Book vs. Movie

Conan the Barbarian

By Russ Bickerstaff

August 24, 2011

If you didn't know the backstory, you'd swear Conan is a mass murderer in this picture.

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The lack of dialogue in the film would be less of an issue for the character of Conan if he was brought to the screen in more of a captivating fashion. The physically uninteresting presence of Schwarzenegger is kind of opposed to the image of the character from the books. Schwarzenegger’s body is carefully sculpted - the product of endless hours in a civilized gym with very precise physical training. He’s got the muscle definition and delicate skin of a world-champion body-builder, but it doesn’t look like he’s been hammered into that form by the stresses and abuses of a life lived on the edge of death. Legend has it that Schwarzenegger had to tone down his workout routine for the film because he wasn’t flexible enough to believably wield a sword. More than anything, that illustrates why Schwarzenegger doesn’t do a terribly good job of even looking the part of a character who has lived a life in combat, in OR out of a gladiatorial arena.

Conan eventually attains freedom and moves along a series of encounters in search of revenge on James Earl Jones for killing his family. Without going too far into it (and really, why bother?) the encounters that Conan runs into over the course of the film bear numerous parallels to some of the original Conan shorts stories, but Schwarzenegger’s Conan is written and performed as a powerful, plodding muscle-bound dolt who bears little resemblance to the far more compelling adventure figure he is based on. Any cohesive story Milius tries to hammer around the character lacks the evenly balanced brevity of even Howard’s least-accomplished work.

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Conan The Destroyer (1984)

A few years after the release of the original Conan The Barbarian, filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis produced a sequel to the original film. Schwarzenegger returned in the title role. Although he seemed to possess perhaps a bit more swagger than he had in the original film, the years didn’t appear to have given him much more intelligence. Here they even play on his lack of intelligence as a kind of joke, which is more or less opposed to the spirit of the original stories. Howard’s Conan was cunning - a wolf-like predator. Though undoubtedly iconic in the role, Shwarzenegger doesn’t really seem all that cunning.

While the plot didn’t follow any specific Robert E. Howard storyline all that closely, it did follow the overall format of a traditional sword and sorcery story much more closely than the original. The story opens as Conan is praying (very much opposed to the rugged, self-reliant character of the stories. Howard’s Conan once said that his God Crom did not listen to prayers, but the scene is pretty well set-up in the original film). Here Conan is praying for his lost love, Valeria, who died in the first film. There is an establishing attack on Conan and his thief companion. The fight scene is not only poorly choreographed and executed, it’s not edited particularly well. It feels more like a highlights reel from a combat sequence.


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