Movies - Conan the Barbarian

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	Movies - Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian is a 1982 film by director John Milius and is recognized as the breakthrough of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is loosely based on the Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard. It was followed in 1984 by a lighter, more child-friendly, but less successful sequel, Conan the Destroyer
. While its sequel is a much more traditional sword and sorcery tale that includes magic, monsters, and fantastical events, Conan the Barbarian is set in a relatively realistic bronze and iron age setting with only a few supernatural elements.

Plot

The film begins with a young Cimmerian boy, Conan, witnessing the destruction of his village and the death of his parents at the hand of warlord Thulsa Doom. The narration tells, "Who knows what they came for, weapons of steel or murder? It was never known for the leader went to the south." The battle standard carried by the invaders, a snake with two heads, is burned into the memory of young Conan. Conan is sold into slavery with the rest of the children from his village and forced to perform intense manual labor. While the other children die, Conan grows strong, and is eventually sold and forced to fight as a gladiator. One night, however, his new owner spontaneously sets him free. From that point, Conan dedicates his life to exacting revenge on Thulsa Doom.

He travels the world looking for the warlord's symbol, the two-headed snake. Along the way he meets two companions, Subotai and Valeria, both thieves. They soon learn that a doomsday cult has arisen that makes extensive use of snake symbolism. While breaking into one of the cult's towers and stealing several artifacts, Conan confirms the cult's connection to Thulsa Doom after encountering the same two-headed snake symbol. After the heist, the three thieves are then offered a tremendous fortune by King Osric to retrieve his daughter who has joined the snake cult. Conan, however, not content with the pursuit of wealth, abandons his companions to pursue Thulsa Doom.

Conan eventually locates the center of the cult, a place of pilgrimage called the Mountain of Power, with the help of a hermitic wizard. Disguised as a priest, Conan sneaks into a ceremony at the mountain, but is quickly discovered as an impostor, captured, beaten, and taken before Thulsa Doom. Though many years have passed, Doom has not aged since the attack on Conan's village. His philosophy, however, has changed dramatically since his years as a warlord. He explains to Conan that the destruction of his village was part of his pursuit of "steel", which he once thought to be the key to power; only later did he realized that "flesh" is the stronger substance. Since the revelation, he has gained much greater power by controlling people through his cult.

After explaining himself, Doom orders that Conan be crucified. Hung from a tree in the desert, Conan is rescued by Valeria and Subotai just before his death, and brought back to health with the help of the wizard. The three then return to mountain of power and rescue King Osric's daughter. While escaping, however, Thulsa Doom kills Valeria with an arrow made from a venomous snake.

Thulsa Doom personally leads an expedition to recover the King's daughter, re-donning the same steel armor he had long since abandoned. Conan, Subotai, and the Wizard successfully repel Doom's attack, and he alone is able to escape. In the final scene, Conan sneaks into the mountain of power and decapitates Doom in front of thousands of his devotees, revealing their god as an imposter.

An epilogue states that Conan later went on to become a great king by his own hand, adding, "but that is another story."

Relation to Robert E. Howard's stories

In spite of the title, the movie is a radical departure from Robert E. Howard's Conan series and owes much more to the original script and direction of John Milius. It draws only a few major elements from its literary namesake, including:

The spoken prologue, "Between the time the Ocean drank Atlantis and the rise of the Sons of Aryas..."
The referral of Conan's people as Cimmerians, and his father's blacksmith profession
Conan's devotion to the god Crom
The crucifixion episode, which is reasonably true to the events in A Witch Shall be Born
The scene where Conan climbs the tower, inspired by The Tower of the Elephant

Other aspects of the film are drawn sporadically from different pieces of Howard's works, though many of those are conspicuously inconsistent with his Conan character. For example, while a character named Valeria appears in Red Nails, the film character's attachment to Conan and her return from the dead to save his life are more akin to Bêlit of Queen of the Black Coast. More disturbing to Howard fans, certain elements seem to have been borrowed from non-Conan sources, including the face-changing Snake Folk and the Thulsa Doom character which originated in Howard's Kull stories. Similarly, Conan's encounter with the witch in the film bears some similarity to Worms of the Earth from yet another of Howard's series, Bran Mak Morn. Thulsa Doom's monologue about fearing the dark are also drawn from the work.

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Movies - Conan the Barbarian

Plot

Relation to Robert E. Howard's stories

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