 Conan the Barbarian (1982) Basically just a series of massive set pieces strung together, Conan appears to have no actual plot. Conan's parents are brutally murdered by marauding pagans (led by James Earl Jones); Conan is sold into slavery, and once he's grown into full-blown Arnoldism, embarks on a brutal search for revenge. The acting is absolutely terrible across the board, with the exception of Mr. Earl Jones, who gives a brilliantly over-the-top performance as Thulsa Doom, high priest of the cannibalistic, orgiastic snake cult; and Max Von Sydow in a bit part as the king who hires Conan to save his daughter from marriage to Thulsa Doom. There's no point in trying to dissect Schwarzenegger's "performance"—he's a monosyllabic puppet strung up to fit the filmmaker's vision, and has maybe ten full lines in the entire film, all of them spoken in a pre-kindergarten staccato. The role itself is completely undignified. Conan is all reptilian instinct, zero human emotion. It beggars understanding that this film helped catapult Schwarzenegger to superstardom, much less commanded a sequel. The story seems pretty random as Conan wanders through a fantasy wasteland, murdering and pillaging and screwing. The film doesn't even try to make sense of the crazy leaps in logic, like how Conan loses his virginity to a witch who transforms into some kind of shrieking creature, or how Thulsa Doom escapes Conan's wrath by turning into a snake. But hey, it's a fantasy epic from the early 80s, when sense took shotgun to sensibility. Nowadays, such scenes would be preambled with someone saying, "Watch out for that Thulsa Doom, he can turn into a mean old snake!" Who needs that crapola? Surely not me. Equally early-80s is the direction, which strikes an uneasy balance between the simplicity of the 70s (lots of zooms and pans) and the unfortunate excesses of later-80s filmmaking (one almost expects the sidekick to say things like, "Dude!" and "Radical!"). Milius takes a few tepid stabs at humor, which evoke some half-hearted cringes. You're forced to wonder what this film would be like as a modern-day remake—probably very bad—or what Oliver Stone's much wilder rejected first draft would have been like … probably a lot more exciting and strange. The major sequences are engaging, though scattered amid lots and lots of walking across the wasteland. My favorite scene by far is the raid on the cult's impenetrable tower, in which Arnold battles the hordes so he can decapitate a giant snake guarding a priceless gem. It's totally bizarre, almost completely without dialogue, and deeply satisfying in a primal, ripped-from-the-subconscious way. The score—an inversion of Ravel's "Bolero"—helps make this one of the most memorable action scenes ever filmed, largely thanks to how surreal it all is. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the film simply doesn't hold up. There's some vague attempts at meaning and spirituality, but ultimately the film exists as a bloodletting. When Thulsa Doom beheads young Conan's mommy, we know Conan will eventually be Thulsa's doom. The getting there is worth your time, but very much inferior to more thoughtful works of fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or Bionic Ninja.
Review by Crimedog |