UK Release Date: 11-07-2011
Price: £15.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: John Milius
Country: US
Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment

This first cinematic foray into Robert E Howard’s extensive œuvre was born out of the unstopp­able rise of heroic fantasy through the 1970s and the then-recent succ­ess of Star Wars on the big screen, which had demonstrated that putting a modern sheen on mythic Campbellian narratives was a valid – and phenomenally profitable – way of resuscitating the cinema of high adventure that had long died out in Hollywood. Howard’s distant Hyborian Age – post-Atlantis, but some millennia before recorded history – was a product of the same Weird Tales milieu that had introduced readers to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and Clark Ashton Smith’s tales of Zothique (the three kept up a keen correspondence). It was just one of the ‘lost worlds’ that populated this golden age of pulp fiction, but the character created by REH to bestride this rich mash-up of history, magic and myth was unforgettable: Conan, whose picaresque progress from orphaned Cimmerian slave to Aquilonian king was loosely charted over a series of stories.

Conan enjoyed a rich afterlife beyond Howard’s wildest dreams, living on in books, and particularly comics, for decades after his creat­or’s tragic early suicide in 1936. By the late 1970s, a film was inevitable and a screenplay – by none other than Oliver Stone – was doing the rounds. It was snapped up by Dino De Laurentiis and handed to Apocalypse Now writer John Milius for a money-saving script makeover (out went the hordes of impossible pre-CGI mutants) and directorial duties. The film emerged in 1982, cementing the reputation of one brawny legend and effectively launching the screen career of another: Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose subsequent progress proved as unstoppable as had Conan’s.

What’s perhaps surprising is how good the movie is 30 years on. It certainly looks handsome on this new Blu-ray release; a resol­utely old-fashioned visual treat, classically composed, elegantly designed and effectively shot. If there are more swords than sorcery on display, then this lends the proceedings a pleasing grittiness that sits well with the film’s themes. Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast; sure, he can’t act as such – not in the sense of being able to deliver intelligible dialogue in a meaning­ful fashion – but that’s almost beside the point; rather than offering mere ‘acting’, Arnie embodies Conan. After all, was anyone else even the right shape to play a savage Hyborian Age warrior? He’s a compelling physical presence, but as well as the sheer brute heft required he brings something else to the part; as Michael Moorcock points out in one of the many (very good) extras, Arnie makes us believe in Conan’s “barbarian patience”, the slow-burning motor behind Milius’s tale of a long-awaited revenge exacted on the murderers of the young Cimmer­ian’s parents. Arnie broods beautifully, and Milius wisely holds back on complicated dialogue in favour of a solidly visual approach to story­telling and characterisation.

If it’s acting you want, then you can sit back and enjoy James Earl Jones’s splendid baddie Thulsa Doom (the memorable moniker is imported from REH’s Kull stories; the character is based on Thoth-Amon, servant of the snake god). In an appealingly fortean bit of lexi-linking, James Jones becomes a Hyborean age version of Jim Jones, exhorting his deluded, long-haired, flower-child followers to commit mass suicide in the hope of transcendence. He’s the perfect foil for Arnie’s Conan – snake oil and weasel words against muscle and steel – and their conflict an echo of the film’s greater theme: that of a knowingly Wagnerian Götterdämme­rung in which Conan is the representative of a new race of men who will stand proud (the occasional “Crom!” aside) without the help of the gods. When you open a film with a quote from Nietzsche, you’d better mean it – and what ultimately makes this Conan a winner is that Milius so clearly does.