Conan the Barbarian

Rating:
Summary: A movie that deserves more recognition...
Review: Conan the Barbarian is not just another dumb, fantasy B-movie. The movie features an energetic, dynamic, pre-Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger, charismatic James Earl Jones, and humorous Mako. The music is operatic and serves to tell the story in a forceful, yet artistic manner. The temples, mountains, and castles are wonderful to behold. The action is gory, violent, and relentless.

Director John Milius and writer Oliver Stone bring all these elements together to create a marvelous story about suffering, struggle, and ultimate triumph.

Don't be closed-minded about Conan the Barbarian. Watch the movie without prejudgment and decide for yourself. I think you'll agree that Conan is a keeper...

Rating:
Summary: Superbly Barbaric!
Review: Thsi film is absolutely brilliant - I cannot recommend it enough. The story is simple yet imaginative, the acting good, and the fight-scenes atmospheric and bloody, just as they should be. One should also complement the settings and use of the Spanish countryside, which gives it a true sense of pre-civilisation and myth. Best of all is the music, which is just magnificent.

The picture quality and sound are excellent on DVD, with quite a few added features.

Rating:
Summary: A Cinematic Masterpiece
Review: Conan the Barbarian is perhaps the greatest fantasy film ever made. The settings, musical score and stark narrative give it gravitas lacking in much of the genre. Arnold, Sandahl Bergman and James Earl Jones played their parts perfectly. It is a shame that the sequel, Conan the Destroyer, was such a travesty.

Rating:
Summary: By Crom!
Review: Though unfortunately the quality of this DVD is below average (the colors are poor and the source print is grainy in places, which is why I'm only giving this 4 stars instead of 5), this is a must-have movie for Conan fans. Schwarzenegger was born to play Robert E. Howard's Cimmerian warrior, and Mako, James Earl Jones, Sandahl Bergman and Max Von Sydow are all terrific. The pastiche screenplay (by John Milius and Oliver Stone) deftly combines elements from various Howard short stories, and keeps the adventure coming. The sets and costumes are richly evocative of Howard's Hyborian Age, and the landscapes chosen for the exterior scenes are all eerily beautiful. Best of all is the Basil Poledouris score! According to director Milius, Poledouris was hired to write music before principal photography began so that Milius could score scenes during filming to the soundtrack. If you don't have the score on CD, get it! Only Randy Edelman's lush score for DRAGONHEART can begin to compete for romantic-fantasy majesty. Please, Universal! Hunt down a better source print and take some extra care in transferring a new special collectors edition to DVD in the near future!

Rating:
Summary: A superior fantasy movie
Review: This would be a 5-star movie, largely because of its inspiring of so many others; the sweeping, vibrant scenery; and the effective interplay of action and music without considerable dialogue. (In this sense, it mirrors Robert E. Howard's writing, which is clean and economical yet lush.) However, the plot, not based on any one story, has its rough places (e.g. if Thulsa Doom is a 1,000 year-old sorcerer, he should be smart enough to guard the rear entrances to his compound, especially after the heroes stage one successful raid--I mean, how does Conan just stroll up to him at the end? There are other points, but I don't want to be accused of being nit-picky.)

Another regret is that the state of the special effects at the time the film seems awkward by modern standards, and this inevitably detracts a bit from the presentation now. However, I wouldn't trade Ah-nold ("Krom!"), Bergman ("Do you want to live forever?"), or James Earl Jones ("Now they shall learn why they fear the night . . .") for anyone just for the sake of a remake.

Finally, Howard's stories are definitely worth reading. His work preceded J.R.R. Tolkien's, though the fantasy genre owes inestimable debts to both fine writers. There is an inexpensive "Kull" paperback that I felt was a good introduction to Howard's work.

Rating:
Summary: A TRUE WARRIORS FILM
Review: TO ME THIS FILM WAS THE WARRIOR MOVIES OF ALL TIME. ITS FULL OF THE ART OF MYTH AND LEGEND THAT ONLY A FEW MOVIES CAN COMPARE WITH. IN A WAY ITS REMINDS ME OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS. WARRIORS THAT ARE BORN. CONAN IS A FIGHTER WITH HEART AND SO MUCH SOUL.

Rating:
Summary: Conan The Barbarian
Review: I can't believe they are not remastering the sound on this film. That was the problem I had with the laserdisc and then the first issue of release in the DVD format. Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono? Give me a break. Basil Poleduris' score should be heard with such sound and fury on this particular film. It's what drives the story in this movie and it saddens me that with the arrival of a Collector's Edition that they were too cheap to remaster the sound to a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. Or are they? I hope the information is incorrect and that they do release it in 5.1. I refuse to believe that it wasn't possible with the technology available to us today. To whoever is releasing this title (Universal?), I am very disappointed in you.

Rating:
Summary: A specific genre has rarely been better served.
Review: On those occasions when I'm asked to name my all-time favorite film, my reply of "Conan the Barbarian" is usually greeted by a wry smile and something like, "No I'm serious, what is really your all-time favorite?" Well, it really is. The combination of casting, high production values, cinematography, and above all scoring, combine to do what no other film of this genre has done before or since - capture the other-worldly spirit of adventure fantasy.

In his Conan series, the author Robert E. Howard created an epic hero who is brooding, pathologically violent, and deeply troubled. His melancholy and ferocity are not the symptoms of psychosis however, but appropriate manifestations of his very nature - he is pagan and barbarian and he has been profoundly wronged. Conan is the stuff of adolescent male fantasy, an elemental physical and sexual juggernaut. To his enemies he is implacable Death, relentless and inevitable. To women he is the irresistible ideal or rather what boys without experience imagine it to be. The lost "Hyborean Age" that Howard created for his hero is a world in which Nietzsche or a nineteenth century social Darwinist would have been comfortable, a world as yet untroubled by the progeny of Abraham or the gentle carpenter of Galilee.

Conan and his world are literally unbelievable. Howard's skill in prose at making them otherwise is rare, but what John Milius and company did on screen is far rarer. The writer can count on the reader's imagination, unconstrained by time, budgets, or physics, to create and sustain the setting for a well-crafted story. The filmmaker, however, has no such luxury, he or she must work with a difficult and unforgiving physical medium all the while hounded by accountants. Jaded audiences and malevolent critics will seek and find every shortcut, every scene that should have been re-shot, and every line that could have been better. What Milius did was not perfect, but it was good enough. The synergy between cast, setting, staging, and score is truly astonishing.

Casting: In 1982, Arnold Schwarzenegger was new to most of us. He was preternaturally huge, his face oddly expressive, and his guttural accent suggested dark, Teutonic power. Arnold was not and is not a great actor and though he may be inappropriate for many roles, he was and is my Conan - the one in my head. The rest of the casting is more than adequate with good performances by James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow.

Setting: Well-crafted and believable sets placed against evocatively bleak Spanish and Canadian landscapes- no shortcuts here, the budget was big enough to do it right.

Staging: I saw Schwarzenegger interviewed some years back and was surprised to hear him say that he "hated" playing Conan. He complained that the director (Milius) insisted that he treat the role seriously and this made for an unpleasant filming experience. The actor would have preferred a more light-hearted approach. Sorry Arnold, had you gotten your way the film would have been irretrievably diminished. Everything in this movie is played for real - no sidelong glances to let the audience in on the joke, no valley girl slang, everything strictly Hyborean. The swordplay is not the polite fencing of a thirties matinee idol nor the inept blundering of a spaghetti Hercules. Every nerve and sinew of these athletic protagonists is bent to delivering crushing blows, meant to be fatal, and we are permitted to see that they are.

Score: Basil Poledouris' score is quite literally the best original film music I have ever heard. Without it, this movie would have been only adequate. It ties everything together. When Conan has left his Valeria to search for Thusla Doom and is truly alone, a distant figure on horseback set against the backdrop of arid wilderness, we hear his emptiness. When he and his companions steal into Doom's lair to recover the Princess, we hear the sybaritic decadence of the snake cult. And when Conan squares off against Doom's chief (and monstrously Aryan) henchmen, we hear the clash and clang of Thor's titanic hammer.

This is great movie making. You may think the genre ridiculous or worse but never has the craft served its subject so well.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome...even by today's standards
Review: Come on..Arnold's first big flick and arguably the best period movie to ever come out. This film inspired Zena, Hercules and to a lesser effect the best of them all: BRAVEHEART. It was interesting to see Arnold's first movie and see how physical he was back then. The story is first rate and although the action isn't with today's standards they set the tone back then. A treat back in the day and even today..

Rating:
Summary: A Film That Does Conan and Robert E. Howard Justice
Review: I have always loved Conan, and have most of the old 1970s paperbacks written by Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp. Howard's vision of an antedilvian world, bereft of true, all-consuming civilization, a savage time of elderly gods, magic, demons, warlords and warriors, translates well into imagination and into the written word. But into FILM? Definately. This movie supremely would have made Howard happy. Schwarzeneger's Conan is just like Howard's conception: a dark-ages James Bond. The film's battle-sequences are among the best that I have ever seen, and James Earl Jones' performance is eerie and excellent. The soundtrack is first-rate as well. Howard's idea of a land populated by wandering peoples of all kinds, a bevy of dangerous beauties, strange deities and a multitude of warring city-states is present in this film in spades. There are a few bones to pick (Thulsa Doom is a Kull villian [Kull is another of Howard's literary creations], not a Conan villain; there is no real closure to this film), but the pros outweigh the cons by a multitude. Fine performances are had by Conan's fellows, and an expert cameo is presented by the venerable Max Von Sydow as an aging monarch. This film is a credit to all fantasy enthusiasts. Check it out and enjoy!