Conan the Barbarian/Conan the Destroyer

We had a Disney animator at our school to talk to our students about the industry. He kept coming back to the same thing. You can be a great animator and know where to find and how to push all the right buttons, but if you can't tell a story, you're missing a big piece of the puzzle.

He pointed to Conan the Barbarian (not an animated film) as the one he comes back to often when he wants to watch a good story or just find his center. Some people giggled. A few others nodded. I was just surprised. That film? Really? I never thought about Conan the Barbarian as some sort of gold standard for fine storytelling. That one never comes up when screenwriters talk about writing.

He's not the only person who has mentioned this film as important. I had a student in one of my English classes who cited the Conan comics and the two Conan films as pivotal discoveries in his life. He felt sort of powerless as a child, and Conan was his escape. Conan stories made him want to read.

Turns out, several of my students are huge fans of this film. I did not see that coming. I remember watching this film on television when I was younger and finding myself bored. I tried when I was in college and still got bored. I could not get past the hyper-masculinity and outright Arnold-ness. This film is sloooooooow.

But I could not avoid this film. I kept hearing Conan the Barbarian cited as pivotal or important, or a real example of fine storytelling and a perfect three act structure. I'd heard enough. I decided Conan deserved another chance. I left work one night, picked up The Complete Quest on DVD, and watched both films that night.

This is decent storytelling, though the film is still pretty slow. The structure is a little out of whack and loose, which is probably the reason why this film is more than 2 hours long while the sequel, Conan the Destroyer is a much leaner and tighter 102 minutes.

Laugh all you want at Arnold, or the overall cheese factor, or the fake looking snake, but James Earl Jones owns the role of Thulsa Doom, and no other actor could portray Conan. Factor in a screenplay co-written by Oliver Stone and John Milius. This is a recipe for the manliest man movie this side of manliness and manly manhood, man.

As for the second film, the adventure is more interesting, but the plot is more forgettable. Something about a princess and a horn and some sort of Golgothan looking thing. There are all these set pieces and sequences that are memorable, but Arnold seems to be going through the motions a bit more. That's just one man's take.

Wilt Chamberlain is fun to watch lumbering around, and Olivia d'Abo is now 41 years old so I don't have to feel like a pederast if I think she's kind of awesome. (For the record, not as awesome as my wife, who is just as English and also silly enough to marry me.) The casting is a bit more interesting and there are more wizards, magic, etc., but the second film isn't the one I reach for first.

My main criticism of the Conan films is they tease you not once, but twice, that the Conan the King story will be told, but they never made that film. That doesn't mean they never tried.

I digress. I don't go for Conan the Destroyer first because I'm more apt to watch both films as a double feature, like I did this week, and wonder if the third great Conan story will ever be told. Somewhere, Crom laughs at the thought.