It’s a movie about a man avenging his family, and you want to cut his family’s death?
I really don’t understand the problem people have with the plot. The plot was fine. A bit linear, true, but that fits the genre.
Really, seems to me, outside of the Hulk TV show, Conan the Barbarian was perhaps the very first viable Marvel wide-released movie. There had been various attempts like the Spiderman TV show from the late 70’s, which looked ridiculous, and the Superman (DC) movies, but were no Marvel character movies.
That’s what makes it important historically, but, yeah, it sucks. It sucked back then to me. I was extremely disappointed. But, it was a step in the right direction I guess.
Although Marvel had been running Conan the Barbarian as a comic and Savage Tales/Savage Sword of Conan since 1970, I wouldn’t call Conan a “Marvel Character”. He long preceded the Marvel brand, and his 1960s popularity preceded the comics (inspired the interest, in fact) – Conan had been published by Gnome press in the 1950s and the by Lancer in the 1960s.
Calling him a “Marvel Property” is as absurd as calling Star Wars a Marvel property becausde they published a Star Wars comic book – the comic is definitely a subsidiary and follow-on to the original phenomenon.
I’ve only seen the movie once, probably about 15 years ago so I don’t have a clear memory of it but my impression, at the time, was that it was like a documentary about ancient man. And, in those ancient times, if you were a large and strong man then you could basically go around and steal, rape, and destroy as fitted your fancy. Basically, it was Game of Thrones without the story.
If there’s something more to be derived from the film, I didn’t catch it.
If it was actual history, I suppose that it might be educational to see how humanity has progressed. Since it (and GoT) is fictional, I feel like that removes the one thing that the film could offer. It’s like watching a documentary about the Smurfs and expecting people to take a moral message from it, that’s authoritative in some way. Well…it can’t be, because the Smurfs aren’t real. It’s just some writer trying to push his view on us as though it’s historical reality.
Not too big a surprise to see that it’s the writing of Oliver Stone. He currently seems to be busy producing English-language propaganda for the Russian government.
Oh, my mistake. I could have sworn there was a Marvel series titled “Conan the Barbarian” being published when the movie was released. That must have been one of those false memories.
There absolutely was, but it still doesn’t make Conan a “Marvel film.” Marvel got a license from Howard estate to turn his stories into a comic book. John Milieus got a license from the Howard estate to turn his stories into a movie. It’s two different creatives adapting from the same source. There’s no evidence that the comics played any role in the creation of the movie, beyond possibly making it easier to get funding, since they served as evidence that the character was still viable.
It’s an origin story. You need to have the orphaning, the spider bite, and learning how to use your superpower. Without the upbringing sequence, why would he care about Thulsa Doom and the snake cult? Why would he be an expert fighter?
I think it’s nicely told with visuals and the occasional narration.
Conan already had an origin story. He was the son of a blacksmith (they got that right) and as a teen joined in the siege at Venarium (where the “civilized” nations impinged on Cimmerian land), where he “earned his spurs”, and after that set out to see the world. He was a born and bred clean-living “barbarian” who knew the ways of his countrymen.
As Miller stated, your memory isn’t false. The comic that started in 1970 continued without a break into the 1990s, so it was still going when the movie came out.
There was a movie tie-in from Marvel
…but it wasn’t part of the comic book continuity – it varied too much from the styory they were telling. There was a novelization, too, by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, but it differed quite a bit from the background they’d set up. Milius’ image of Conan and his background wasn’t really shared by anyone else.
I guess it’s all “Disney” now.
Marvel did a Star Trek comic for a while
They also did two comic book adaptations of Ray Harryhausen “Sinbad” movies.
None of those are “Disney” now.
Howard died in 1936, so I’m pretty sure Conan is public domain now.
I think what often doesn’t work for me with other “barbarian” films is that the “better acting” and “higher production values” often make the films seem overly polished and almost anachronistic. Like the characters are too articulate with modern sensibilities or the sets look like something that could never have been created with “hyborian age” tech.
It’s kind of why Jason Momoa didn’t work for me in the Conan remake (which I got bored and turned off) but worked very well as Kahl Drago in GoT.
A lot of the vocals reminded me of poorly dubbed movies. Just another thing standing between me and enjoying this film.
Glad you all enjoy it. Just not my cup of tea. Now I’m trying to think of a crappy movie that I like disproportionately and review often…
Perhaps it might help to note that…
- It’s a classic fairy-tale (rather than folklore) framework.
- Hollywood created Excalibur following the success of [/u]Star Wars[/u], realizing the popularity of a fairy-tale in space suggested audiences were willing to pay for fantasy/fairy-tale stories on screen%. When Excalibur earned academy awards, the doors were flung open for more and Hollywood announced there were at least 5 more D&D-themed offerings on the way. Those turned out to be The Archer: Fugitive from the Empire, Krull, Sword and the Sorcerer, Legend (with Tom Cruise!), and Dungeons and Dragons (with Tom Hanks!).
Many others followed (because that’s the way fads generate knock-offs) until Schwartzenegger’s Conan was actually seen as a [relatively] serious effort. That, in turn, spawned another series of D&D-themed efforts like Lady-Hawk, Flesh + Blood (both with Rutger Hauer), The Warrior and the Sorceress, Dungeon Master (with Richard Moll) and others.
Red Sonja was criticized upon announcement as ‘Conan with a woman instead’ even though it was drawn out of the comics series as well. It was rumored to have been a planned contingent if the first two Conan movies did well enough (which, apparently, they did), and Schwartzenegger was under some kind of contractual agreement to play a cameo role to support its story line. IMDB says he did it as a favor to DeLaurentis and when his 1-week cameo turned into a 4-week co-starring role, he severed his ties to DeLaurentis. By the time Red Sonja came out I was burned out on bad D&D movies, so I didn’t bother to watch it even when it was showing at the theater I was working for and I could have gotten a seat for free.
She certainly was sexy and the costumers emphasized her charms.
Fourteen wouldn’t have been a problem within that world’s context, but age-of-consent was a hot topic around the time of that filming (because actor Rob Lowe got in trouble at some political convention around that time) and too many of the Moral Majority types (who were rampant at the time) wouldn’t have been able to refrain from imposing modern-day Earth American sensibilities on fictional characters in the Hyborian age.
I was going to mention this movie, too, but in the context of the Conan sequel:
It seemed to me that the protagonists of each film would have been doing their respective princesses a favor, because a critical part of their suitability for sacrifice was the fact that they were virgins.
When the fade-to-black happened while the princess was kissing the wizard’s apprentice in DragonSlayer, I leaned over to my friend and chuckled, “There ya go! She no longer qualifies to be sacrificed.”
–G!
% Meanwhile, Hollywood also followed the space-adventure themes from Star Wars with Battle Beyond the Stars (with John-Boy Walton!), The Last Starfighter (with Robert Preston, not reprising the Music Man role), and Mel Brooks’ Space Balls.
Hanks’ film was Mazes and Monsters.
Not to mention George Peppard. Basically ‘The Magnificent Seven’ in space (which is basically Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ in the West.
@Dinsdale - I watched a bit of Conan the other day and you’re right. A lot of the dialogue (when there actually is any) does have a bit of that dubbed "Spaghetti Western’ feel. But I don’t know that it makes it a ‘bad’ film any more than ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ is considered a ‘bad’ film.
The first 20 minutes or so of Conan is actually pretty tight storytelling-wise. We experience how close young Conan and his family is by witnessing them crafting swords in their blacksmith shop together and his father sitting down with Conan and explaining Crom and the Riddle of Steel. We understand Conan’s “tale of woe” by seeing his father ripped apart by dogs and his mother murdered by Thulsa Doom while Conan is sent off to push the Wheel o’ Pain for years. And we get to see how Conan transforms into a killing machine.
Other parts of the film are a bit hit or miss. For example, his master releases him for…reasons. But overall I enjoy Conan.
Not to mention Robert Vaughn, playing the same role that he played in The Magnificent Seven
My impression was that Conan’s master realized there would come a point where he could no longer control him. We see Conan being trained not just in the ways of combat but in philosophy and literature which isn’t something you’d normally train a simple gladiator in. I like to think his master was thinking, “I’ve had a good run with this guy, but at some point the good times are going to end and he’s going to be pissed at me. I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead.”
I read that scene much more sentimentally than that. The guy who bought him is, by almost any metric, a terrible human being, but as he trains Conan, he starts to develop genuine affection for the barbarian. He comes to recognize that Conan has the potential for greatness, but that he’ll never realize that greatness as a slave to other men. This eats at the small conscience he has, until one night he gets drunk and throws him out into the wilderness, in a scene that is highly reminiscent of the end of Harry and the Hendersons and a dozen other movies where someone befriends a wild animal, then has to release it for its own good, because it can’t thrive in captivity.