BY G. CONNOR SALTER

This is part one of a series considering the legacy of the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian.

Today, most discussions about important fantasy movies are far more likely to mention The Lord of the Rings than Conan the Barbarian. That certainly makes sense.

However, a strong case could be made that the director behind Conan the Barbarian, The Wind and the Lion, Dillinger, and Red Dawn set the groundwork for much that we consider to be standard in fantasy movies and in other action-orient genres like superhero movies.

For one thing, Milius worked as a writer on many famous action movies in the 1970s-1990s. Most notably, he wrote Apocalypse Now and contributed to the first two Dirty Harry movies, The Hunt for Red October, and Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan movies. His writing traits (memorable hero monologues like the “Feeling Lucky Punk?” scene in Dirty Harry, competitions between two larger-than-life warriors who learn to respect each other) remain core tropes for action movies today. Even discounting many movies that Milius worked on as a script doctor (Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), his fingerprints are all over blockbuster entertainment that still influences audiences today.

For another thing, Conan has gone from being a divisive movie to a curiously prescient movie. At the time it appeared in 1982, it polarized critics. A Jewish film director making a movie where an Austrian bodybuilder plays an Übermensch who spends the whole moving hunting down an African-American supervillain? A bodybuilder playing an action hero? A movie based on pulp fantasy stories featuring allusions to Fritz Lang’s classic Die Nibelungen films?

Some of these critiques have proved less worrying with time. For example, John Walsh notes in Conan: The Official Story that Milius discussed how the Japanese art of kendo informed him while making the movie (63). Various articles on the film at the time of its release featured Milius discussing having the actors train in kendo to learn its self-control principles. So, the movie isn’t as Teutonic as it seems. There is something Asian driving Conan’s Germanic hero’s journey.

While critics continue to debate the movie’s merits, it was arguably the most successful 1980s “serious” fantasy film. Other critical successes (Dragonslayer, The Princess Bride) lampooned or subverted the genre. Conan told the story straight and (unlike comparable films like Legend) made a profit. As Flicks contributor Travis Johnston wrote, “It may not have started the early 80s craze for fantasy films, which was part of the post-Star Wars push into pulp, but it was certainly the most successful of the lot, and its critical reputation is in a better state than that of, say, Ridley Scott’s Legend or Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster.”

It also proved more influential than many 1980s fantasy films. The decade some inventive fantasy films, from Matthew Robbins’ Dragonslayer to Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. However, few of these films generated templates that other filmmakers used. Conan quickly spawned many imitators—including a slew of derivative sword and sorcery movies like Sorceress. However, it is also the prototype for many modern fantasy projects, most notably the TV show Game of Thrones.

And it was influential because it did something that reviewers didn’t care for at the time.

Make it Look Historic: The “Realism” of Conan the Barbarian

Early reviews of Conan the Barbarian often negatively compared it to Star Wars, arguing that Milius’ film school classmate George Lucas succeeded where Milius failed. For example, New York Times critic Vincent Canby argued, “An effectively escapist film occupies the imagination and transports us into another world,” as Star Wars did, and Conan never engaged him enough to transport him.

In fact, Milius’s seriousness may be where he emulates Lucas the most. As discussed elsewhere, Lucas’ largest legacy in speculative fiction may be creating a “used future,” an escapist world that felt lived in. That decision—to make the world seem “real,” whether that meant textured to look grimy or downbeat, or somehow set in the world we know—took sci-fi films away from the utopian clean futures of 2001, and fantasy films away from the whimsy theatrical style of The Wizard of Oz. Fantasy filmmakers like Peter Jackson cite Lucas as their primary inspiration in the 2004 mini-documentary The Force is With Them. However, Milius’ Conan is an important intermediate step in this process. It shows how we got from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings.

As Alfio Leotta observes in The Cinema of John Milius, Milius wrote the script for the movie based on Oliver Stone’s drafts and elements from several Robert E. Howard stories (80-81). Crucially in Conan Unchained: The Making of Conan the Barbarian, Milius admitted that he didn’t know Howard’s work when he first got involved in the movie. His overall vision was something he already had, and which informed how much of Howard’s material he used. That vision also led him to discard much of Stone’s draft (Leotta 81), which had a postapocalyptic setting and mutant armies.

What was his vision then?

Well, the final script doesn’t have much fantasy. There are occasional references to mythic lands: the warrior’s grave that Conan stumbles upon is implied to be from Atlantis (Leotta 85). There are occasional moments of magic: Thulsa Doom has some form of hypnotic power and the ability to turn into a snake. Milius observes in the director’s commentary that Doom was written as the last of some Atlantean race. However, there aren’t many references to magic beyond Thulsa Doom, a giant snake in a temple, and a wizard summoning spirits to resurrect Conan. One of the most fantastic elements isn’t even from Howard: the spirits scene is based on “Hoichi the Earless,” in Masaki Kobayashi’s anthology film Kwaidan (Leotta 84).

So, while we get enough magic to make this a fantasy movie, the sorcery part of sword and sorcery is in short supply. What Milius gives viewers is less Howard’s fantastic world, certainly not Stone’s postapocalyptic world. What Milius does give viewers is a prehistoric atmosphere: Conan’s world is our planet, just ages ago. In Conan Unchained, he explains he began with the idea he “loved Viking things and always wanted to do a Viking movie,” so he aimed for “a sort of historical grounding.” Characters have armor and weapons loosely based on various periods—Conan dresses like a Viking, his friend Subottoi dresses like a Mongol.[1] Set designer Ron Cobb described the design as based on historical civilizations, making the Hyborian Age seem like a proto-Dark Ages culture (Leotta 81). As Cobb puts it in Conan Unchained, Stone’s draft suggested a “fantasy world,” while Milius’ final script suggested “an ancient world.”

Initial reviewers seem to have seen this pseudo-historical tone as a problem: a frequent complaint was that Milius had taken a lighthearted fantasy work and made it look serious with Wagnerian overtones, grim atmosphere, and pseudohistorical sets. Today, when Game of Thrones has dominated fantasy TV with its history-retold-as-fantasy approach, Conan looks prescient. It may not reuse entire historical episodes as plot points (the War of the Roses, etc.), like George R.R. Martin’s books and their adaptations.[2] It may not meticulously set the action in a specific historical period like Robert Eggers’ The Northman. But it set the stage for that style.[3]

Even filmmakers who haven’t mentioned Milius as informing their style fit into the broad tradition he helped to create.

From Conan to Frodo: Lord of the Rings and Pseudo-History

Milius’ emphasis on Wagner and Nietzsche makes his style (the sex, the battle gore, the apparent celebration of “crushing your enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women”) closer to Martin than to Tolkien. While it’s unclear that Peter Jackson was thinking of Milius’ film when he made his Lord of the Rings trilogy, he takes a similar approach to fantasy worldbuilding.

Tolkien’s attitude toward his work—“always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of inventing” (Carpenter 103)—made it possible to approach it more like a historical drama than a whimsical story. However, none of the adaptors before Peter Jackson (Bakshi, various European TV adaptors) gave it the kind of dense detail that a historical epic has. Ian Nathan highlights how much Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens attempted to capture this immense, detailed tone (5).

Jackson took the most inspiration from Tolkien’s detailed vision, but was also informed by at least one filmmaker with a Miliusesque approach. He explained in a 1998 Ain’t It Cool News interview that he was aiming for “the historical authority of Braveheart, rather than the meaningless fantasy mumbo-jumbo of Willow.” Given how much Randall Wallace’s Braveheart script plays fast and loose with William Wallace’s story, historians may find that comment strange. Its creative liberties are so great that it may be better to call Braveheart a fantasy textured like a historical drama. After all, Braveheart has about as much to do with William Wallace’s real life as Milius’ Conan has to do with Robert E. Howard’s character. But the point here is style: whatever its accuracy issues, Braveheart’s style (set designs, atmosphere, tone) makes it feel like a historical adventure.

Gibson and Jackson both understood something that Milius had shown over a decade earlier. People who wouldn’t normally see a fantasy movie or a Robin Hood-style adventure movie will check it out if it doesn’t look too otherworldly. If it appears set in the world they know (or its distant past), audiences will take a chance.

While Milius’ approach has most directly affected fantasy films, it also serves as a surprising precursor to another genre.

Come back next week where we look at Conan the Barbarian and the modern superhero movie franchise.

Footnotes

[1] Notably, Conan wears a mix of Mongol armor and Viking armor at various times in the movie, and there is a training sequence of him learning combat from proto-Mongol warriors. Add to this factor the details that an Asian wizard and an Asian warrior help Conan, and the movie becomes less about Aryan superiority than critics may assume. It may be “a Teutonic movie,” as Milius put it in interviews. But it is not a pro-Teutonic movie that treats all non-white races as inferior. If anything, the Asian characters are smarter than Conan, and his journey may be seen as how he combines the best of Teutonic and Mongol influences on his path to become a king.

[2] Along these lines, Bryan Singer comments in the 2013 documentary Milius that it “inspired an endless slew of fantasy realm pieces” including Game of Thrones. It is also worth noting that Milius co-created the HBO TV show Rome, which helped create the HBO tradition of sexually explicit, action-oriented epic storytelling that Game of Thrones capitalized on.

[3] Eggers discusses how he worked many references to Conan into The Northman: “This is me trying to do Conan the Barbaria by way of Andrei Rublev.”

Works Cited

“20 Questions with Peter Jackson.” Herr de Ringe Film (originally posted on Ain’t It Cool News), August 30, 1998. web.archive.org/web/20200318230526/https://www.herr-der-ringe-film.de/v3/de/news/tolkienfilme/news_19946.php

Bramesco, Charles. “Robert Eggers: ‘This is me trying to do Conan the Barbarian by way of Andrei Rublev.’” Little White Lies, April 12, 2022. https://lwlies.com/interviews/robert-eggers-the-northman/.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. New York: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.

Johnston, Travis. “Retrospective: Conan The Barbarian is still fantastically barbaric at age 40.” Flicks, May 2, 2022. https://www.flicks.co.uk/features/retrospective-conan-the-barbarian-is-still-fantastically-barbaric-at-age-40/.

Leotta, Alfio. The Cinema of John Milius. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019.

Milius. Directed by Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson. Chop Shop Entertainment and Haven Entertainment, 2013.

Nathan, Ian. Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-Earth. London: HarperCollins, 2019.

“The Force Is With Them: The Legacy of Star Wars.” Written by Gary Leva (director not stated). Produced by Leva FilmWorks and Lucasfilm, included in Star Wars Trilogy: Bonus Material. Twentieth-Century Fox DVD, 2004.

Topel, Fred. “Exclusive Interview: John Milius on ‘Milius.’” CraveOnline, January 6, 2014. https://www.mandatory.com/fun/625751-exclusive-interview-john-milius-on-milius.