I like Conan the Destroyer more than Conan the Barbarian. There, I said it.

I’m not saying that it’s as good as Conan the Barbarian, just that I like it more. And Conan the Barbarian is one of my favorite stories in any medium.

Let me explain.

I had started writing this review before I read the essays included in the special edition of Arrow Film’s 4k restoration of Conan the Destroyer. The first essay included is by a film critic named Walter Chaw, and it’s tilted “Days of High Adventure”. The same essay is included in the Conan the Barbarian special deluxe edition from Arrow Films as well.

Chaw has some interesting ideas about the Conan phenomenon. Frankly, I’m not sure how many of them I agree with, but one of the things I do agree with him on, sort of, is his appreciation for Conan the Destroyer. He writes: “I have a soft spot for Richard Fleischer’s Conan the Destroyer… I’ll also defend Conan the Destroyer as a valuable, some would say necessary, curative to the notion that Howard’s work was only intense and humorless.”

I agree. When I was writing my original review, prior to having read his essay, my first distinction that I made between the two films is that Conan the Destroyer is fun. Conan the Barbarian is many things: larger than life, thoughtful, a musical masterpiece, sexy, historic even. But whatever it is, it isn’t fun. As the narrator Akiro laments, “His was a tale of woe.”

The only fun element in the movie is Valeria. Without her the movie would frankly be unwatchable.

Conan the Destroyer, on the other hand, does not take itself nearly so seriously, and that makes up for its relative shortcomings as a fairly generic fantasy adventure story.

There’s nothing remarkable about the plot. It seems like it could have been lifted out of a manual for writing fantasy stories. But that doesn’t make it bad. There’s a reason people like this sort of high fantasy kind of adventure. All you have to do is execute the formula well and people will like it. And that is what they did here.

And well they did it. I don’t care what anyone says, but you’re not going to find, ever, for example, someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wilt Chamberlain, and Andre the Giant (in a suit) to square off in hand-to-hand combat within the span of about five minutes. You’re just not. No one did before, and no one has since.

You’re also not going to find someone to play a wizard better than Mako (the magic battle in the mouth of the dragon in actually my favorite in any movie), or a she-warrior better than Grace Jones, or even a virgin princess better than Olivia d’ Abo. That last part might be able to be played just as well by any number of young actresses, but I daresay none better. I thought she frankly stole the show from all the rest of the big stars, although I’m not entirely happy with how her story was written. But more on that later.

And the character actor Tracey Walter, the guy who plays Malak, has a filmography longer than my arm.

And besides the cast, again, the whole production, like Conan the Barbarian, is entirely first-rate. The sets are gorgeous and believable. The cinematography is also just as good as the first movie. I like how they are in a more desert environment for this film, which contrasts nicely with the alpine settings of the first movie. And I think it contributes to the more sunny disposition of the film.

The costumes bring out a sort of sensuality that reminds me a little of Valeria in the first film, as portrayed by the dancer Sandahl Bergman. I talked about bodies and costumes in my blog post about that film, and you could say that they are even more of an attraction in this one: Grace Jones wears a fox tail below the waist and little else, and not much above it, Schwarzenegger is back to his Olympian proportions (up 45lbs of pure muscle from the first film), and Wilt Chamberlain makes him look small, and Olivia d’ Abo wears her royal wardrobe well, in kind of an 80s, relaxed, off-the-shoulder way that affects a sort of innocent coquettishness, befitting the ingenue princess character she portrays.

This is my kind of fantasy movie.

Earlier I mentioned that I “sort of” agreed with Walter Chaw when he said he had a soft spot for Conan the Destroyer. The reason I qualified that comment is because Chaw is somewhat apologetic about liking The Destroyer. I’m not going to quote the entire paragraph, I don’t think that’s my place here to publish his work on my blog, but the gist of it is that he thinks a lot of the reason Conan as an IP (for lack of a better term) sometimes gets dismissed as fluff is because of outings like Conan the Destroyer, as opposed to the more, I guess, legit stories of Robert E. Howard and maybe the first film.

I couldn’t disagree more. Frankly, the Conan stories that I’ve read of Howards’, and I haven’t read them all, but a few, aren’t good. Howards’ Soloman Cane stories are written better. You might not like the grim dark tone of Solomon Cane, but they’re better writing.

What made Conan Conan, in my opinion, are the other outings written by other authors. Like Robert Jordan, for example, who wrote the novelization for this film. I like Jordan’s Conan Chronicles better than Howards’. I used to read the Conan comic book back in the day and one of my all-time favorite answers to the reader submitted questions in the back of any comic book came from a Conan title. Someone had written one of those classic questions of who would win in a fight, this time Conan or Wolverine (Logan). The editors gave a few insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two characters, but then said that it didn’t matter, because if Conan and Logan ever actually did meet they would have another contest rather than a fight. And then they had drawn a little cartoon of both Conan and Logan sitting on barstools having a drinking contest with empty mugs of ale piled to the ceiling.

That’s Conan.

And this leads me to what I believe is a huge flaw in this film though, and that’s the ending. It’s played way too seriously.

There are good reasons for why Conan shouldn’t have stayed with Jehnna, from a storytelling perspective. One, is simply that they had planned on making more Conan movies and so they didn’t really want to tie him down in Shadizar. Fair enough. Another is simply that Princess Jehnna is very young and inexperienced (she even says early in the movie something like “how many men have I seen?”; Olivia d’ Abo was only fourteen or fifteen), and vulnerable, and it might not look all that honorable if Conan chooses to stay with her. And that’s probably a legitimate concern, even for people living in the so called Hyborean Age.

But there are still better ways of writing this scene than what they did. He didn’t need to make her cry.

This is important.

Probably the reason that Conan the Destroyer was disappointing to some people and critics is because at its heart it’s actually a kind of romance. That’s the story. Really, the whole quest to find the Golden Horn and the Key and all that is just the plot. The story is about Jehnna and her sort of puppy love infatuation with Conan. The parts of this story that matter the most are about that. And it feels that way when you watch it. The most enjoyable scenes aren’t really the sword fights, but when Jehnna is trying to figure out how to win Conan. The scene where Malak is trying to explain the facts of life to the princess (who has been kept a virgin and away from men by Queen Taramis so that she be properly sacrificed, as a virgin) is funny and a moment where we actually care.

Orson Scott Card in his lecture series Storycraft talks about just this sort of thing. It’s in the seventh video, “Riffs Part II” I think. He advises his students that most novices don’t put in enough about the relationships between the characters. He tells about how he once wrote a novel, it might have even been an earlier version of Ender’s Game, and someone told him that it was long. Card realized that “long” really meant “boring”. And the conclusion that he came to after evaluating the manuscript was that it felt long because there wasn’t enough of that interaction between the characters. And so he added a lot of that, made the manuscript much longer, and gave it back to the reader. This time the reader liked it, even though it was technically “longer” than it was originally.

And partly, Card eventually figured out, this was because the things that you normally would think of as exciting, that some reviewers might call “thrilling” or “thrills”, such as battle scenes, actually aren’t happening. Meaning, there is no battle. It’s fake. There are no actual armies battling out in space, so who cares about it? But the interaction between characters is real. So he ended up cutting a few of the main set piece battles out of Ender’s Game later on and he said the story was much better for it.

That’s kind of what is going on here. There are a lot of well-choreographed fight scenes, and I don’t want to discount their contribution to the experience, but in the end, they wouldn’t mean a whole lot without the moments like those between Jehnna and Malak. It matters that Bombaata betrays them, it matters that Zula pledges her life to Conan, it matters that they all choose to stay with Jehnna at the end.

Except Conan.

And back to the point about this being a romance, one of the conventions of a romance plot is that the characters “get together”, as Malak puts it, in the end.

The fact that they don’t basically means that the story is a failure, in spite of the fact that they saved the day. Jehnna doesn’t win Conan. Even Akiro’s narration at the end, after Conan turns on his heel and exits the throne room: “And so Conan mourned his lost Valeria…”–Wasn’t Conan mourning his lost Valeria when we fist met him in this movie? So what has actually happened here? What was the point of the story?

Instead of having her fail outright (and, again, it’s understandable why they didn’t want Conan to kiss her back, for the reasons stated above), they could have saved the ending by simply making it ambiguous.

Here’s my take: I think when she kisses him, Conan doesn’t give her a stoney stare back, but smiles at her a little. He still turns away and leaves though. On his way out, he stops to look at something. Maybe one of the jewels that they discovered on their quest, maybe even the Golden Horn, and turns back to the assembly, smiling a little again, and says something like, “This looks valuable, you might want to guard it closely, so someone doesn’t steal it.” And then he continues his exit.

Conan’s the King of Thieves. That’s why he was hired in the first place. Little is made of it in the story after he starts the quest, but it would be nice to remind the audience of that fact and tie it back to the beginning. And that would make sense becasue Queen Taramis even says early that you shouldn’t have the King of Thieves around the Horn.

And getting back to the talk about relationships, it would demonstrate the altered nature of all of their relationships to Conan now. They’re members of a queen’s court, and a queen herself. He’s a thief.

That sort of moment is storytelling. (I kind of just reminded myself of the ending to Snow White and the Huntsman and the look between those two characters at the very end.)

And it also evinces a desire on Conan’s part to return one day and see them, but does so in his very Cimmerian sort of way. And I think that would have softened the blow for the princess and also the audience and it would give some reason for the story to have taken place. Conan has a potential home and a future, maybe even with Jehnna when she is older and an established queen. And he can still go off and have more movies made of his adventures in the meantime.

So there, I fixed it. (I wonder if this is how Jordan wrote it? Honestly, haven’t read this particular Conan adventure of his.)

Anyway, I still really like this movie, despite the ending. And so I’m giving it five out of five stars, in the form of San Pellegrino labels.

As for the specifics of the 4k version, I will say this, it was so clear that for the first time I noticed that the queen’s guardsman that Conan faces off against in the forest in that great fight scene with Jehnna leaning against the rock is the same actor that played Thorgrim in the first movie. His name is Sven-Ole Thorson, a Danish strongman and martial artist who has had a long career in the film industry as an actor and a stuntman. I’d never noticed that was the same guy before. So that should tell you something.

Also, for the first time I noticed Jehnna’s “mark”. It’s on her breast. I’d never seen that before. I always thought it was just something Queen Taramis said at the beginning and that had been overlooked during filming, but no, it’s actually there. Just couldn’t see it.

Again, the extras are interesting. I like the pictures on the cards. The posters in both the editions are high quality, though creased. You would have to have them linen backed or something like that to get the creases out of them if you wanted to hang them, but you could.

The same author Paul Sammon, who wrote the long essay in the Conan the Barbarian deluxe booklet, writes another one here, so if you want some more behind the scenes reportage you can have it.

And that’s the end of my review of Conan the Destroyer 4k Arrow Films.

Take care.