Review of Conan the Barbarian (1982) by Nikola B — 09 Nov 2010

Absolute masterpiece, from every point I look at it.

First thing I am going to say about this work, is that it IS NOT a movie at all. It is a scenic orchestral opus perfectly blended by a pure genius of composing, Basil Poledouris and great director John Milius. While Basil`s portion of the work came to be a fantastic homage and blend of Maurice Ravel, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Richard Wagner, Carl Orff, Sergei Prokofiev, Gustav Holst and Miklos Rozsa, surpassing them all with this work (in my, I am sure, minority opinion, yet I am a great admirer of all of them), Milius and Oliver Stone effectively portrayed much of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in mere 129 minutes of this spectacle. Conan is used as a model of "Ãbermensch", a man driven solely by his "will to power", who laughs to the cults who trap the souls of their belivers, portraying him as the only truly free character in the movie. Here, you will not find long philosophical debates, only Laconian sentences that hit the point with few but adequate words, in a timely fashion almost always followed by the highlights of Poledouris score. To those "critics" who complain about acting of Schwarzenegger and Bergman, one thing must be cleared. Their lines in the film are brought down to the minimum. Schwarzenegger is called to look like an "Ãbermensch" should, and he did that part great, to be honest. Bergman is a dancer, and her part in the kitchen/the orgy made the film look like a "ballet of gore" during that scene. Actors should give life to their characters, as Max Von Sidow and James Earl Jones do with ease, both of them being masters of their profession, but with the Conan character, it is not the case. It goes even better. How? Well, there comes Poledouris again. His extensive use of "leitmotifs" for Conan, just as Wagner used them for Siegfried character, or Morricone for Leone`s characters, brought life into Conan in a manner better than any actor could with mere monologue or two. You dont need to hear about his pain, you hear his pain. You dont need to hear about the way he feels when he finally reaches freedom, you HEAR how he feels. Same with a highly symbolic scene in a tomb of an ancient king, or in the beginning, when he was listening to (again very symbolic) speech about cosmogony and "the secret of the steel" from his father. This is not a story about revenge, it is about the eternal struggle between corrupt civilisation and primordial sense of freedom in human. It is powerful and emotional description of the twilight of the gods, critical review of egomaniac guru-leaders prominent in the time when the film was made, and their indoctrinated followers widespread in the hippie subculture.

The storyline itself later became a bottomless well of inspiration for various plagiarists in the genre, who made enormous wave of trash cliche movies, simply because storyline isnt the essence. Whistling around "The magic flute" doesnt make you Mozart.