It’s remarkable that I’ve gone this long without seeing this. Swordplay was pretty exciting for me as a kid. I still enjoy a well-choreographed sword fight. And Arnold is pretty famous for this role.
It’s a pretty silly movie. It takes itself seriously, and that’s pretty good. Otherwise it might wind up like Masters of the Universe. But it also doesn’t do a good job of making the characters likable. Conan’s quest for revenge seems strange, partly because we don’t know why his village was raided, and partly because Conan doesn’t seem very likable. This is made even more puzzling by the strange passivity that the villain has. He runs a cult (or something) and it’s hard to say that they’re evil. They seem to keep to themselves.
The funniest thing is the amount of sexual content in the movie. There’s a bit of nudity, but there are a few sex scenes, and they’re overly dramatic.
At a certain point, I realized that this movie was almost exactly like a comic book… just a really shoddy comic. No real development. Plenty of action and sex. Lots of women in weird, skimpy outfits. It plays out as a male adolescent fantasy, with Arnold taking the women he wants as they purr over him, then using his sword to dispatch a variety of bad guys.
I noticed one sex scene in particular, where the girl straddles Arnold. He grasps one of her breasts. She lays on top of him, he reaches down to grab her butt, they roll over. The seduction is complete.
It is what it is. I think I might have liked it more if I saw it as a kid. Now it seems laughably dated. It’s under-written.
But I do have to say that the set design and props are really well done.
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