Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian is a goofy, cheesy, stupid movie that also isn’t very good. With a structureless plot, tenuous character motivations, and a kitchen sink approach to costume and setting, there is little to enjoy beyond the sheer absurdity of the project.

The movie opens on some narration informing us that Conan takes place in the time between “the waters of Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas” which is basically an admission that this movie exists in a sort of primordial time before history. This is important, as the story moves around a lot. Based on costume and set design, the titular Conan goes from somewhere resembling viking-age Norway to somewhere resembling medieval Spain, then to somewhere resembling Jin Dynasty west Asia, then somewhere resembling ancient Egypt, finally ending in somewhere resembling New Testament era Israel or Jordan where he meets a Japanese wizard and does battle at a Scythian Kurgan. So the setting is not high fantasy per se, as it is overly reliant on familiar historical looks and locations, but also isn’t alternative history, as it’s a bunch of cool ideas just mashed together with no regard for appropriate time periods or geographies. Personally, I found this halfway historical, halfway fantastical thing very distracting.

After that introductory narration, we meet a young Conan, his family, and his mountain village, before everyone but Conan is killed and he is taken and put to work on a giant wheel. What this wheel does and why it needs human labor over, say, beasts of burden is never explained. Nor, as Conan is growing from scrawny child actor into prime Arnold Schwarzenegger, is it ever explained why he is apparently the last child to be taken away from the wheel. Once bought as a slave, Conan is trained in blood-sport and used as a gladiator. After years of dominating the ring, his owner takes him to some place resembling Mongolia where he is further trained in martial arts, bred like a prize stallion, and eventually released by his owner despite never fighting in the arena again. Why? Who knows. No reason is ever given nor is one easy to infer.

After being released, he gives a witch an orgasm so amazing she loses control of her magics, gets a random archer he meets on the road to swear a lifetime of loyalty to him for no reason, makes a thief he just met fall hopelessly in love with him for no reason, drunkenly punches a camel in the nose for no reason, steals a massive gemstone from the lair of a giant snake, and at some point gets on the trail of the men who destroyed his village in order to exact revenge. None of these moments are linked by any kind of causality. Events just happen one after the other, up to and including his eventual quest to defeat the menacing Thulsa Doom. This makes the film somewhere between a male Barbarella and a prehistoric James Bond.

Like in Barbarella, an impossibly sexual character from a pulp comic book series moves from weakly connected vignette to weakly connected vignette, emulating the episodic storytelling of its source material, but in a rather rambling and haphazard way. Like James Bond, Conan is masculine power fantasy through and through: strong, powerful, great at fighting and at sex, and destined for greatness – not by prophecy but by personal grit and accomplishment. Through the lens of traditional masculinity, he is essentially faultless. Every girl loves him and every guy wants to be him. Even the last girl he rescues, who he doesn’t sleep with on screen but is implied he will sleep with later, feels straight out of the Sean Connery or Roger Moore era Bond playbook. Bond is able to get away with this cheesiness, to an extent, thanks to its cold war setting, cool gadgets, and occasional self aware and subtly ironic tone. Strip that all away and Conan just comes across as silly.

It likely doesn’t help matters that the writing is not great. The movie’s idea of foreshadowing is to have a character with the catchphrase “who wants to live forever,” in fact, not live forever. The writing is also beyond sparse. Very, very little is said by any of the characters. Even basic expository things, like character introductions, are so pared back that at the end of the film I wasn’t sure I knew anyone’s name other than the titular hero Conan and his main nemesis Thulsa Doom; incidentally, the only two characters mentioned by name in the narration.

This was probably an act of necessity rather than design, as several of the cast purportedly had trouble articulating on camera. Similar to his laconic robot in Terminator, which came out two years after Conan, Arnold was constrained to very few words because his English wasn’t that great yet. To fix this, the film relies mostly on facial expressions, meaningful looks, and grunts. This isn’t the best fix, as Arnold had just started his transition from bodybuilder to film star and so his acting wasn’t that great either. To support him are a male companion played by an ex-professional surfer with rumored diction problems so bad they dubbed over all his lines with a different actor during the editing process, and a female companion played by a dancer who was recommended to the director by Bob Fosse. Needless to say, virtuosic performances do not save the many wordless silences of the film by infusing them with simmering subtext. Luckily, the majority of the words uttered are in the more capable hands of James Earl Jones and Mako Iwamatsu, who do the best they can with the material they have.

They don’t have much, though, as the more verbose exposition of the narration and villainous monologuing betrays a story that lacks cohesion and structure. The original script would have made a four hour epic, fusing ancient sagas and legendary mythology with storylines from the original pulp comic Conan the Cimmerian. This draft was written by Oliver Stone while high on a mixture of cocaine and depressants. Milius, the director, the came in and reworked the script, keeping some ideas from the first half and rewriting the second, presumably taking a chainsaw to the material in order to accommodate three (essentially) first time actors, two of whom struggled to speak intelligibly in front of the camera. This may also explain why the first half feels like a knockoff Ten Commandments and the second half feels like a bad Seven Samurai impression. Different writers with different subconscious influences were pulling the film’s tone this way and that.

Conan the Barbarian was a divisive moneymaker on release that carried enough name recognition over the decades to be remade in 2011. It’s hard to understand why, though. It’s a bit of an incoherent mess. Nothing makes any sense, no one acts according to any form of human logic, and the action is honestly not that great either. Beyond ironically quoting it’s more memorable lines, like “the lamentations of their women,” and getting a chuckle out of its more absurd moments, like a man notching stiffened pythons as arrows in his bow, I’m not sure if there is much of anything of value in Conan the Barbarian for a modern audience. Actually, come to think of it, the score is quite nice.

Would Recommend: If want to watch some dumb sword and sandals (and sorcery) male power fantasy.

Would Not Recommend: If pulp fantasy sounds dreadful.