Diary entries forConan the Barbarian
Conan the Barbarian
Movie looks absolutely incredible on the new Arrow 4K. If we have to constantly be revisiting old properties, could we at least finally get KING CONAN?
Conan the Barbarian
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role that would propel him to new heights and masses of attention, especially after pairing his muscular strength next to a shiny sword in this fantasy tale, Conan the Barbarian is equally cheesy as it is imaginative. It's violent and fun at times—most notably in its last act where battle scenes get excessive with strength and gore. It's over-the-top in places and plain silly in others—in fact, the stretched out length of the film really hinders the pace. Things get good when Conan and his recently met pals sneak into a snake cult, where sacrifice and giant snakes come into play in a heat of excitement. Yet, Arnie doesn't do much and don't expect him to, because he just looks the part—which is good enough. Picture anyone else in the role of Conan and you have a completely different film. 3.1/5
Conan the Barbarian
My first John Milius. Finally scratching off a long-standing blind spot—a film that’s lived in my periphery for years, one I’ve always been keenly aware of. Primarily known as the vehicle that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger into superstardom, Conan the Barbarian managed to do enough within the sword-and-sorcery genre to become a defining standard for everything that followed. Milius is one of American cinema’s most ideologically distinctive voices. Openly Nietzschean, a proud gun owner, militarist, and vocally contemptuous of the liberal Hollywood mainstream—Conan feels like the most concentrated statement of his values. Based on Robert E. Howard’s pulp fantasy stories from Weird Tales in the 1930s, Conan is characterised as cunning, amoral, and intensely physical. But Milius draws as much from Frank Frazetta’s cover art for the 1960s–70s paperback reprints as from Howard’s writing itself, filtering the character through his own obsessive lens—chiefly his belief in rugged individualism. It’s worth noting that Conan arrived in 1982 at the intersection of several cultural currents. Reagan’s America was steeped in muscular conservatism after what the right perceived as the weakness of the Carter years, and Milius’s own convictions aligned with that perfectly. The sword-and-sorcery genre was also having a defining moment—D&D was a cultural phenomenon, Marvel had been adapting Conan for a broader audience, and Star Wars had defined what popular fantasy would look like. It all fed into each other, and by 1982 audiences were primed for something exactly like this. Milius understood that better than anyone. What I love most about Conan the Barbarian is Arnold’s quiet moments within a performance that is otherwise so guttural and primal. There are stretches where Conan is simply lost in thought, repressing and internalizing his emotions—because that is all he knows to do. It isn’t hard to read that as a reflection of the era’s expectations of men, or even as a kind of meta-portrait of Milius himself: the strong, silent type rendered mythic. It’s a somber story, rife with tragedy and injustice, but one that treats that pain as the very forge of identity. Dino De Laurentiis reportedly wanted a pop-inflected score closer in spirit to Flash Gordon, but Milius pushed back, convinced that kind of campy irony would gut everything he was going for. And he was right. Basil Poledouris’s score is one of the genuinely great film scores of the 1980s—arguably of any decade. It lends the film an epic, solemn gravity that critics mocked for being self-serious, but that self-seriousness is precisely why Conan the Barbarian has managed to endure for so long. A near-masterpiece. An examination of masculinity distilled to its most primal, Conan the Barbarian is a film of genuine technical achievement—grand in its production design, iconic in its score, singular in its vision. Nothing else quite like it. ᐅ Watched in 2026 — Ranked (https://boxd.it/RjcIq)
Conan the Barbarian
Certainly fits the definition of “epic” and Peter Jackson steals a lot from it, but it’s both too long and not long enough. it’s really fascinating how Conan is presented as this Aryan ubermensch, Nietzsche is willingly invoked to make you think of this, and yet he’s still saved by the woman who was previously regarded as purely a sexual object—thereby making you think “oh Milius was simply using that for aesthetic” and then Conan beheads a black man.
