesn’t really work for a character whose preferred mode is solitude – group identity and strength in numbers are ideas so central to fascism that it’s the origin of the term (i.e. the Italian term fascio, or a bundle of sticks – one stick is easily broken, but tie them together and they are strong).
It’s true that a fasces is a bundle of rods (and an axe), but fascists took it as their emblem because its been a symbol of law and order for two millennia and not because of a strength-in-unity allegory. In Roman times the fasces was carried by lictors, who were bodyguard-enforcer-executioners employed by local magistrates and consuls. Lictors used the rods of the fasces for lashings and the axe for executions, and the whole thing became an emblem of the office, then of the concept of legal state power.It’s been used thus in heraldry, sculpture and art since. There are still fasces on the coat of arms on many European police forces, on the emblem of France, on the Lincoln memorial, etc. as symbols of law and state power. There were a lot more of them in the 1800s.That’s what Mussolini was referencing when he took the fasces as icon and name for his little movement: law and order, tough-on-crime, glorious Roman past in one handy bundle.
There are fasces on the back of a dime.
Ehhhhh…. I mean…. Conan, Valeria, and Subotai are thieves looking to thief their way into thief-fortune. It’s fair to say that they get *more* trouble than they bargained for but to say that he doesn’t go looking for trouble? …… I dunno.
Good point. And if that bundle of sticks gets too close and agitated – there can be fire within.
But it fired you up, right? We used to get fired up before the game with the score.
Given what I remember about that team I’m pretty sure the only women lamenting after the game were our mothers, to the extent they cared.
I think the point Luke is trying to make is that a world where “might equals survivability and power” is what kind of world that fascist want. Or at least it’s what they say they want, until they find out they’re not the mightiest after all…
It fits in very well with alt-right scare tactics. They literally call liberal cities “lawless” and portray them as unsafe to live in.
I say this as someone who loves the film, but that’s the idea of propaganda filmmaking, isn’t it? Conan’s okay to non-fascist audiences because it’s set in a “might makes right” ancient world, Conan is sympathetically drawn, and his enemies are monstrous. But it’s not for nothing that fascist regimes frequently invoke the might makes right past—it makes horrific things in the present easier to swallow.Two years later, the propaganda is a lot less subtle in Millius’s Red Dawn, another movie I liked as kid and which seemed at the time like a good adventure story. You rewatch it now, it’s hard to overlook all the rightwing dow whistles: the Communists launch a sneak attack on the U.S. by streaming over the “undefended” border with Mexico, or to skip over the part where Ron O’Neal—Super Fly himself, badly miscast as a Cuban colonel—instructs the KGB to go to the local sporting goods stores to collect “forms 4473″ so they can round up all the gun owners. And all of this places our leads in a might makes right world where they, of course, prosper because they’re good, clean, American teens.
I guess it just strikes me as a regular-way hero story. Fascism to me comes with a sizeable demand for conformity by the masses. Conan was a loner who picked up a couple of sidekicks, both outlaws. His enemies needed to be bad so we’d root for him. I just don’t see propaganda in this film despite the director.Now Red Dawn? All freaking day.
Again, this doesn’t ruin Conan for me, and I’m not saying it should for you. But I’ll just point out that that’s kind of the right wing/libertarian paradox—it’s all about rugged individualism (that’s not just Conan, but also how the kids in Red Dawn are presented)…until it isn’t. January 6 is the tale of a bunch people who would to a man and woman describe themselves as rugged individualists who turned into the most mindless lemmings on the planet when someone with an authoritative voice started yelling orders to overrun the cops and force their way into the building. Fascism typically doesn’t sell itself on the joys of conformity.
That scene was originally meant for the attack on the Cimmerian village at the start of the movie and the form number for swords was just 1.
Messing with the Second Amendment was a lot simpler in the Hyborian Age…
The Mexican border isn’t really the big deal dog whistle you’re suggesting
You don’t think there’s any dog whistle there?“Infiltrators. Came up illegal, from Mexico. Cubans, mostly.”The best part is, you know who doesn’t have to sneak across a border to infiltrate the United States? Cubans! Cubans who want to immigrate to the U.S. are almost definitionally not “illegals.” At the time Red Dawn was filmed, all they had to do was reach U.S. territorial waters or present themselves at any port of entry and we welcomed them with open arms, and a near-guarantee of residency and citizenship!Milius is a really good filmmaker and scriptwriter, so that scene doesn’t sound like a series dog whistles. He throws in the Southern border as a middle item in a wargame scenario that includes “commercial flights…like Afghanistan,” ultra-accurate nukes, and a Soviet charge across Alaska and Canada to reinforce the initial ground invasion from the south. But to this day, there are plenty of “Build the Wall” types who believe that a border wall is needed to protect us, not just from immigrants seeking a better life (a purpose for which a barrier wall is really ill-suited), but from an actual military invasion of the U.S. by a foreign aggressor as presented in this film. A few years back, that aggressor was supposed to be ISIS, sometimes they believe it’ll be Mexico itself, come to reclaim the southwestern states, and I’m sure these days a lot of those fantasies revolve around the “screaming Chinamen” Milius had on our side back in 1984.
Yeah you’re projecting 2022 back 40 years a lot. If he really wanted to blow an 80s dog whistle the Cubans absolutely would have come through Florida.
No, not really. The point is that parts of 2022 go back a long way. Before you had FOX News raising paranoia about the border and immigration, you had Pat Buchanan (and that’s an anti-immigrant tradition that goes back to 19th Century). Cubans coming from Florida would be history, not a dog whistle. However, a lot of the Cubans in Florida are members and allies of the far right, going back to the Cuban Revolution, so that’s probably another reason Milius doesn’t namecheck Florida and has them sneaking across the border instead.
I guess that explanation works if you’re completely unaware of the Mariel boatlift
No, that’s why it would be history, but nice try. And again, that’s my point: you don’t need to invoke illegals across the Mexican border in order to have Cuban fifth columns, precisely because of Mariel. Yet Milius doesn’t go for recent history and instead cooks up the nonsensical “Cuban illegals” (the Marielitos weren’t illegal) precisely to dog whistle the border, then actually has the main invasion come across the border.Then again, if you want to pretend that scaremongering about the Mexican border is something that was invented in 2016, feel free. I don’t think we have anything further to discuss.
Speaking of missing the point the influx of hardened criminals and the drug violence had a lot of people wanting Cuban immigration to stop after Mariel. My main issue is you believe this entire movie was a wargame scenario only in order to sneak in 40 seconds of dialogue that was going to change the agenda of the country. Milius made the movie because he’s a nut for this kind of war game his choices were based on military not political decisions like it was easier for commandos to get in thru Mexico unseen than Florida but you got triggered by the word illegal so the whole movie is just scaremongering about the border. Trust me if Milius felt that strongly about the Mexican border he would have made a movie about it. But hey lots of people thought because Arnold was Austrian and the score reminded them of Wagner that it was some sort of ode to Nazis and aryans.
So the big argument about why an obvious far right/libertarian dog whistle (which it was, definitely, at the time) isn’t supposed to actually be a dog whistle in this movie is because he didn’t make it the whole movie? Back to the grays you go.
Were you alive in the 80s?
Saw both Conan and Red Dawn in theaters.
I have an inordinate fondness for this movie because oh my god Sandahl Bergman.But I do question Conan’s body-building regimen. Am I to believe that ten years of pushing a waterwheel around in a circle will get me Arnold’s build? And sword skills? Heck. Sign me up.
Ha, I always thought the same thing. It would be like the guy who does nothing but dumbbell curls and has massive biceps but nothing else. Conan would have been all freakish legs and shoulders.
maybe he turned round and worked his biceps and lats from time to time?
We’re agreed that it’s a shitty workout, but he would at least have massive thighs and calves as well – he’s pushing that wheel around with his legs. My big question about the wheel scene is what were his captors planning? They get a bunch of kids, have them work at something stupid for years and years until only one is left alive, and then have that one fight in a cage match where he likely would have been killed immediately? That seems like a waste of slaves. And is this something they did that one time or did they have a whole network of these wheels, with a Conan-in-the-making chained to each one?
It was a money making venture. It’s a grain mill. Spinning the wheel grinds grain into flour.
It is definitely not a flour mill. No farmers with carts full of grain, no storage vessels, nothing – just the Wheel of Pain, assorted barbarians, and kids chained to it. https://makeagif.com/i/TYYanJ
Presumably it had something with making bread of the French sort — that’s why it’s a wheel of pain.
ALL THE STARS
The sword skills come later.
Sigh. If only they had filmed R.E. Howard’s stories.
If you want a jacked-up genius go watch Reacher on Amazon Prime. I found the Milius film to be a fantastic distillation of what makes Conan fun without the overbearing “he’s awesome at EVERYTHING” bullshit.
People who like the Milius film often haven’t read Robert E. Howard’s stories. Want to know what makes Conan fun? Read The Tower of the Elephant or Red Nails.
I’ve read them. And the L Sprague de Camp books. I’m sorry but I find his characterization in the written stuff to be too much Awesomeguy McPerfect. He’s the biggest and the toughest and the smartest and YAWN. The movie Conan has flaws I can get behind. I don’t know what you want from the Howard stories that you didn’t get but if it’s Conan himself? No thanks.
I remember my brother and I watching this for the first time as kids and feeling like my head was going to explode from the awesomeness. I have such a soft spot for it even 30 years later, as a result. It really did and does deserve a good sequel- and I love the idea of showing an aged Conan much like the aged Heracles stories. The old, great, warrior doomed to be called upon to push his body to the limit forever, even as his body fails him as he ages.
I think, with all respect to Beastmaster, this was the best live action fantasy movie made until the Lord of the Rings films. So if you count the trilogy as individual films, it is now the fourth best fantasy movie.
Beastmaster was trash. If you had said Sword and the Sorcerer that would have been correct except it came out a month before Conan.
“remains the best take on Robert E. Howard’s iconic character“If being faithful to his character isn’t something you value
Yeah, the movie is perfectly good as its own thing, but Arnold Conan has absolutely nothing in common with Howard’s character. For one thing, you always got the impression that Conan was the smartest (if not the most educated) person in the room in Howard’s stories. I don’t think anyone would get that impression from Ahnuld.
And thank god. Doc Savage can have the “muscle-bound genius” shtick. I always found that sort of “guy who is huge and also brilliant and also fucks like a gigolo” nonsense grating. I *barely* tolerate it in the original Conan stories because the stories themselves are fun. Conan the character is kinda shit.
Hence “take on”.Not “1:1 replica”.
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!
Yeah once you crush them it’s time to kick back leave the driving to the flunkies
The 87 year old Cohen the Barbarian “hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper”. Terry Pratchett
I saw this movie in the theater – I knew it was ridiculous, and I loved it anyway. The opening sequence, showing a sword being forged while the drum-heavy theme played in the background, got my blood pumping, and I was ready to see Arnold play the role he was born for. There are definitely flat spots – the “comedy” bit where Conan gets drunk and falls face-first into a bowl of porridge is a good example of something that never should have been written, let alone filmed. But when Arnold is just being asked to look scary with a sword, he gets the job done! He’d be better in later movies, but this one is still rewatchable.
It’s also worth mentioning that the character of Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski was directly inspired by Milius, which makes that movie retroactively funnier, and also makes Conan a lot funnier, too.
Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski was directly inspired by Milius Milius is an odd duck especially for Hollywood (a conservative gun nut), but…he wrote The Wind and the Lion, Big Wednesday, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and, well, Apocalypse Now. (And he did the story for Extreme Prejudice, one of my favorite 80s action movies. Okay, favorite action movies.) So he often does good work. I bet I wouldn’t want to hang around with him. John Goodman would be another story.
This movie is the ballz. I Am unabashedly a huge fan. A complete blast from beginning to final frame.
There’s an austerity to Conan the Barbarian that I wish more filmmakers had employed when sword & sorcery flicks were having their brief moment back in the early-to-mid eighties. And one which I hope is utilized in the likely inevitable revival of the genre.Pretty much the entire first third of the film has barely any dialogue whatsoever, allowing the score and a lot of sweeping landscape shots to do the heavy lifting. And you what? When ‘Frank Frazetta’ is the elevator pitch for your movie, it works.Unlike the high fantasy trappings of Tolkien, the pulled-from-her-ass worlds of Rowling, or the now multiversal MCU, a proper sword & sorcery setting like Conan doesn’t need to rely so heavily on the concept of lore. And is generally better off when things are left under-explained.That said, Robert E. Howard did actually provide a good deal of background on the Hyborean Age. And it’s actually pretty solid stuff. But for a medium like film (or the video game that I hope beyond hope either Naughty Dog or Santa Monica Studio eventually makes), populating a world with ruins and customs so ancient their origins are long forgotten and never explained is, I think, a-ok.
I have little to say, except that I could not agree with you more. You nailed it!
There’s a lot of tossed-off bits that work the way they did in Star Wars (‘77), hinting at a larger, full-of-weird-shit world without making you have to stop and parse it out to orient yourself. Like “just another snake cult”, I love that.
Indeed. Modern writers forget that its way better to give you a slice of a world rather than explain every corner of it.
To be fair to modern writers, they are encouraged by studios and the viewing public to build as much potential for greater IP world exploration as possible. It’s not necessarily their fault that every fucking studio wants their own MCU.
Having potential for IP world exploration is fine. Studios have always wanted sequel potential. I don’t have a problem with that. I think they don’t understand what makes that actually work best is stuff that isn’t fully explained. Everyone wanted to know more about Boba Fett and the Space Jockey for decades because they were so damn mysterious and weird. I think the studios think they need to have a fully formed character right off the bat instead of sprinkling some things in they can grow organically.As for what the viewing public telling writers they want… the viewing public are idiots.
I agree with all of this. Milius definitely created a culture that felt pre-modern in a way that a lot of other ‘80s and subsequent sword and sorcery films really didn’t, just by leaving out all the quippy dialogue and letting Conan and his friends express themselves with their physicality.One of my favorite scenes, when Conan is being trained in swordsmanship, is a great example: the sensei corrects Conan’s stance and slaps him twice to drive home the lesson, and another student smirks. The sensei doesn’t say anything or even look at the other guy. He just calmly moves back into position… and side-kicks him right in the balls. People didn’t waste a lot of words in the Hyborian Age — Ryan Reynolds would not have felt at home there.Admittedly, the score helps a lot by filling the spaces with enough grandeur to help it all come off. According to Wikipedia the filmmakers had first considered a contemporary hard rock soundtrack before landing on Poledouris’ orchestral majesty and hoo boy, was that a bullet dodged, or what?
Holy fuck, I mostly enjoy Reynolds but good god what I wouldn’t give to see him in a Conan movie get his motor mouth slapped shut. Can you imagine Grace Jones just smashing him in the mush with that staff? (And then inevitably ruining him for every woman after…)
I mostly enjoy him too, but he isn’t always used as well as he could be. For example, in Blade: Trinity I don’t think he has a single line that isn’t sarcastic, and that made it really hard to care whether he gets eaten by vampires or not.And I’m pretty sure an encounter with Grace Jones ends up with him ball-gagged and getting dragged around behind her by a leash. Then or now!
Yeah, I saw images of her at some music or fashion show like last year or the year before and was pretty bowled over. Lady has aged mucho bueno.
I came to post something similar, not that I expect I would have articulated it so well. The film is almost oneiric in places, it’s deliberate in its pacing quite specifically to emphasise the strangeness of the world, and I think that lore (or at least, lore as it’s typically deployed in these things) has rather the opposite effect: it makes the world knowable and familiar. Conan resists this fairly tedious temptation and is all the more admirable.
Sooooo….in the summer of 2010 I was heading up the Digital Media Archives at NBC-Uni, with a 4-person office that doubled as an MPAA vault in the center of a floor of engineers who neither understood nor cared what we digital media guys were up to. And it was great! I had my own golf cart on the lot, and the drive to and from the backlot physical vault could eat up a good 40 minutes of just cruising through fake city downtowns and Old West buildings.
And my favorite, very very favorite memory of that summer was a Saturday morning when no one was there and the J2K master of Conan the Barbarian landed on my desk for archival QC. I put it on and blared it from speakers across the entire floor. The windows nearly shook from Basil Poledouris’ score and I felt, in my own tiny way, a little like Conan himself. 🙂
Like a lot of things in 1982 Conan The Barbarian was a final and fully formed hurrah of 70’s art culture. It has that auteurish, risk tasking, soft focus, unabashedly adult hallmarks of 1970’s Hollywood when a low budget movie about ancient naked barbarians could have James Earl Jones and a lifetime achievement symphony score by Basil Poledouris.Then Conan The Destroyer is a bit more sharply focused, ironically pandering, with an ensemble that wouldn’t be out of place on MTV. It’s an 80’s movie.
The day I knew I was truly old was when I agreed with the Mongol guy that the open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at the wrist, and wind in my hair were actually best in life.
Likewise, when Conan speaks his first words onscreen—“To crush your
enemies! Drive them before you! And to hear the lamentations of their
women!”
This is such a nitpick but it’s “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!”Like, if you’re gonna put it in and even talk about how it’s iconic, at least get it right.
Funny that the actual quote is a little more passive. “Hey I wasn’t driving anything, man, I just saw them getting driven”
It’s not really nitpicking when it’s the film’s most famous, iconic quote and can be viewed in ten seconds on Youtube. It’s also ‘lamentation’, not the plural. I went and watched it to check. Maybe I am nitpicking 🙂 The article should be corrected in any case as it’s lazy not to. And as noted above, to not mention Basil Poledouris’s superlative score is a particularly egregious oversight. That said, I enjoyed the rest of the article and any further celebration of Conan the Barbarian is welcome.
Yeah. It bothered me, too.
It will always be, not only the best Barbarian film to come out of the 80’s, by a long shot (and there were a lot of bad ones) but the best Barbarian film ever made. It holds up.
“Many a liberal pacifist who acknowledges how complicated solutions can be in real life can enjoy a simplistic good vs. evil brawl in fiction.”Maybe the movie wasn’t made for you.
I remember watching the censored-for-TV version on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, young enough to marvel that the movie had that actor who sounded like Darth Vader. I don’t really see all the ideological stuff going on, because the scenery, music and action are so well done.
I need to do a rewatch of Destroyer, because I don’t remember enjoying it as much. Except for Grace Jones.
Destroyer has its charms. As others have said, it’s kind of the greatest D&D movie ever made. And Grace Jones is a goddam treasure in it. It’s mostly let down (imo) by leaning too hard into comic relief and lacking a really good villain. It’s hard to follow up James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom but man, they don’t even really TRY. At best you’ve got the weird tension with Bombaata and since he’s played by a decidedly stiff NON actor (Wilt is physically intimidating but can’t act for shit), the conflict/stakes are pretty weak. And that rubber mirror monster… woof… It’s a cool idea, but again probably works best as a D&D boss fight.
I guess I’m struggling a bit to see why you referred to the values of this movie as fascist like five times in this article. I have watched this movie since I was like 6, and I have to admit I don’t see it. The one line that I assume you’re using to justify thinking it’s all about “might makes right” is a line that Conan says while he is literally a slave fighting in gladiatorial matches. The rest of the movie is about three people trying to make their own way in a world where money and power is consolidated with a bunch of rulers, and a cult is brainwashing a bunch of people. I get the writer’a politics may be crazy (I don’t know. I have no info on that), but I kind of feel like the author of this article is pushing some of his own current mind space into something it doesn’t fit in. I’d even give you that MAYBE you could say they are showing that only the big strong man can save everyone…but they also made Valeria pretty much a badass.
This movie was damn weird to have seen as an eight year old. Too long, and as a nominal fan of the comics (which, at the time, I didn’t get to encounter that often) I wasn’t prepared for the “adult” stuff going on, lol. I appreciated it more seeing it on television several years later. I also liked the robustness and even the comedy of the sequel. I wished a part 3 had been done. I guess it technically isn’t too late for “King Conan” starring Arnold, but… that’s a story for another day.
funny story: my stepdad was never much of a tv viewer but there was a tv in his den & he would sometimes put it on when he was doing paperwork. one evening at dinner, he started telling us about a movie he had gotten drawn into that afternoon – it eventually became apparent it was “conan the barbarian.” i asked him what the title was & he said he had looked it up in the tv guide & it was called “the jerk.” i told him that was a misprint & he said he thought so too, at first, but then after watching it, he decided that was the correct title after all.
Would Conan O’Brien have done so well had his name been Brad?
Are they ever gonna make a movie out of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream?
Its two follow-ups: Destroyer and… Red Sonja.
King Osric : There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father’s love for his child.That line fucking rocks. This is a great movie.
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Nice article, except you got his quote wrong.
I think people miss what the power fantasy really is. There’s a scene in the books that sums it up. Conan is in a large city, where he had to hand over his weapons before entering. The rich men and political leaders of the town are exceedingly rude, dishonest and disrespectful. As Conan tries to navigate this unfamiliar place, he laments that if they were out in the world and he had his weapons, noone would dare be so dissrespectful. The threat of violence makes everyone polite. And that’s the real power fantasy. Real world problems are hard. You can’t just punch them or stab them with a sword. But, fantasy enemies are easy to deal with. You can just beat them up or kill them at will. And crowds cheer when you do. When you defeat your real world problems, people just say “what, do you want a metal for being an adult?”
As virtually everyone else, I love this soundtrack with all my heart. One of my favorite things to do whenever I hear it, is quote the intro by Mako when I press play and see if I can time it to the intro of the percussion and nail the gravitas of his voice:
“Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!”You try it out, it’s fun!