I ended up changing my weekend movie-watching plans. I didn’t get around to a movie on Friday night because I spent the day out and about instead of working (taking advantage of a nice day before the next deep freeze hit) so I had to catch up on work in the evening. Then on Saturday I’d noticed while looking up 80s fantasy movies that Conan the Barbarian was leaving Peacock soon, so I watched that.

I could have sworn I’d seen it. It was the kind of thing they showed during movie nights in the dorm big-screen TV lounge or that my group of friends watched either in the study lounge on our floor or in someone’s room. I can quote lines from it. And yet it was utterly unfamiliar. I didn’t recognize most of the characters, had no idea what would happen, didn’t know the plot. Usually if I saw something once decades ago, it starts to come back to me when I watch it again. This was all new to me.

And I liked it more than I expected to. I haven’t generally been a big fan of the barbarian-style sword and sorcery fantasy, and I thought this would basically be big-budget Fantasy Cheese. But it was at least a bit deeper than that, with stronger characters and a more coherent plot. It was surprisingly enlightened, given the era in which it was made. Yeah, there were a lot of topless women, but the woman who got dialogue was a strong character without fitting the Strong Female Character trope (they didn’t just put a sword in a woman’s hand and declare that this made her strong, and she wasn’t Rambo in drag). The romantic relationship is relatively non-toxic, based on mutual respect and trust. The cast is rather diverse, especially for that era. Aside from a few special effects and the ages of the cast members (or the fact that they’re alive, RIP James Earl Jones), this could have been a movie made today, and you can’t say that for a lot of 80s fantasy movies.

I think it helped that they were very restrained in the dialogue and let the action tell the story. I didn’t do a count of lines, but it seemed like James Earl Jones’s character had the most lines, even with much less screen time, and that was a good decision because he managed to make lines that probably were pretty corny on paper sound like Shakespeare. He elevated the material to the point of transcending it, and he was utterly mesmerizing. It made me wish I’d had the chance to see him do Shakespeare. He was menacing enough here that I managed to forget the warm smile and infectious giggle he had in person (he was the guest speaker at the opening of a new library where I used to live).

One thing that was familiar to me was the soundtrack. A friend gave me a copy of the soundtrack on cassette, and even though I’d never seen the movie, I loved the music, and it became my background music for reading fantasy books throughout my teens. As a result, I had very different mental images associated with that music. I haven’t listened to it in ages (I’m not sure I even still have that tape), but I listened to it so often that as soon as I heard the music again, it all came back to me, and it was a little disconcerting hearing it in context with the movie while also getting flashbacks of mental images from things like the first couple of Shannara books or the Katherine Kurtz Deryni series. The CD doesn’t seem to be available anymore, but you can get a digital version, so I may have to do that and burn a CD because it does make good reading music and would probably make good writing music.

I don’t think the movie is going to go into my regular rotation. I enjoyed watching it, but I also had nightmares about beheadings afterward. It’s definitely not a repeat watch comfort movie. There’s no part of that world I would want to live in, so it’s not a place to revisit, and I don’t particularly want to hang out with those characters. That’s generally why I like rewatching movies.

On an entirely unrelated note (aside from the thing about places you’d want to live and people you want to hang out with), the first two Rydding Village books are now available on audio. Here’s the first one.