Disparity between popular and critically acclaimed movies isn't something that should catch any reviewer by surprise. On the other hand, sometimes things get a little bit personal. In my case, I was puzzled by the low rating of a film I consider one of my favorite masterpieces of the Seventh Art. Conan the Barbarian by John Milius is, in my humble opinion, one of the top ten motion pictures ever made. However, whenever I mention that film to the average filmgoer, they show either disdain, ignorance, or indifference.
The unenviable status of Conan the Barbarian among film lovers puzzled me for years. At the beginning, I was close to the conclusion that I had been trying to find artistic justification for my ultimate "guilty pleasure." However, years passed, and my film taste developed enough for me to distinguish true art from commercial trash, but my affection for Conan stayed the same. Finally, I began to develop my own theory about Milius' masterpiece, and that theory can be summed up in a phrase: "wrong time."
However, it seemed like a good time for Dino de Laurentiis, an Italian film producer who saw the mega-success of Donner's Superman as an impulse to start making his own film adaptations of popular comic books. His previous attempt in that direction, Flash Gordon, was successful despite being criticized by critics, who were allergic to 1970s camp. Unfortunately, when De Laurentiis decided to make another comic book adaptation, he chose the wrong hero.
Unlike squeaky-clean characters like Superman, Flash Gordon, or even Buck Rogers, Conan the Barbarian didn't belong to the G-rated world of simple moral virtues of the late 1930s and early 1940s. His character was invented in the 1930s, but the dark imagination of the tragically deceased author Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) kept Conan outside the pulp fiction mainstream. It was only in the 1960s when, thanks to L. Sprague de Camp and other authors, Conan was rediscovered and later served as some kind of adult alternative to Tolkien-inspired stereotypes in the fantasy genre. However, Conan reached the peak of its popularity in the media of comic books, using new standards of depicting sex and violence to make his character popular among male teenagers.
De Laurentiis knew that the campy and ironic approach towards Conan's character wouldn't work. So, he needed a real 1970s author to deal with a 1970s phenomenon. The choice fell on John Milius, one of the biggest names in the so-called "New Hollywood" of the 1970s. Milius was perfect because the vision of Conan as a lonely but free character in an amoral world was in line with Milius' own individualistic and libertarian views.
According to many Conan purists, the plot is inconsistent with the "canon" of Conan novels and comic books. In another way, it uses many of Conan's stories to make the story both original and faithful to the works of Robert E. Howard. The story begins in the time of Conan, some 12,000 years B.C. when the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia were a single landmass, and when many ancient but corrupt civilizations shared the space with barbarian tribes. One of such tribes becomes the target of raiders led by the evil sorcerer and demigod Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones), who kills all the adults and takes children into slavery. One of those children is Conan who, thanks to years of hard work, grows up to be a muscular and extremely strong slave. These qualities later lead him to a career as a gladiator, and after earning freedom from his master, he begins his personal crusade for revenge. The quest leads him to the city of Zamora, where he strikes up a friendship with thieves Subotai (played by Gerry Lopez) and the beautiful Valeria (played by Sandahl Bergman). After successfully stealing jewels from the Temple of the Snake, they are approached by the old King Osric (played by Max Von Sydow), whose own daughter (played by Valerie Quenessen) became a follower of Thulsa Doom, now the leader of a growing and dangerous cult on the way to global domination. Conan accepts the offer to return the Princess to the King, although his friends doubt his real motives.
From the perspective of the average film-goer, who expected some escapist mind-blowing adventure, Conan the Barbarian might have been a disappointment or mediocre piece of work. Instead of an adventure, the film is an epic story where the plot and characters tend to be more important than the visual and other attractions. However, the film doesn't lack those attractions - there are fewer action sequences than in an average action movie, but they are beautifully shot and choreographed. The film authors also paid great attention to detail, in quantities unprecedented since von Stroheim's time. Although the world of Conan is fictitious, Milius cleverly portrayed it as a mythical vision of the Bronze/Iron Age Europe, using many actual historical details of that time period, usually ignored by Hollywood. The amounts of blood, gore, sex, and nudity that may be gratuitous in any other film paradoxically give a great deal of historical realism to the film that is basically a mythical fantasy. But the biggest attraction of all is Basil Poledouris' musical score, so beautiful and perfect that even some of the biggest critics consider it one of the best in the history of cinema.
The acting attractions are very few, but there are some wonderful parts. Conan the Barbarian is now mostly remembered as Arnold Schwarzenegger's first film role, which later catapulted his career. Although the future star received one of the first "Razzie" anti-awards for his performances, I must say that his role in Conan is perhaps the best in his career. He didn't just work hard to make his character as physically identical to Conan as possible, but emotionally as well. His role is quite serious and lacks the one-liners that would later become Schwarzenegger's trademark. Schwarzenegger's acting partners in this film weren't that lucky in their later careers. James Earl Jones was probably the most successful of them all, and it's thrilling to see him here in an atypical but brilliant portrayal of the ultimate bad guy. Apart from Max von Sydow, almost everyone else - Gerry Lopez, Sandahl Bergman, and Valerie Quenessen - sailed into oblivion, although their parts were adequate at worst.
Apart from the major misunderstanding between the commercial audience and artistically ambitious movie creators, Conan the Barbarian suffers from another, more serious problem in its approach towards viewers. Some critics are prone to appraise this film not on its artistic merit but on its, sometimes questionable, ideology. The screenplay was written by Oliver Stone in his best screenwriting years, but also in a period before his attempts to become the cinematic conscience of America, and for some, his references to Nietzsche's philosophy are enough to brand the screenplay as fascistoid. The portrayal of Thulsa Doom's cult in the film might be interpreted as influenced by Nietzsche's unflattering views on Christianity, thus making the movie more anti-Christian than some more harmless but more hyped cases (like The Last Temptation of Christ, for example). However, John Milius was definitely more involved in the screenplay, and political overtones were lost or hidden behind Milius' own individualistic philosophy. Anyway, even if the film does have some hidden "message," that message wouldn't prevent a mature viewer from enjoying a cinematic masterpiece that is very rare to find these days.
RATING: 10/10 (+++++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.films.reviews on June 27th, 1998)
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