There was a time, long ago, when fantasy movies didn’t look like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with those excellent movies, but they’ve dominated our cultural idea of fantasy fiction for more than two decades now, and it’s important to remember that genres aren’t locked into just one aesthetic. So it’s a good thing that Netflix just added Conan the Destroyer, the second movie in the Conan series, a throwback and distinctly un-Tolkien version of fantasy that feels pulled directly from the pages of Heavy Metal magazine.
While Netflix only has the second movie at the moment, it’s well worth catching up on both entries of Conan’s cinematic adventures. Conan the Barbarian tells the mythical story of the barbarian king, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose family is murdered in front of him by the raving snake-cult hordes of Thulsa Doom, played with exceptional menace by James Earl Jones. After years of surviving the fighting pits, and a few more years of adventuring, Conan finally takes his revenge on the cult that killed his family.
Directed by John Milius, co-writer of Apocalypse Now and co-creator of HBO’s Rome, Conan the Barbarian’s fantasy looks more Mad Max than Middle-earth. The whole thing is shot in the deserts and mountains of Spain, which gives the world a gorgeous arid look. Even the movie’s many castles, palaces, and lairs feel distinctly uncivilized. All of these details make the entire look of the film a perfect match for this violent tale.
While the first movie is full of grittiness and gore, Destroyer is more of a kids’ adventure movie by comparison. It dispatches with most of the gore in favor of bigger monsters, bigger stars, and bigger muscles. But it remains an entertaining and vastly different version of fantasy to anything we see today.
In Destroyer, Conan and his friend are tasked with delivering a young princess to a far-off priest to participate in an important religious ritual. Along the way, Conan gets some new companions, including two played by Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain. The party suffers betrayals and tricks, all while fighting their way across another gorgeous wasteland of a time long ago.
Destroyer director Richard Fleischer can’t quite match the beauty and strangeness of Milius’ wasteland, but the movie’s increase in budget is apparent from some of its fantastic sets. Rather than simply wandering the deserts as he did in the first movie, Destroyer puts Conan in lavish throne rooms and gives him an inventive fight inside a hall of mirrors that looks surprisingly incredible. Both Conan and the monster are reflected in a dozen different directions, making the sequence feel totally different from any other fight in the series. Meanwhile, the mirror room itself is decidedly unnatural, with the mirrors forming sharp and precise angles, giving it a stark contrast from the natural rocky hills and dirty stone palaces in the rest of the series.
Decidedly of its 1980s era, the Conan series is full of violence that’s more interested in brute strength than exceptional choreography. Swords are heavy and are used more for crude hacking than incisive clean cuts. While some of Conan’s friends might outsmart their enemies by using the element of surprise, Conan’s violence is direct. He wins not just because he’s the best fighter, but because he’s simply bigger and stronger than everyone else. It all feels exceptionally on theme: a perfect genre of combat to tell the myth of a barbarian king.
But beyond all the action, and the gorgeous grit of these movies’ art design and set decoration, the glue that holds the Conan series together is the pure movie star excellence of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Part of what made Schwarzenegger such a tremendous star, particularly in these kinds of fantastical blockbusters, is the specificity of his vanity. All movie stars have vanity, of course, it’s part of what makes them sparkle, but while the vanity of some stars is something they guard carefully, Schwarzenegger flaunted his. Stars like The Rock have stipulated that their characters go through fights untouched, and are never forced to suffer defeat, guarding their tough-guy image with care. But no one in Hollywood has ever looked like Arnold, and he knew it. For Arnold, vanity was instead about finding the right ways to exhibit that fact, whether in victory or in defeat, and few movies do so as flagrantly or wonderfully as the Conan movies.
Whether he’s being tortured by Thulsa Doom’s men, crushed by a serpent that’s twice as big as he is, or being crucified and eaten by a carrion bird, Arnold is still unmistakably the most powerful and daunting person on screen. His sheer magnetism, screen presence, and massive physique guarantee that he’s impossible to look away from. The Conan series, like all his best movies, knows perfectly how to take advantage of that fact. The movies get to build their drama by letting us watch Conan lose again and again, stacking the odds infinitely against him without ever needing to convince us he’s going to win in the end; Arnold’s square-jawed glower of determination accomplishes that all on its own. Every look and glance he makes deepens our understanding of his fury for vengeance and his stature as a hero, even when he’s at his weakest.
It’s pure movie star shit, and the kind of performance that feels borderline impossible at this particular moment in Hollywood — and most moments, to be honest. It’s also the secret sauce: the perfect thing to elevate Conan from good to great, from a fantastical oddity to a movie that perfectly defines this entire heavy metal fantasy subgenre. It’s true that we don’t have movie stars at the moment who shine quite as brightly as Arnold in his prime, but it’s also true that actors now rarely get material as fun or well made as Conan these days either. Conan the Destroyer joining Netflix is the perfect excuse to take a trip back in time and catch up on two of the most kickass movies from a very different era of Hollywood.
Conan the Barbarian is available to stream on Philo and AMC via Roku, and rentable on YouTube and Prime Video.
Conan the Destroyer is available to stream on Netflix.
