The biggest release this week, for this movie fan anyway, is the Blu-ray of John Milius’s masterful fantasy epic, Conan the Barbarian. No doubt this is being put out to lead up to Marcus Nispel’s upcoming interpretation of the character, which I’m actually looking forward to, albeit with some skepticism. This movie kick-started the sword & sorcery craze of the eighties, but even more to its credit, it made the great Arnold Schwarzenegger a star.

Milius, who rewrote an earlier draft of the script by Oliver Stone, is a filmmaker who loves big, manly stories, and Conan the Barbarian is his best film. Arnold’s portrayal of Conan isn’t really the sleek, panther-like killer of Robert E. Howard’s brilliant short stories, however he perfectly embodies the imaged realized by the legendary illustrator Frank Frazetta. Milius’s direction gives the film a visual weight rarely achieved in fantasy cinema. Arnold only speaks when he needs to (“Conan! What is best in life?!”), and it makes his presence all the more intense, driven, and mysterious.
James Earl Jones plays Thulsa Doom, the evil sorcerer whom Conan has sworn to kill for murdering his family, and Jones brings the same sinister presence he brought when he performed the voice of Darth Vader (fun fact: Thulsa Doom never appeared in Howard’s Conan stories, but was actually a villain in Howard’s short stories about his Conan prototype, Kull the Conqueror). Add a supporting cast featuring names like the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman, the legendary Max Von Sydow, and the great Mako (who also narrates), and you have a perfect film when it comes to providing instant gravitas in its characters. If you listen to the commentary track, Milius talks about the trilogy of Conan films he had planned out, it’s a shame all of his ideas were never realized in future films.
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