As the narrator says:
It has been surmised that perhaps my lord was like a wild animal, that had been kept too long. Perhaps. But whatever… freedom, so long an unremembered dream, was his.
Interestingly, in the original script Conan was released by accident, as a result of an earthquake.
Feel like stuff like this is why people like the movie. They make if feel like Conan exists in a bigger world that the film just shows pieces of. What philosophy or religious idea does Conan’s master subscribe to that leads him to release his prize slave? Even the films narrator doesn’t know!
Most such movies have bad acting - usually in the form of overacting or acting that feels too contemporary. Conan had non-actors, not bad actors, in the lead roles. That’s not the same thing.
This talk of Conan being or not being a Marvel property now makes me want to see Conan and Thor team up with Captain America in the next Avengers movie.
As long as it doesn’t involve the mulitverse*.
*HA! Fat chance of that
It’s been done…sorta.
Well, they had Conan in the modern world, but not interacting with their standard superheroes.
Au contraire - the second one has him getting into a fight with (and beating!) Captain America. Who then later offers him a chance to join the Avengers, an offer Conan is musing on as the comic fades to black. So…sorta 
.
Well, except that when Conan beats someone in a fight, they aren’t around to talk with the Cimmerian afterwards…
Ah, my apologies. I have the first one, but not the second.
And this, which didn’t feature Conan directly, but did involve a wizard Conan killed resurrecting himself and attempting to turn the world into a new Hyborean age.
I’m late to this topic, but absolutely no discussion of Conan the Barbarian is complete without a read of the epic “So who is Red Hair?” essay, originally a series of Tweets, now happily reproduced in Threads where it is more easily accessible:
I’ve watched Conan The Barbarian at least 3 times, and after reading this I realized how much my eyes were just watching, but not really seeing, this movie. Well worth a read if you want to see surprising deeper layers to this seemingly shallow movie.
Dang - who woulda thought this thread would have legs longer than Sandahl Bergman?! 
No mention of Ator and his hang glider?
“I’m the luckiest boy in the world…”
Well, that was fascinating!
In the second panel of that 1984 example, was that punk rock group
“Vision and the Green Goblins” or what?
–G?
This thread inspired me to rewatch Conan for the first time since probably the early 90s. I think I liked it, but it is very odd. As said, most of it is sort of anti-acting, or null-acting. I wouldn’t say the leads are wooden, or bad actors, it’s more that they are just doing these things, and we’re along for the ride. About the only real acting is Max von Sydow as the King, and that almost seems out of place.
There are two things that kind of go together, that both make the movie better and worse for me. It has that old times movie pacing. Cinematography just seems to go on and on. Yes, there are some rocks, and there are horses riding through the rocks, oh, now the horses are riding through some snow. I get that was the style, and it sets atmosphere, or whatever, but often times I just want the movie to get on with it. Not just Conan, but other movies in that style, too.
Wrapped up with that, is I think the positive thing of just showing stuff. It doesn’t have to be talked out (see the null-acting), hammered home with overwhelming music, or (thankfully) explained in flash backs of something I just saw an hour ago.
If I don’t remember that the beheading sword at the end is the one his father made, then that’s my problem. Conan gives some good visuals on it, so I can see it clearly, but I feel like a modern movie would have had a whole flashback scene of Conan’s father making the sword, probably showing again some sappy scene where Conan shows how much he loved his father. Here, they don’t need to show that. We know Conan loved his father, because in general that is what kids do, and then he spends the whole moving avenging his death.
Same with the red haired man. If we don’t notice that’s probably the same person as the kid who closes Conan’s manacles, then we just lose out.
That was an interesting take, but I always thought that Conan was left alone on the wheel, because he had grown so strong he could push it himself. There were no other slaves, because none were needed. [The thread @rejemy linked claims the works associated with the wheel had fallen on hard times, so Conan was the only one left working there.]
Overall, not really amazing, but certainly of it’s time, and I think a classic, in the sense that something can be a classic without being stellar. I’m sure if I’d been told over and over that it was amazing, and I needed to see it, I would have been very disappointed. Watching it with some nostalgia mixed in certainly helps smooth over the rough spots.
Yeah, sorry about that.
When I was looking it up on IMDB, ads for the latest Dungeons and Dragons movie kept popping up and distracting me.
(Oh…and my first mistake had me flustered. I kept typing Battle of the Network Stars and just knew that wasn’t set in space but, for a while, I couldn’t remember the correct title of that one.)
??? I thought the other slaves died off over time, giving the audience a time-lapse justification for how Conan grew to become such a massively musclebound monster over the years. Then again, it seemed like the people in charge of the mill-wheel and the enslavement were basically raiders/slavers so you’d think sooner or later they would have launched another spring or autumn raid, captured more slaves and replaced the dead slaves with a fresh batch on the wheel, kill off a few more through abuse and undernourishment, replace them from additional raids, repeat ad nauseum…
But then we’d just end up with Conan the run-of-the-mill-slave.
–G!
The very first thing to appear onscreen in the movie is the Nietzsche quote, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” It’s not what you’d call a subtle film.
I figure that they would normally be regularly replenishing their mill-slaves with fresh raids, but once they got Conan in there, they realized they didn’t need to. The other slaves die off like they always do, but Conan keeps picking up the slack, so they don’t bother replacing them anymore, until eventually it’s just Conan left. At which point, they realize they can make a lot more money out of this guy than having him grinding millet, and send him off to the gladiator pits.
You get out of here until you’re ready to apologize.
