After reading Thomas Bulfinch’s The Outline of Mythology, Howard decided to rewrite a rejected Kull of Atlantis story, “By This Axe I Rule,” for his newest creation. This story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” envisioned Conan as a middle-aged king, which effectively makes the other stories prequels to this one. (It also renders the chronologies of his stories as incoherent to the point that there are numerous ‘probable’ chronological theories about where they all function and lead to this end point.) It is in “The Phoenix on the Sword” that Howard's obsessions with historical dramas and low fantasy created an artificial legendary. He would eventually expand the Conan mythology into various avenues and spin-offs, including Red Sonja.
Howard’s Conan is a staple of popular culture at this point. He has appeared in comics virtually continuously since the 1970s, games (including RPG, video, tabletop), television shows, and a handful of films. Roughly fifty years separated Conan’s first print and on-screen appearances.
John Milius’ 1982 opening salvo, appropriately named Conan the Barbarian, remains the highwater mark for this loosely connected cinematic world. Not only does Milius present a clearly thought-out milieu, but one that was clearly intended towards reaching an endgame with the closing teaser of an elderly Conan, grey-bearded with axe upon a throne. We sadly never got there, but at least this first stab (no pun intended) endures.
The film’s plot structure, based on a screenplay co-authored by Milius and Oliver Stone (!?) leans heavily not only into Howard’s world, but in Joseph Campbell’s academic works and mythological building blocks. Therefore, it still largely works so well because it was built on evergreen foundations. All the heroes and villains, despite or because of how loosely defined they are largely complete their journeys and functions within the wider narrative. They serve their purposes and maybe are inhabited by prestige actors clearly having a good time.
Or maybe they are inhabited by a former bodybuilder turned movie star whose thespian bona fides are questionable, but whose charisma in front of the camera is not. Sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger is largely kept mute for a good stretch of the opening as he was not yet the quip-machine he would become, but his imposing physique seemingly takes up the entire frame. He lets his imposing mass do the talking for him in these early stretches, and that was a smart choice.
While the literary Conan was better educated and more talkative, Schwarzenegger’s Conan leans into a kind of quiet mythic hero archetype. He seeks revenge for the destruction of his childhood that led to his time spent in slavery and eventual gladiatorial combat. His spirit is seeking as much succor given the notable passages where he calls out/prays to Crom. As if these clues were not big enough tells, the film includes a passage where Conan is crucified to a tree (shades of Norse mythology there), resurrected, and his great love’s life exchanged for his to complete the overarching mission.
That mission mainly involves taking down Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones, letting that bass voice seduce and menace in equal measure) and his snake worshipping cult. Doom ties into Conan’s childhood backstory here and remains the heavy throughout as his cult-like religion gobbles up resources and scares the locals. One such concerned figure is King Osric (Max Von Sydow, going perhaps too big) who requests that Conan and company free his daughter from the cult.
Jones and Von Sydow bring prestige to the film, along with the likes of Mako as an eccentric wizard living in a wasteland who also functions as the chronicler of Conan’s adventures. If their presence was not enough to lend credence to the film, then the entire thing borrows liberally from classical works, with Conan’s killing of a gigantic snake recalling a similar scene in Die Nibelungen. All of it is wrapped up in a visual language that recalls the works of Frank Frazetta whose paintings of a hulking, ultraviolent Conan did more to push his image into the popular lexicon than just about anything else up to this point. It was a wise choice to recall and reference these various points.
A similar dip into the operatic, if not ancient heroic works occurs in Conan’s weaponry fetish. In the beginning, his father tells him to trust only in the power of steel and the earthbound god Crom, and so he spends the rest of the movie leaning into these things. Much like Sir Gawain is obsessive about his armory and weapons, Conan the Barbarian pays special attention to a steel master’s sword forged in the beginning scenes that eventually reappears. Conan breaks it in a bout of pseudo-Oedipal fury moving away from easy symbols to the Nietzschean ideal of a hero. It is not the Riddle of Steel that makes the man/hero, but the hero/man that makes the steel powerful.
If all of this sounds a bit too heady for an action-adventure fantasy film, then I think that says more about the current crop of fantasy epics than this one. Even with the occasional lulls/dead patches, or outright dumb devices like Doom being able to use snakes as poisonous arrows, Conan the Barbarian holds up surprisingly well for a film that just celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Milius’ conception of the world was fascinating, nearly nihilistic, and, at least, consistent and developed. The same thing cannot be said of the rest of the films I am going to discuss.
The problem with 1984’s Conan the Destroyer is one of producer interference not understanding what made the first go-round so appealing. If your main character’s adopted surname is “the Barbarian,” it should go in tandem that their story is one of violence, sex, and near mute Nietzschean Übermensch. Destroyer decided that what kept the first film from being an even bigger success was too much violence and a distinct point-of-view.
Or to be more precise, Dino De Laurentiis decided the franchise needed to trend towards more family-friendly territory to achieve huge success. Dino De Laurentiis is a fascinating figure, at once responsible for taking Italian’s Neo-Realist cinema to the world, and for diluting numerous franchises with questionable sequels and/or remakes (King Kong, Hannibal Rising, King Kong Lives). His guiding hand transformed the franchise in quick succession from one with a distinct perspective and tone to Red Sonja.
Conan the Destroyer is the middle ground between these two extremes. Original writer/director John Milius was unavailable, so he was replaced with Richard Fleischer. Milius achieved fame writing the likes of Dirty Harry, Apocalypse Now, and eventually co-creating the HBO series Rome. He seemed like a respectable match for the world created by Howard. Fleischer, in contrast, is best remembered for a wide variety of projects that he made like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Doctor Dolittle, and Soylent Green. He was much better in smaller-scale noir-ish works like Compulsion or The Narrow Margin than the giant blockbusters.
This change in tone, from distinct artistic POV to generic journeyman, is immediately evident as the overall film feels at odds with itself. At once, a self-serious swords and sorcery tome and one of the films that made Arnold into a quip machine. Destroyer winds up being passable weekend afternoon fare. But one also cannot shake that there is something better struggling to get out. Something with more personality.
Whereas the first film assumed the audience was smart enough to understand the savagery at the heart of the material, this sequel makes every excuse to turn the assembled good guys into clearly delineated heroes. We cannot have taciturn and roguish leads. Nope, they must reveal themselves as inherently good with hearts of gold and unyielding loyalty to the cause. The cause, in this case, is ensuring that Olivia d’Abo’s bratty princess retains her virginity and an imperious queen (Sarah Douglas, radiating all the erotic allure of a Ren Faire dominatrix) be toppled.
It is humorous, perhaps unintentionally so, how horny d’Abo gets for the monosyllabic brute and how repeatedly he rebuffs her advances. Their anti-chemistry is almost a relief. Leaves much more room for Mako to pull faces, Grace Jones to just swan through the whole thing with her androgynous menace, and Tracey Walter to steal nearly everything that isn’t bolted down. The whole thing waters down not only Howard’s original creation, but Milius’ groundwork for the franchise. We have jettisoned Conan and replaced him with a winking pile of muscles in a James Bond-like story that substitutes magic and princesses for Q’s gizmos and sexy secret agents.
This dumbing down would only get worse with the next two films. The promise of the dark fantasy of the first film feels like a mirage even just two years later. This is an era that brought us the likes of Excalibur, The Road Warrior, and Gremlins, so for it to turn around offer up this compromised vision is a strange afront. The Reagan years were in full swing, I suppose, and all the pablum that went with it.
1985’s Red Sonja is a bit murky when it comes to the cinematic universe of Howard’s world. While credited in the opening titles, Red Sonja is actually a Marvel Comics creation in the way that we commonly think of her. Her appearance, backstory, and general demeanor here owe more to Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith than they due to Howard. Marvel’s Red Sonja was an amalgam of two creations: Red Sonya of Rogatino and Valeria, who previously appeared in the franchise (and whose actress we will discuss again shortly).
Regardless of the primary source of the adaptation, the final movie is a mess through and through. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character is clearly supposed to be Conan in a glorified cameo, extended through camera trickery and just sticking him in the frame to beef up his screentime to that of a supporting player, but rights issues caused him to go by “Kalidor.” Brigitte Nielsen is beautiful to be sure, and properly Amazonian in stature and carriage, but seemingly incapable of projecting any thought, resolve, or much of anything through the camera. But the camera does love to look at her.
Then there is the strange problem of tone. And, oh boy, does Red Sonja have a tone problem. Is this a serious and epic swords and sorcery film set in Howard’s Hyborian Age, or a family-friendly high-fantasy romp that finds the strange middle ground between cutesy kid sidekicks and violent beheadings? It is the latter, except it never truly finds that middle ground. (Can any film find that sweet spot? Probably not.) It oscillates violently between the barbarianism and pulp of the source material and trying to be a kiddie matinee at the same time.
I am not sure how to properly describe what is left? It does not engage as much as it should, but you also cannot look away as one baffling decision after another pop up. Did director Richard Fleischer really think these awkwardly choreographed and shot sword fighting scenes committed to their world-building and projected anything other than actors discomfortingly flaying their swords about? We never get a feel for the threats or the (anti)heroes in this world because it all feels so slapdash, like a preordained parody of the film itself. Except it is not smart enough to even flirt with meta-humor or commentary.
Scenes that should feel epic in scope or scenery appear limited or cheap. There is a gigantic skeleton that functions as a bridge in front of a volcano for the heroes to cross, and it should inspire awe. And I sat there watching it wondering what Ridley Scott could have made of this material. Granted, there is only so much gorgeous visuals can paper over a bad script but compare the miracles Scott conjured with just soundstages in Legend to the location shooting of this and behold the power of a good director with an eye for detail and imagery. (For the record, none of this is a slight against Legend, one of my favorite films. I’m merely using another mid-80s fantasy vehicle for comparisons sake of what was possible to achieve.)
It is a groaner, for sure. And a product of its hypermasculine era and genre. The main villain, Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman returning to the franchise), is notably evil because she is a lesbian, I guess. At one point Sonja scarred her face after rejecting her sexual advances, so she had Sonja’s entire family murdered, their home burned, and let her soldiers rape her. There is not a big enough “oof” for me to properly express the grimace I had as this prologue unfolded. Sure, I remember bits and pieces of 80s and 90s popular entertainment being aggressively homophobic and mundanely misogynistic, but this is a whole other level of both playing into the worst stereotypes and tropes imaginable.
And at 89 minutes it still manages to feel interminable. A wooden, ugly vehicle that was rightly a box office bomb and barely remembered except by camp aficionados. Do you think I am being mean or petty? Well, just remember what Maria Shriver has admitted to telling Ah-nuld after watching this: “if this doesn’t kill your career, nothing will.” Or look at what the man himself has said about, “it’s the worst film I have ever made.” And this is the guy who starred in the likes of Junior, Jingle All the Way, and Batman and Robin! He knows from bad movies in his filmography.
What remains fascinating is that Red Sonja as a property has been stuck in development hell since, at least, 2008. First Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan were going to make it, and posters/concept art of her in the full chainmail bikini costume, flaming red hair, and bloody sword exist. That never happened for a variety reasons, including their eventual breakup and McGowan injuring her elbow. Then came Bryan Singer until the credible allegations of sexual misconduct forced him off the production. Then came Joey Soloway as director, Tasha Huo as writer, and Hannah John-Kamen as star. But as of March 2022, it seems like they have all vacated the project. Now M. J. Bassett is in talks to direct, so we’ll see if that ever materializes.
Who knows. The failure of this film plus Schwarzenegger’s decision to terminate his contract with Dino De Laurentiis left this potentially fertile property in limbo until 1997. So there does seem to be something vaguely haunted about getting Howard’s creations to the big screen.
It is hard to imagine a worse entry in this loosely connected franchise than Kull the Conqueror. A truly inept and embarrassingly pedestrian supposed blockbuster, Kull the Conqueror was intended as a glorious return for Schwarzenegger to the franchise, but he refused to come back. Yes, this was originally supposed to be that elusive King Conan film. More on that later.
Attention turned elsewhere and lo and behold, Kevin Sorbo. Hot at the time thanks to Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Sorbo stepped into the project but refused to reprise a role originated by someone else, so instead of Conan the Barbarian, we got a rebranding, Kull the Conqueror, another Howard creation.
It is mildly hilarious to me that Sorbo thought he was such a hot commodity that he was above stepping into a famous role when he has all the screen presence of a wet paper towel (with bangs). His oiled, furry torso does most of the heavy lifting in numerous scenes, and he proves awkward when asked to engage in an action scene that is not pitched at the cartoonish level of his popular series. It is abundantly clear that this was originally written and intended as an R-rated epic that was chipped away at repeatedly by various power players until it became its final, pitiable state.
Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue has openly expressed his pronounced disappointment with the final film, blaming Sorbo and the studio for continually sanding down the spikes and thorns in his script until it became a rubbery cartoon. He has stated “that [it was] diminished in the long process that it took to get [it] to the screen,” and it lost its “poetry, panache, and power” along the way. I would agree with them as in fits and starts you can almost see what was originally intended before it ended up like… this.
Would it kill these studios to try to craft an adult-orientated dark-fantasy that did not devolve into family-friendly slapstick? Just because it involves a resurrected sorceress trying to usurp the kingdom does not mean it has to be juvenile. Lean into the dark, mythological aspects of the material and make something unique and interesting. Must a live-action Saturday morning cartoon be the result?
Tia Carrere and Harvey Fierstein seem to know, or at least spin their performances toward, the kind of campy junk fantasy they are stuck making. The rest of the cast treats the material with a solemness and seriousness that renders their work as leaden, too self-conscious, or disengaged at any given moment. I suppose a lot of this should not be blamed entirely at the actors’ feet, they are doing the best with what they were given, but rather a director, John Nicolella, who came from TV movies and never adapted his style to the big screen. The whole thing plays like an episode of well, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys after ingesting massive quantities of HGH but just getting bloated instead of bulky.
Sure, Red Sonja was bad, but it was at least memorably, laughably bad. Nearly entertaining in its awfulness, to be sure. Kull the Conqueror feels like a TBS/TNT made-for-TV movie from the late-90s that somehow wound up getting a big screen release. One gets the sense that this could easily have been a direct-to-cable/video backdoor pilot for another cable/syndicated fantasy/adventure show from the era like Beastmaster, The Lost World, or The Adventures of Sinbad.
Well, another box office bomb, and another long gestational period between forays to the Hyborian Age. The ever teased third Schwarzenegger Conan film, King Conan: Crown of Iron, came closest to fruition just before his 2003 election to California’s governorship. That project is now permanently stalled thanks to rights issue, the eternal plague of potentially fruitful and/or intriguing films. Warner Brothers spent years trying to get the franchise back off the ground.
To try to briefly summarize the revolving door that was relaunching the Conan franchise: we almost got Robert Rodriguez’s version before he left to make Grindhouse in 2007. Other attempts were made with the Wachowskis (which seems like an ill-match between creators and material on paper), Boaz Yakin of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time fame, and Brett Ratner, who also almost got Superman off the ground with Matt Bomer in the role during the mid-2000s as well. I am unsure if we should be grateful that these versions never materialized. Having seen the one that did, could any of them have been worse than what we got?
Instead, we got a different music video turned film director, Marcus Nispel. After directing the remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, the gig was his for the taking. I am not sure why, to be honest. Even looking at his oeuvre as a music video director I don’t see a lot of eye-catching and memorable ones. But 2011’s Conan the Barbarian was yet another remake/franchise restart done under his direction.
If the two previously mentioned heavily stylized but immediately forgettable remakes were not a big enough red flag, then the general sense of indifference that pervades this Conan should be one. It is not just the bad dialogue, the ludicrously expensive production somehow ending up looking cheap, or the overly hormonal male gaze that does it in, but the sense that the previous entries have been stripped for parts. The parts that were discarded are the ones that aimed for broader and higher reference points. Nispel’s Conan just wanted the boobies and gore.
And to that point, the film does deliver. Somehow a worse offender than its contemporaneous Clash of the Titans remake, this version also jettisons the mythological aspects and visual language that recalled opera, heroic literature, and genre painting for frantic editing, rubbery CGI, and the blandest dialog and characters imaginable. Who knew a pseudo-incestuous pair of wizards could be so unbelievably boring?
There is a certain amount of chutzpah in the beginning as Morgan Freeman narrates what amounts to a Lord of the Rings-style lore dump over a montage of a map, lands, people, then we cut to a CGI fetus getting carved out of its dying mother on a battlefield. If you thought this was a tease of the grindhouse sleave and quirk to come, well, you’d wind up being wrong. The whole affair quickly flatlines as Conan’s personality dissolves to glaring and stabbing while hulking around, even as a teenager.
His childhood trauma once more empowers his quest in this film, but he lacks the early 80s versions belief system and sense of purpose. Jason Momoa’s version exists merely to bare his large chest, glare into the camera, occasionally flash his ass, and spend an inordinate amount of time slicing, dicing, and chopping his CGI enemies in ways that recall that brief period of 3D obsession that no one really liked but the studios forcing upon you. He is much better utilized in things like Game of Thrones and Aquaman than he is here.
There is little pulp in this journey through the Hyborian Age. Instead, the entire thing feels like the masturbatory fantasies of the juvenile male raised on porn and violent media. Who needs fully developed characters or satisfying stakes when you can just careen from one overly long action sequence to another with the random pitstop to ogle nude and seminude females? Jesus, even the 80s action films of this ilk bothered with giving their films the faintest hint of a personality.
Call me crazy all you want, but the stop-motion machinations of Ray Harryhausen had more life, personality, and vitality than these soulless, dire CGI monstrosities. The likes of The Lord of the Rings proved you could imbue a CGI creation with that level of artistry and care, but who needs it when you’re merely plundering the Gen X pop psyche for bits and pieces of nostalgia to form a refurbished product. Then again, where else can you watch Rose McGowan engage in Marilyn Manson cosplay while trying to bang her wizard dad? That must amount for some amount of entertainment value, right?
So, aside from John Milius’ first try, why is it so hard for Hollywood to satisfactorily produce a film involving the works of Robert E. Howard? I think that much of it is a misunderstanding of what made the material work in the first place. Just sticking any anonymous director into the chair and letting them make a generic hyperviolent swords and sorcery film is not the answer. There is an ethos and a mythos to Howard’s world that needs a guiding hand.
Comic books, mainly the Marvel ones published between 1970 through 1993, have better dealt with Howard’s world. The media itself is kin with pulp fiction, so transposing Conan from the likes of Weird Tales to one of the big two comic publishers is a lateral move. Sure, there is a change in how those stories are written, but less so in the scope and subject matter.
Look at Red Sonja, a character that debuted in #23 of Conan the Barbarian. Yes, there are elements that can be found in Howard’s vast catalogue, but how she is popularly conceived and known is based purely out of the comic canon. Her books are still ongoing, granted under Dynamite Comics instead of Marvel due to the Howard estate selling the rights. Frankly, I think a combination of the original Howard stories and the vast catalogue of comics is where to go for the inevitable next swing.
Frankly, I would love it if the next film would try to
recall the works of Frazetta, Esteban Maroto, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John
Buscema instead of aping the style of Zach Snyder’s largely brown, desaturated
colors, doing things just because they look cool without feeling or proper
intention, and misplaced/unearned seriousness. Go back to not only what Milius
was taping into but what Howard was exploring: mythology. Conan the Barbarian,
while pulpy and grandiose, is also on a continuum with the likes of heroes of
ancient poetry, folklore, and well, the present-day MCU. Treat him and his
world as such.
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