They don’t make them like they used to.

I sat down this evening for what I expected to be about a half hour of skipping around in the new edition of the film Conan the Barbarian that I purchased a little while ago and hadn’t even bothered to open yet. Just to check it out and not feel guilty for having spent a decent amount of money on a movie that I have seen around a hundred times in my life. Just to see what 4k looked like on this movie.

I ended up watching the entire thing from start to finish without even getting up.

I recently repurchased a 4k tv and Ultra-HD Blu-ray player. I mentioned previously in this blog that I had given my last ones to my father when he was recovering from a heart attack. Though these new ones aren’t top of the line like my previous equipment, the television isn’t OLED for example, this movie looked absolutely awesome anyway.

The film, in case you’ve never seen it, relies heavily on cinematography, or in story terms, the setting, to bring it to life. There are a lot of shots of open vistas in the film, and the added detail really helps you see further into the distance and makes everything more realistic. I also think that it actually helps tell the story and directs the eye better. For example, when Conan first sees the dune ruins (the “mounds”) where Akiro lives, it’s in the distance. Previously, it was just a vague sort of shot of him staring out to sea. Now, you can clearly see the whole set of the ruins and the dunes and you realize that’s what he is noticing. And the fire scene in the dunes looks way more convincing in 4k.

And furthermore, because you sort of notice this, it makes you think about this setting to a greater degree, and you notice also, for example, that Akiro’s beach shack is on stilts, because the tide must come in. And this would mean that the little promontory that he lives on could appear at times to be a sort of fata morgana, which is the illusion of land that sometimes you see next to the ocean, like a kind of reverse mirage. In folklore, these were mystical places. The name fata morgana comes from Morgan le Fay, one of the sorceresses of Arthurian legend. Spirits or fairies were supposed to live there. I think that was sort of what they were going for here with Akiro’s hut.

Or, they were simply trying to make it seem like he lived in a crow’s nest and dressed himself in shiny objects and thread like something a crow would collect.

Or maybe both.

I’d never picked up on this before, but when everything is so clear it’s like listening to music through a Hi-Fi system for the first time, all the sudden a track you’ve heard a thousand times sounds different and you hear things in the mix you never have before. That’s kind of the experience I was having here.

Sometimes the clarity doesn’t do the film any favors though. For example, when Conan first arrives at the Temple of Set, there is clearly a modern road in the background, complete with tire tracks. I don’t remember seeing that before. And the battle scenes were shot before the rise of CGI, so they used old tricks like exploding blood bags and stuff like that. You can see right through some of these “special effects” pretty easily in 4k when you used not to be able to. But that being said, it’s a tradeoff I am willing to make for the cleaner shots of the setting.

The other thing the film relies on is bodies. Yes, bodies. Bodies and costumes.

Let me explain. Sword & Sorcery, a genre to which this film belongs, is about physicality. It’s might vs. magic, as the video game series Might and Magic perfectly expresses in its title. The heroes in a Sword & Sorcery story need to have bodies. As in, Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger type bodies (Conan). As in, professional dancer Sandahl Bergman type bodies (Valeria). As in, professional surfer Gerry Lopez type bodies (Subotai). As in, former NFL defensive end for the Raiders Ben Davidson type bodies (Rexor). They need to have might in order to combat the magic. You can’t just have a bunch of thespians running around onscreen.

Boris Vallejo, a famous illustrator of Sword & Sorcery book covers and other art in which every subject looks like a Greek god, even prefaces his book Fantasy Art Techniques by saying in the introduction that “To the question of how my work relates to or reflects my life, I answer that it carries no deeper significance than this: I like bodies.”

So few Sword & Sorcery movies really get this right, and it’s always a disappointment when they don’t. This blog doesn’t name names, but you can just go look at the covers of the movies in this genre. (A lot of Sword & Sorcery novels don’t really get this right either, but they can get away with it easier because they aren’t in a visual medium.)

The Conan movies did get this right, and I think the 4k resolution really helps to showcase this aspect of the genre. Sandahl Bergman’s skin looks so real it seems like she’s almost in the room with you. The same with Schwarzenegger’s arms. You can see, for example, even some of the stretch marks around his muscles from when he was Mr. Olympia and his arms were considerably larger. Which is kind of scary. The sweat on his forehead in the Tower of the Serpent looks hyper realistic.

This creates a tactile feel to the movie. And maybe that’s a better way of describing it than physicality. The costumes create a lot of this also and now that they are rendered with such clarity it really brings that tactile feeling through. The leather amour that Valeria wears for example when she is crawling across the marble floor in the orgy scene looks so real that you can almost feel it. The roughness of the bronze age weaponry and armor that Conan finds in the various ruins feels different onscreen than the rest of the more modern armor that everyone is wearing, and those costumes look so realistic that I found myself wondering what they would be like to wear.

And you can tell that the costume department was going for that tactile feeling. They just had to be to pick out all of these various fabrics and leathers and metals and stones that people wear. There’s just such a variety of tactile differences: the flowing silks that Thulsa Doom wears, the disc armor that Thorgrim wears, the taught muscles that Conan wears, Subotai’s furs, Akiro’s shaggy coat, Valeria’s saphire(?) necklace against her skin. The steel. You can’t help noticing them and even though you can’t really feel them, I think that you are subconsciously imagining what all of these things would feel like when you’re watching the movie. What would it feel like to have bronzed skin and muscles like Conan? What would it feel like to dress in silk robes? Or to wear the coarse tunic of one of the Set priests? I think you’re invited to think about that.

And the 4k really helps. I have seen this movie so many times and it really never occurred to me about the tactileness of the world. The bodies occurred to me a long time ago, but until everything was rendered so clearly I didn’t pick up on the tactileness and now I suddenly realize it’s essential to the genre. Which I wasn’t really expecting.

So good work Arrow Films. I’m awarding you five Pellegrinos, for making me notice a whole new aspect to a film I’ve seen a hundred times.

Arrow Films also released a 4k Conan the Destroyer. I think Barnes & Noble has it in stock so I’m going to check that one out and review it too. Stay tuned for that review because I have some contrarian opinions about that adventure.

P.S. I would be remiss not to mention the passing of James Earl Jones a few weeks ago. I was thinking about that while I was watching this film. Thulsa Doom has always been my favorite role of his, and one of my favorite villains in movies.

Edit: So here’s the thing, I wrote that entire review above without realizing that the Conan the Barbarian I had watched was actually Arrow Films Blu-ray limited edition. I had thought I’d ordered the 4k. I think I got excited because it was the limited edition one with all the extras and didn’t realize that the Barbarian version was sold out, but not the Destroyer version (in 4k). And so I ordered it.

There was also a deluxe package where you could get them both in the same box, or you could order all of them individually in just regular Blu-ray or 4k. It was all a little confusing.

But like I said above, that was all a while ago so I’m not really sure what happened.

Rather than delete what I had already written, I decided to reorder the correct 4k version and compare, because I already wanted to get the 4k Conan the Destroyer anyway. I actually ended up finding them both at Barnes & Noble, with the Destroyer 4k version being the limited edition which includes some collectables. What follows are some of my notes on the differences between the Blu-ray edition and the 4k Conan the Barbarian and I will make a seperate post on Conan the Destroyer 4k.

As to the comparison, I think in part the reason I didn’t pick up on the fact that it was actually a Blu-ray image I was watching was because my 4k Blu-ray player upscales to 4k. And it does a good job of it evidently, because I have seen this film on Blu-ray before, but nothing like this. Arrow advertises in the item description on their website that the Blu-ray was restored from the original negative by Arrow, so maybe they did a better job than previous versions. (Actually, in the booklet that comes with the 4k deluxe edition of Conan the Destroyer, which I hadn’t looked at prior to writing this, at the back it says that the film “was restored and graded in 4k SDR, HDR10, and Dolby Vision by Silver Salt Restoration, London.” All of the audio mixes were also remastered at different studios around London. The standard Blu-ray edition of The Barbarian does not come with a booklet. But I bet they restored that version as well.)

I’m not sure, but everything I wrote above was true from my perspective. This Blu-ray version looks great. I don’t know what it would look like without a 4k upscale, but I think most players do that anyway so I don’t really know if it matters.

But the 4k version is noticeably better. Everything I mentioned above applies, just more so, especially as the movie goes on. The first few scenes don’t really seem to be much different. But around the time they meet Valeria you can tell that there is more detail in the faces. Everything is more lifelike. It literally looks like you could reach out and touch them and I think the actors’ performances are more subtle now that you can their expressions so clearly.

One of the things that stood out to me (and when I was doing a little research for character name spellings on Wikipedia I read a few things about the film which linked up with some of my observations), was how good the giant snakes looked in 4k. I mentioned above that some of the “special effects” didn’t work that great in 4k (actually Blu-ray), but on rewatching it again in actual 4k I noticed on the positive side just how good the animatronic snake was in the battle for the Eye of the Serpent. Also, when Thulsa Doom transforms into a snake in the orgy scene next to the princess, that looks real.

And so what Wikipedia said was that John Milius, the director, “eschewed optical effects”, and instead used animatronics and optical illusions to achieve his effects. I think that shot of the giant snake next to the princess has to be some kind of optical illusion, because it looks way better than any CGI, even today’s. That must be a real snake. But I have no idea how he did that. And I do think that part of the reason these scenes hold up so well forty years later is because there were no special effects used (or very few, the spirits in the mounds are CGI). So the giant mechanical snake that Conan fights in the pit actually appears much more convincing because it is “real” in a way, just not a real snake.

I think it was in one of Dave Halverson’s video game magazines that I read a review of The Incredible Hulk movie with Edward Norton which had just come out on DVD I think, and the reviewer lamented the heavy reliance on CGI and special effects as opposed to practical effects (those that aren’t digital) like they used in the Hellboy movies. The reviewer believed the latter to be vastly more satisfying. I tend to agree, and I am happy that Milius chose to use practical effects over special effects because they have undoubtably held up better this way.

As for HDR, my TV received a 7.2 out of 10 for HDR brightness from rtings.com, so it’s not the best screen for HDR content, but it should reveal a difference between a non-HDR film and one that has it.

So, to evaluate this in my amateur way I used the funeral pyre scene because it takes place at night and there is a large fire that they light. I actually have an MKV file of an older Conan the Barbarian Blu-ray film that I ripped a long time ago (which is why I was originally only interested in the 4k versions) and have on an external drive. The file does not have HDR, way too old for that. I rip everything at the highest settings. I plugged that drive into my 4k Blu-ray player and then went back and forth between the disc source and the usb source, just watching the funeral pyre scene. This is Dolby Vision by the way.

There was some difference. But curiously, it didn’t seem to me that the fire was any brighter, it just seemed that everything else was dimmer. It looked more realistic in HDR because it seemed like everything must have been lit only by the stars and moon and then the fire, whereas in the regular Blu-ray it looked like there must have been stage lighting somewhere. But that’s about it. I’m not sure HDR really makes much of a difference, but your milage may vary. So much of that is the equipment that you have.

Anyway, that’s the end of my review of Conan the Barbarian 4k Arrow Films. On to The Destroyer and some perhaps controversial opinions.

Edit, the Second: So I thought I was done reviewing this film, but then I thought I should say a word or two about the extras that come with the deluxe version. These are the same extras you get with either the 4k deluxe edition or the standard Blu-ray.

First, I like the little production cards. I’m not really sure what someone would do with them except keep them safely in the case, but they were well chosen still shots. Somebody took the time to capture just the right moments.

The essays are interesting. Especially the one by Paul M. Sammon titled Nine Days in Cimmeria: On Location with Conan. This is a long account (it takes up most of the booklet that comes with the set) of the author’s time spent interviewing the cast and crew in Spain during live production. He actually got to see some of the filming and was there, for example, when they shot the orgy scene. That was his first day. He says there was a large crowd watching just off camera. He said that Sandahl Bergman was very nice and he was so close to the production that he had shaken her finger instead of her hand because of the black stripes of makeup she had all over her body (including her hands) during the orgy scene, and that same finger was cut to the bone during filming that day and that required like four or five stitches to fix. Little things like that make the essay pretty fascinating for a fan of the film.

And he even used the same word as me, “physicality”, to describe Ron E. Howard’s writing. So he’s clearly very smart. He writes, “I’m extremely curious to know how the filmmakers are going to handle the brutal physicality for which Howard was known.” Physicality isn’t a word you come across that often. But here it is used by two different writers forty-five years apart to refer to Sword & Sorcery, and independently of each other. I found that pretty interesting.

The interviews are also worth watching. There are several of them. The overarching theme I gathered from them is that most everyone enjoyed their time working on the film, and it seems like something that they are all proud to have been a part of. So as a fan, that’s always nice to hear.

Ok, now it’s really done.

Take care!