Nobody shows up to particular advantage, especially Mr. The cast of dozens and dozens includes Max von Sydow, doing a brief sit-in as a good king who helps Conan on his travels James Earl Jones, who plays Conan's archenemy, Thulsa Doom, the leader of an extremely successful snake cult, and Sandahl Bergman, a dancer from Broadway's ''A Chorus Line'' and ''Dancin','' who plays a beautiful, karate-chopping thief who shares Conan's bed for a while. At the center of it all is the Milius-Oliver Stone screenplay that has no discernible point of view, unlike the screenplays for ''Star Wars'' and ''Raiders of the Lost Ark.'' There are also supposedly impressive long shots that recall Eisenstein and Kurosawa. There's a great deal of sword-and-ax play. There are selfconscious gags in it, including a brazen steal of the gag from Mel Brooks's ''Blazing Saddles'' in which Alex Karras socks a horse.
ORIGINAL CONAN THE DESTROYER CAST MOVIE
He doesn't seem to have thought about what sort of movie ''Conan'' should be.
Here it looks as if he had been carried away by the logistics of big movie making, worrying about horses and costumes and locations and weather. Milius (''Dillinger'' and ''The Wind and the Lion'') is not an unintelligent film maker. ''Conan the Barbarian'' contains plenty of ambitious scenes - episodes of magical transformations, battles in which skulls are split if not lopped off - but it's not engaging even on a primitive level. Though the landscapes are sometimes pretty, the images are as empty as the narrative, which, among other wrong things, begins on a fairly exciting note and then becomes progressively less suspenseful until it just sort of stops. One is never unaware that one is watching a lot of extras trot around Spain wearing goathair jogging shorts and horns on their hats.
One has the impression that it cost a lot of money, though not all of it is on the screen. Then, perhaps, it will be the laugh riot it has every right to be, a sort of muscle-bound, Nordic ''What's Up, Tiger Lily?''Īs it now stands, in the version that opened yesterday at the Rivoli and other theaters, ''Conan the Barbarian'' is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past. John Milius's ''Conan the Barbarian,'' starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the body builder-actor, as the character made famous through decades of pulp fiction and comic books, may make money, but it will only be fully realized as a work of art when Woody Allen takes charge and dubs it into Icelandic.
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