Fun fact: he was paraphrasing Genghis Khan.
The original:
Man’s highest joy is victory.
To conquer your enemies and to pursue them,
To deprive them of their possessions,
To make their beloved weep,
To ride on their horses,
And to embrace their wives and daughters.
I suspect “embrace” may not be a literal translation.
Entertaining, if you are in a very forgiving mood.
Jack Palance as the villain, chewing the scenery til it screams.
A dwarf who is not particularly short.
A giant who is not particularly tall.
An elf wearing penny loafers.
Or maybe the scribe was just being polite when putting it down for public record.
Advice, the forgiving mood better be very forgiving. Very. Or drunk or stoned. Or ideally, either of the above plus the riffed version. Then it’ll be fun.
So in the final battle. They prepared all of those pointy sticks (palisade?), but what good did they serve? Didn’t slow the attackers one bit. Twice they showed attackers and their horses falling down slopes, just knocking the palisades out of the way. And 10-20 mounted armed horsemen have ZERO success against 3 men on foot?
Loved it when they showed Conan sharpening a pointy stick - except the stick is already pointy and his sword removes no wood! 
Yeah, I’m picking nits at this point, and I guess you can’t debate taste, but this movie is utter crap. I guess I could imagine watching it as a crappy movie that I wanted to make fun of… Maybe with a drinking game.
Not if one of the is Conan the Barbarian. The two other guys are only there to pull the dead bodies away from Conan. (I don’t recall that scene, but my statement applies in any circumstance where one of the 3 guys is Conan.)
Did you not hear the prayer to Crom? No one’s gonna beat that
I’m surprised no mention of Red Sonya is the “list of films that look like a Boris Vallejo painting”. As I understand it, the only reason Schwarzenegger’s character was “Lord Kalidor” and not “Conan” was they didn’t have the rights.
I’m going to be contrarian here and say that Conan The Barbarian worked for me in ways many of these other films didn’t BECAUSE of the low production values and Arnold’s “minimalist” accent. Conan was snatched as a child and made to push a wheel for most of his life. I don’t expect him to be particularly articulate. Horses are expensive. A penniless barbarian and his thief companion wouldn’t be able to buy one and there didn’t seem to be a lot of people around to steal a couple from.
Although one thing I did notice on rewatching was when they were escaping Thulsa Doom’s temple with the Princess, Conan and his buddy kind of left Valaria behind to fight a bunch of mooks by herself. Now maybe he had no doubt of her martial prowess, but still seemed like kind of a dick move.
As the man himself said, to Hell with you. I love Conan the Barbarian.
The reason? Conviction. Conan commits to its story and to its world, never winking at the audience, never second-guessing itself, and without a touch of irony. The world looks and feels like a fantasy world, and its characters act and talk like characters in a fantasy novel, and as a lifelong fantasy fan, that’s what I want from a fantasy movie. People here have mentioned Excalibur (1981), and I think the two movies have much more in common than people realize. Both feel like films directed by utter lunatics, which they were.
Plus, the soundtrack was great.
I endorse this, with a triple-emphasis on Poledouris’s score. It’s not exaggerating to say that it’s one of the best film scores in history. .
More of a cheval de frise. My son would be aghast at my incorrect terminology.
Agreed. But a decent plot and acting are pretty important also. It could have been wonderful. Excalibur had the advantage of a story honed by time waiting for a production like this. Would have been better to steal from something like that and place Conan in it.
I haven’t watched it in a long time, but I remember liking Dragonslayer.
I liked that movie. I remember thinking a good editor could have fixed the pace and disjointed elements of the plot. The live action scenes were weak, the animation was somewhat better.
Yeah, I’d agree. It’s not a masterpiece, but is better written and acted than most of its ilk.
Howard wrote at least three short stories that I can recall that start on a fresh battlefield, littered with thousands of corpses from both sides, and Conan (and sometimes his One Rival for this story) is the only survivor from both armies.
The plot was fine. It was a fairly classic hero’s journey, with each part leading to the next, if you assume a certain degree of mythic dream-logic. First, you have the hero’s upbringing, which establishes his character, capabilities and motivation. Then you have the hero gathering what he’ll need for his quest - a sword, a prophecy, a friend, and a woman to love. Finally, you have the quest itself, and while fairly simple, it hits all the right beats. The hero travels far, fails thanks to hubris, and almost dies. Then he rises again, fights, loses his love, rediscovers his faith, overcomes obstacles both physical and mental, triumphs, and grows as a person. As folklore goes, it’s pretty good.
As for the acting, John Milius is nothing if not a student of cinema - his homages to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky throughout the film are clear evidence of that. I think he was going for a midcentury European (Italian neorealism, Robert Bresson) approach to acting, with nonprofessional performers delivering their lines in a naturalistic, unaffected manner. I mean, he cast a bodybuilder, a surfer and a dancer in his three lead roles - he obviously didn’t want professional acting in his film. Whether it worked is a matter of opinion, but I think that the lack of even attempts at acting (except in two key roles) gave the film a verisimilitude that other “barbarian” films lacked.
No, that’s the verisimilitude of bad acting found in most such movies. Doesn’t require any special effort.
The only flaw I found in the Conan movie was that Conan was raised as a slave, which kind of spits in the face of REH’s original. Conan was enslaved/imprisoned a few times, rarely for more than a week. Just enough time for him to find the weakness in his chains/cell, take advantage of them, and brain a few slavers/jailers/soldiers on his way out.
His entire upbringing in the movie was wasted time. A 2 sentence narrative explaining he had been raised as a ‘barbarian’ warrior would be sufficient. Much of the movie is like this. I appreciate the visual sequences @Alessan mentions but a movie is not a music video and needs a real story behind it. And I repeat myself, the acting sucked. You might get away with your protagonist as a muscle-bound ventriloquist’s dummy like Sam Jones in Flash, but you’ve got to back them up with better than we got in Conan.
Despite my opinion that it is flawed, I don’t expect much better from the genre and I’m glad it was made in place of something even worse.