Conan the Barbarian: 2-Disc Standard Special Edition - 4K Ultra HD [4K UHD]

Arnold Schwarzenegger at his best you have to watch it it's a classic must see fun for

Ah, Conan the Barbarian. If you were lucky enough to be alive in the eighties and of an age old enough to go to the movies you may have been lucky enough to see Arnold at the beginning of his movie career and eventual box office dominance of the eighties and early nineties. Let's start with some background. Conan the Barbarian was released in May of 1982 with an estimated budget of 20 million dollars. The director was John Milius with Universal Pictures distributing it and Dino De Laurentiis Company producing. The movie is an adaptation of a character created by Robert E. Howard named Conan back in the 1930's in the days of pulp fiction magazines. These were stories that were published in large number on cheaper grade paper pulp magazines which later became known collectively as pulp fiction. Howard has since become regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery genre. His career as a writer was short lived though as he shot himself in the head at the age of thirty. The movie opens with a black background on which is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." It pretty much follows Conan through the trials and tribulations of going from a little boy through adulthood. The whole movie came about from Ed Pressman a producer who had been looking for a new vehicle for Arnold after his movie Pumping Iron where in which the world got a look into the world of bodybuilding and Arnold's training for the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest. He had a friend Ed Summer also a producer (isn't everybody...) who owned a comic book store and said Conan would be a perfect vehicle and took Pressman over to see the Conan comic books he had, this would've been around 1977. Just so happens Oliver Stone had been working on a script for a Conan movie at the time as he was also a fan of Robert Howard's Conan writings. Stone pitched the idea to Dino De Laurentiis who bought his script and brought in John Milius as the director. Milius took a liking to the Conan character cause he had been into Vikings from early on in his youthful surfboarding days. Milius would bring his surfing friend Gerry Lopez in as Subotai and eventually Sandahl Bergman as Valeria. Ron Cobb designed the look of the sets (he also worked on the sets of Alien) and Basil Poledouris (another friend of Milius) would do the sound track. The thing I like about this movie is that Arnold was still relatively new to acting so he wasn't throwing out the one liners and cracking jokes every other line like he did in Conan the Destroyer. This is definitely the movie that launched his career though and he basically owned the eighties from there on out. For extra features you have: A Deleted Scenes section. Conan unchained: The Making of Conan an excellent video with Ed Pressman on how it all started. Art of Steel: Sword Makers and Masters, this section goes to New Glarus, Wisconsin where the Albion Armorers Company make true reproductions of Conan's father's sword and the Atlantian sword (Jody Samson originally created the Conan swords and worked for Albion) and also has an appearance from Sensei Yamazaki the sword master who trained Arnold and the rest of the cast on the set. Conan: From the Vault, a collection of commentary and videos from back in the day and on the set of the movie. Special Effects, a short minute and a half video of one of the effects shots from the movie. Conan Archives, a collection of animation drawings and stills from the set. A theatrical trailer section and to round out the extra features: Feature Commentary with Director John Milius and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you're a fan of the Jason Momoa version of Conan then you probably won't like Arnold's Conan but just like Shawn Connery was the first Bond, Arnold was, is and always will be CONAN in many peoples hearts.

This is a review of the 4K version of this film. The good news is that it's a lot better than the Blu-ray. The bad news is that there are a couple of places where the quality is not good but still better than the Blu-ray. As far as 4K films go this is more of a four and half than a five and there are other 4K and even Blu-ray films that are sharper. However, this is the clearest I have seen this film and I was generally impressed with it. The sound is also particularly good and also well balanced in that the music isn't louder than dialogue so you don't have keep changing the volume up and down like you have to with some films.So, if you like this film and have it on Blu-ray (or even DVD) then this 4K is a true upgrade in quality, albeit not necessarily always as clear and sharp as some other 4K films.

This movie is great! Happy to see it again after all these years! Brings me back to the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, when men were men, women were women, and small furry animals were ... oh well, as this had been my most cursory review, and also received one negative rating, I've decided to update it a bit: I would agree with other reviewers that the "Collector's Edition" of this DVD is not preferred - please if you can purchase the original release of this film on DVD. Though the "Collector's Edition" has some merit for the novelty value (the ending has been altered somewhat and a few additional superfluous scenes added), it nonetheless is not the classic from my childhood. Unlike George Lucas, I firmly believe that in the battle between directorial privilege / additional CGI effects and childhood memories - childhood wins! That said, I saw this movie probably at too young an age, and I think it was probably one of the first rated R movies that I had ever seen. The violence is still fairly intense, even in our present age of over-the-top CGI gore. Some things leaped out at me this time around that my young eyes must have suppressed or glossed over on first viewing, despite the fact that we -- my other twelve year old friends and I -- made use of the pause and rewind function to re-watch some of the more inappropriate scenes. Specifically horrifying, yet unnoticed when I first watched this film, are the Ed-Gein-style human figures skinned like deer and left hanging on a rack in Thulsa Doom's mountain fortress. This is hard to see as the lighting is dark and red, but as Conan and his crew sneak into the fortress the discerning eye may notice this in the background. Chilling to say the least. As a student of the thin line between evil and enlightenment, I find that little detail significant. Furthermore, another point to be made is that the screenplay was written (in part at least) by Oliver Stone. Given Mr. Stone's combat experience I find this also to be significant, especially as it relates to the "riddle of steel," which I shall not spoil here, and our ongoing conflict with opponents who utilize suicide bombers. Please see Aldous Huxley's book The Perennial Philosophy for a discussion about the connection between combat during wartime and the attitude of enlightenment as well. I may add more to this at a later date, and please accept this imperfect review of a classic film in the spirit in which it is intended, as a reflection of youthful exuberance!Watching this again tonight and thinking that if I ever could teach a class on late 20th century American society, I would start with this movie, and view it through the lens of the Vietnam War, Nietzsche, Oliver Stone, the hippies, left-wing politics, etc. The movie clearly depicts the conflicts between the power structure and the hippie movement. King Osric's daughter is led astray by a wayward truth. Why could her father not give her that truth? Thulsa Doom's "emptiness" echoes the preaching of Charles Manson, flower children in the desert. The depiction of combat, laced throughout with burning villages, decapitated snakes and sex orgies, echoes the war in Vietnam and the cultural disintegration at home. Oliver Stone's later screenplays and directing work of course would inform this discussion. I wonder how he feels about this movie now? It certainly does not paint the counterculture in a favorable light.

Excellent Product

Love Conan the Barbarian comics and the movie.James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom was amazing, but this character first appearance was in 1928 short story called, "the cat and the skull." as a antagonist in Kull the Conqueror.