Conan the Destroyer (1984)

Conan the Destroyer arrives as a sequel with its predecessor's edges sanded down, recut to a PG so that a broader audience might be admitted. The violence is milder, the humor broader, and the entire enterprise carries the scent of a marketing committee. Richard Fleischer directs with competence and no conviction. The result plays like a comic book that has been filmed by real people, which is a strange thing to watch.

The casting is where the film shows a quiet, unremarked breadth for its era. Grace Jones, Wilt Chamberlain, and Mako hold prominent roles in a 1984 sword-and-sorcery picture, and the ensemble is notably multiethnic without anyone in the frame pausing to comment on it. Jones brings a genuine magnetism to Zula, a warrior woman who fights, joins the quest, and earns a captaincy by the end. Jehnna, the petulant princess, is crowned queen. These are gestures toward female capability, though the film never stops being a male-driven adventure, with its women serving the plot and the romance. The camera belongs to Schwarzenegger, and it stays there.

Beyond that, the film has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. There is no engagement with race as a subject, no environmental sermon, no critique of wealth, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent character, and no revisionist reading of history, since its history is invented. The swords are for swinging. The wizards are for trickery. The quest is for a horn. A viewer searching for social consciousness will find a muscular man in a loincloth and a monster that must be killed by removing a jewel from its forehead. The film asks nothing of us but attention, and it is generous enough not to demand a lesson in return. That is a modest virtue, and in this genre it is not nothing.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}