Review of Conan the Barbarian (1982) by Ben F — 13 Jan 2010

As this movie was coming to a close, I thought only one thing.....bookends. I know that seems weird but hear me out. This film had a great beginning....a pretty stupid middle, and a fantastic end. That's why I think of bookends. When I was in the middle of the film, I thought that this movie was just going to be bad for the rest of the film, but it actually got progressively better and better, which is something that I very much didn't expect.

In a nutshell, this film is a revenge story. You can look at it from all different directions, but that's what it basically comes down to, and I loved it. James Earl Jones and his evil army, killed Arnold Schwarzenegger's village when he was a boy, including his parents, and left him alive. Little did they know that this was a mistake that they shouldn't have made. Arnold becomes a slave, but he eventually escapes when he is an adult. He begins an adventure seeking out the ones who did him wrong, and he meets friends along the way. It's the textbook action adventure story, but I don't have a problem with it.

Now something that I really need to address with this movie is the fight scenes. They were sort of on and off at times. Sometimes, the fight scenes were shot particularly poorly, while at other times there was some particularly unique and well shot fight scenes. It was kind of hard to keep up with, it was constantly flip flopping. For instance, fight scenes that we saw towards the beginning of the movie seemed very poorly executed, like everything was moving at a slow pace, and the fighting seemed amateur. Scenes that were shot towards the end seemed professionally filmed and well executed. This seems odd, because films are never shot in order, so that sort of made me scratch my head as well, but I'm just nit picking here.

The acting in this film was atrocious. Really, that's all. There really is no way you can justify the acting in this movie. The only person who was okay in this movie was James Earl Jones, and he's always good. Everyone else was emotionless. I know Schwarzenegger is supposed to not have emotion, but come on. This was one of his early movies, so that's to be expected. But this didn't take away anything from the overall quality of the film.

One thing that I'd also like to point out, is what the hell is with some of the audio? Certain scenes in this movie have horrible audio. Maybe it was just the copy I had. Oh well.

What I loved the most about this movie was the music. It was FANTASTIC. The score made this film infinitely better. Battle music during fight scenes made me open my eyes wider, and it just made the movie more fun.

This film really surprised me. It really did just do one big 360 move, going from a good film, to a bad film, to a good film again. Really weird, but nonetheless, "Conan the Barbarian" is an awesome flick.