He also strangles a chicken (well, not strangle, really) pucnhes a camel, punches a horse, clobbers the same camel again, and for a second there it looked like he was going to do something to the elephant too. Conan HATES animals.

— MegamanIXI, on the IMDb boards.

In Conan the Barbarian, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s world-famous Sword&Sorcery short stories, we get to witness how the young Conan is first abducted and sold as a slave after his whole village has been slaughtered by the men of Thulsa Dhoom. After a ridiculous montage where Conan is able to build the muscles of a professional bodybuilder by doing work that reduces normal men to skinny corpses, we are served with another montage where Conan makes a name for himself as a gladiator. In fact, he is such a great gladiator in his little outback pit, that his owner sends him all the way to foreign countries to learn weapons use from the traditional masters. However, before they are able to return to their thrity-seats Colosseum and the slaver gets the chance to profit from his rather extravagant investment, said slaver has a change of heart and sets Conan free. From here on, after a short career as a thief, it does not take long before Conan is hellbent on avenging his tribe.


Conan the Barbarian is a mediocre movie. Granted, it does not try to force the restrictions of a children’s movie on an adult premise, something most other Sword&Sorcery movies is guilty of (Conan the Destroyer is supposedly one such film (I’ll hopefully find out for myself later tonight), as is The Sword and the Sorcerer). It is fiercely explicit both in violence and sex (at least as far as their budget can allow), and it is gritty and dirty as hell. Furthermore, the moviemakers quite obviously know just what they are working with here; Arnold Schwarzenegger hardly has any lines at all, and excepting one scene he rarely says more than a sentence at a time. In addition to this, the comments on the IMDb boards that I’ve read seem to indicate that the movie is fairly true to the source material. True, Conan grew up as a free Cimmerian, not as a slave, and this Thulsa Dhoom might be more similar to Thoth Amon, but most of the posters over there claimed that the movie was mostly true both to Howard’s world and to his philosophy. (As the horridly trite Nietzsche quote they used to open the movie bears witness of.)

In spite of these rather positive elements and a narrative structure with a lot of breadth, the movie isn’t all that much. The costumes and the props might not be among the worst ever, but they’re pretty far from making the top five list. Screamingly obviously fake facial hair makes the movie stray into the parodical at times; warriors swing warhammers the size of my thigh; huts in a wintery Cimmeria have roofs about as solid as newspaper. The actors are decent, but no more. James earl Jones does a good job as Thulsa Dhoom, but he overplays his part a bit and doesn’t really have all that much to work with. Max von Sydow might do the best job of the lot, but he has something like five minutes of screentime, and he’s only sitting still, complaining that Thulsa Dhoom has stolen his daughter. The rest of the cast attracts little but humungous yawns of disinterest. The musical score is rather decent, I might even label it as “quite good”, but it is consistently malplaced, with brash, loud music in scenes where Conan et al. are trying to be sneaky, and brash, triumphal music when Conan et al. are struggling for their lives. Finally, the movie’s climaxic (climatic?) action scene, the Battle of the Stones, features such a laughable deus ex machhina I hardly believed my own eyes.

Add to all this that not much time has been spent on fight choreography, leaving me with the impression of most fights as awkward things, where the actors are more concerned with looking at their opponents’ swords than at their faces and body language, and you get a movie that most of all screams for care. It longs for someone who loves it, who isn’t just involved in it for the money, to take hand of it and turn it into something which fulfills its promise.

We must conclude that while Conan the Barbarian isn’t exactly a bad movie, neither is it a good one, and as it is closer to the latter than to the former, it well deserves the rating 4.0/10.