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Genre
Sword & Sorcery
Length
129 minutes
Director
John Milius
Major Stars
Arnold Schwarzenegger
James Earl Jones
Max von Sydow
MPAA Rating
R
Year Released
1982
Review Posted on
8/8/2006
Rating
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Review by Dragan Antulov
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 movie I consider one of my favourite masterpieces of seventh art. CONAN THE BARBARIAN by John Millius is, in humble opinion of this author, one of the top ten motion pictures ever made. However, whenever I mention that movie to the average moviegoer, they show either disdain, ignorance or indifference.
Unenviable status of CONAN THE BARBARIAN among movie 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 movie taste developed enough for me to distinguish true art from commercial trash, but my affection for CONAN stayed the same. Finally, I was beginning to make my own pet theory about Millius' masterpiece and that theory can be summed up in a phrase "wrong time".
However, it looked like a good time for Dino de Laurentiis, Italian movie producer who saw mega-success of Donner's SUPERMAN as an impulse to start making his own movie adaptations of popular comic books. His previous attempt in that direction, FLASH GORDON, was successful despite being chewed by critics, then allergic to 1970s camp. Unfortunately, when De Laurentiis decided to make another comic book adaptation he chose the wrong hero.
Unlike squeaky clean characters of Superman, Flash Gordon or even Buck Rogers, Conan the Barbarian actually didn't belong to G-rated world of simple morality virtues of late 1930s and early 1940s. His character was indeed invented in 1930s, but the dark imagination of tragically deceased author Robert E. Howard (1906- 1936) kept Conan outside pulp fiction mainstream. It was only in 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 fantasy genre. However, Conan reached the peak of its popularity in the media of comic books, using the new standards of depictions of sex and violence in order to make his character popular among male teeenagers.
De Laurentiis knew that the campy and ironic approach towards Conan's character wouldn't work. So, he needed some real 1970s author to deal with 1970s phenomenon. The choice fell on John Millius, one of the biggest names in so-called "New Hollywood" of 1970s. Millius was perfect, because the vision of Conan as lonely but free character in amoral world was in line with Millius' own individualistic and libertarian views.
According to many Conan purists, the plot is inconsistent with the canon of Conan novels and comic books. In other ways, it uses many Conan stories in order to make the story both original and faithful to the works of Robert E. Howard. The story begins in time of Conan, some 12,000 years B.C. when the continents of Africa, Europe and Asia were single land mass, and when many ancient but corrupt civilizations shared the space with barbarian tribes. One of such tribes becomes target of a raiders led by evil sorceror and demigod Thulsa Doom (Jones) who kill all the adults and take children into slavery. One of those children is Conan who, thanks to years of hard work, grows up to be muscular and extremely strong slave. Such qualities later lead him to the career of 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 friendship with thieves Subotai (Lopez) and beautiful Valeria (Bergman). After succesfully stealing jewels from the Temple of Snake, they are approached by old King Osric (Von Sydow), whose own daughter (Quenessen) became the follower of Thulsa Dooom, now the leader of growing and dangerous cult on the way to global domination. Conan<
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