The infamous TIME magazine movie review!

There it is:

Quote :

TIME magazine
Monday, May 24, 1982

OVERKILL

"That which does not kill us makes us I stronger." When a movie begins with G. Gordon Liddy's favorite quotation from Nietzsche, the suspicion arises that somebody may be taking the enterprise a trifle too seriously. That's especially so when we know the title character is not borrowed from anyone's list of the great books, but from Weird Tales, a pulp magazine of the 1930s, and owes his continued life to comic books and paperback originals. Nostalgia for creatures from the black lagoon of adolescent fantasy, even a certain wry affection, is permissible; the lugubrious sobriety John Milius brings to Conan the Barbarian is not.

His hero's traditional nemesis Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) is now guilty not just of killing Conan's parents and selling the boy into slavery, but of running a drug and snake cult for hippies. (At last we know where to locate Conan in time; this is the Stoned Age.) Seeking vengeance, Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) becomes, incidentally, the world's first deprogrammer. This among other muscle-bound links to contemporary life is definitely intentional. What is not is the flatness of Schwarzenegger's performance, the dullness of his odyssey. Instead of the giddy lift one sometimes obtains from improbably heroic adventures, one gets a grim endorsement of the uses of primitive mysticism and brutality. Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

- RICHARD SCHICKEL

Quote :

Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.

How ridiculous, it's a shame !

The first time I read this stupid article, I nearly fainted !

And the worst..... it's not the only one :

" This isn't fantasy, it's just a rehash of the latest obsessions ; all Milius has done is transplant them to a stock Hollywood setting, updating the explicitness but not the sophistication. There is more Neanderthal than Nietzsche in it - which is appropriate, but hardly appealing " (David Sterrit, Christian Science Monitor)

" Milius never finds a consistent tone or style. The dreary, uninvolving narrative lurches from brutal 'realism' to cruddy oracular pomp to zippy fantasy to Christian and phallic symbolism. In brief, Milius worships force, but he doesn't have the consistency or the visual skills to be a good facist filmmaker " (David Denby's New York review)

" Conan the Barbarian opens and closes with decapitations. In between, there's nonstop mayhem, mutilation, phallic worship, orgy, and cannibalism. Based on the character created in 1932 by Robert E. Howard, the movie's style is tongue-in-cheek, soft-core pornography. Conan is a $17.5 million, kinky kid culture flick ". (Joseph Gelmis, News Day)

Enough for today !

MightyMcT,

Excellent find as always!

Little does that doof who wrote that article realize, is that he basically just decribed the real Ancient World right here,

"Conan the Barbarian opens and closes with decapitations. In between, there's nonstop mayhem, mutilation, phallic worship, orgy, and cannibalism. Based on the character created in 1932 by Robert E. Howard, the movie's style is tongue-in-cheek, soft-core pornography. Conan is a $17.5 million, kinky kid culture flick" (Joseph Gelmis, News Day)"

That's what I always loved about this great movie: its authenticness and political incorrectness. Milius nor anyone else for that matter, was ever able duplicate or eclipse CONAN's raw realism and natural spirituality. Closest Milius ever came again to it was 1984's "Red Dawn" and maybe some parts of 1981's "Excalibur", by John Boorman.

Very Heroic & Zen like movie which never fails to inspire. Young kids love this type of thing, its like reading Clasical myths or comic books. Even Conan writer Decamp said that kids should see this movie, despite the level of violence.