"Conan the Barbarian": one-paragraph review

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous Conan

By the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was starring in 1994's "True Lies," his acting—never that great—had improved a lot. Re-watching 1982's "Conan the Barbarian" last night drove this point home pretty hard. Directed by John Milius (who also directed the original "Red Dawn" and cowrote the screenplay for "Apocalypse Now"), "Conan the Barbarian" is a screen adaptation (written by Milius and Oliver Stone—yes, that Oliver Stone) of the fantasy novels of 30s-era writer Robert E. Howard, who wrote of the fictional Hyborian Age, a time of swords and sorcery (1982 was also when games like Dungeons & Dragons were peaking). In the movie, we meet Conan as a boy whose Cimmerian father (the absurdly multitalented William Smith) teaches him about "the riddle of steel," which requires both heat and cold, hardness and flexibility, to be crafted into a powerful, proper sword—the only thing, Conan's father emphasizes, that Conan can ever trust. Conan's parents are killed by a menacing raiding party led by Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), who leads a snake cult devoted to Set (whether this Set is from the Egyptian mythos is left unsaid). Young Conan is captured in the raid and set to work as a slave who grows into the huge Arnold we all know and love. At first lauded merely for his great strength, Conan is thrown into a gladiatorial pit where he learns to fight instinctively against a variety of bloodthirsty opponents. He is rewarded with an unending line of nubile women and is taken to train in the fighting arts with the best warmasters. Then one day, his redheaded slave master—a boy himself when he first met Conan—sets him free. Conan wanders the wilderness and picks up three friends: the archer Subotai (Gerry Lopez), the thief/warrior Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), and a nameless wizard (Mako), who becomes Conan's chronicler. Taking the path of thievery and hearing a prophecy that he will eventually become king by his own hand, Conan sets himself on a path of revenge against Thulsa Doom, who still lives and is said to be a thousand years old. He and his band meet King Osric (Max von Sydow), whose daughter has been seduced by the snake cult, and whom Osric wants Conan to steal back for him. What follows is a series of encounters with camels, giant snakes, demons, magic, muscular guards, muscular snake-priests and, in the end, the final (and rather anticlimactic) encounter with Thulsa Doom himself in an ending that might remind some people of "Apocalypse Now" (which director Milius, you'll recall, cowrote). As I mentioned at the beginning, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't much of an actor back in 1982; his Conan is a weird combination of (1) a clever/cunning warrior driven by a single purpose and (2) a mouth-breathing brute who, when drunk, punches camels that offend him. 1982-era scripting and editing both come off as fairly primitive, but that primitivity may be less a product of the era and more a product of Milius and Schwarzenegger's ham-handedness. While the costuming allows lustful teen viewers to see plenty of tits and ass, the whole thing—the blood, the sex, the combat—is rather tame by today's standards. That said, "Conan" has become a cult classic, and while Arnold comes off as stupid and brutish, he's a great physical match for the role; as he himself has said in interviews, he made Robert E. Howard's impossible warrior believable. I've heard rumors of a "King Conan" movie starring a now-aged Arnold Schwarzenegger; it probably won't feature his muscles, but there's great potential to write the character as time-hardened, wiser, cleverer, and maybe fighting to preserve his kingdom for his children (and even his grandchildren). Overall, though, "Conan the Barbarian" remains what it was in 1982: a piece of entertaining fluff (with, by the way, plenty of race-inappropriate casting in both major and minor roles). Watch it, enjoy the hilariously bombastic score by the proto-Wagnerian Basil Poledouris (who also scored "RoboCop," "The Hunt for Red October," and "Starship Troopers"), and have a smile.