The Conan Completist

The story starts off much like John Milius' draft, with a map of modern Europe/Africa turning into the Hyborian Age. However, there is no "Nemedian Chronicles" or Conan voice-over narration. There is some of the Riddle of Steel dialogue present here; Milius seems to have extended it, made it more polished. The Father making the sword is here, but a lot shorter and rougher. Everything happens very quick. The Hyperborean attack the Cimmerians, not the Vanir. The Father gets attacked by "vulture bats". They really chew and slash the shit out of him, but his old dog attacks, wounds them and saves him. Then, One-Eye the Mercenary (he is the Hyperborean war leader) axes the Father to death. The Mother attacks One-Eye with a pike, but is killed by him: he chopes her down, like he did with the Father. The Hooded One comes, with a vulture bat on his shoulder, the heads of the Father and Mother staked on pikes as he passes. Young Conan is more the fighter (at one point, he is armed with the sword his Father made for him), though he never kills. He bows his head, as accepting his fate, that he is either dead or enslaved by the victorious raiders. There is no Wheel of Pain. Conan is just chained up with the rest of the young boys, sort of a "Column of Sadness" like.

Everything at this point happens so quickly, as he grows older after this point. Then it cuts to Conan running through the forest with severed chains. Wolves attack him, he uses the chain to kill a few of them. There is no "Thing in the Crypt"/Atlantean Sword sequence. Here's an interesting part: as the wolves are coming to kill Conan, and he's fighting them off and running for his life, etc., a naked women calls off the wolves. He then follows her to her hut. It's the Wolf Witch. Her dwelling is like you see in the movie, as her hut comes out of a rock formation. Here, it gets a little silly, as she walks around him, picking her nose. She then proclaims: "You will be nailed on a tree in two months time". Her shadow moves behind her. Conan stares in awe, wondering if he saw what he just thought he saw, being the way her shadow appears like it's alive. She is asking Conan questions, like where did he come from and where is he going to go, he responds: "The North, a Hyperborean slave pen, for seven years" and "I am going South to Zamora, where they don't ask any questions". She then delivers the line (though slightly different): "From the North. A man of great strength. A conqueror. A barbarian. Who would have the stamp of greatness on him and, one day, be a king by his own hand... And would set his heel on the snake Set - and crush him." Quite interesting, she then says: "That's why you must be stopped... I've waited for you a long time, my barbarian." [1] Then, all of a sudden, Conan is powerless, he can't seem to find his baring (think the wine is drugged?), and she attacks him, as a she-wolf demon, with a dagger in her hand. After he knocks the knife out of her hand, the two seem to have some kind of weird sex. She wraps around him with her thighs (sort of like Xenia Onatopp in GOLDENEYE), Conan even seems to enjoy it a bit. The witch says lines like "You want me, you want me, don't you?", "I want it, I want it." Conan breaks her hug, she bites him. After some more rolling around and fighting, he then hurls her into the fire.

After this, Conan all of a sudden ends up in Shadizar (!), and falls in with a couple of rogues-thieves called Zang (priest of Mitra) and Shevas the Pickpocket, where they ponder about raiding the Tower of the Serpent, and how many attempts have failed. Conan is in some tavern, meets a slut, then fights for her, as some guy called Strabo wants her too.

It then cuts to King Prospero, who is being plagued by magic (presumably, I think, by Thulsa Doom). Princess Yasmina is his sister. She knows it is not poison, though others of the court believe it is. Prospero does a lot of ranting to Yasmina, because he is under spells or drugged, but it's obvious he is being driven mad and insane, he is incoherent. He then asks his daughter to stab him through his heart, to cut his soul clean away. [2] And he calls Yasmina: "Taramis". Yasmina is stunned at this point. The king, possessed by some evil, attacks Yasmina, she is forced to kill him (I take it that Taramis is the evil spirit). Yasmina seeks to flee the palace, to find out what is happening; she bumps into Zenobia, a maiden of some kind.

While this is going on, Conan is making his way to the Tower. As he approaches, he bumps into Taurus. Taurus: "You're no soldier. You're a thief, like me." Conan: "Who're you?" Taurus: "I am Taurus of Nemedia - and you?" Conan: "Conan of Cimmeria... I have heard of you. The Prince of Thieves!" They become quick friends. Taurus throws the hook up the Tower, they climb. Taurus waits for Conan, but when Conan gets up there, Conan turns away to bring up the rope. Taurus, at this point, enters a chamber. Conan looks back to find Taurus, doesn't see him, he then opens a door and sees some hideous creature-like humanoid standing at 6 foot 9 inches tall, beating Taurus' limp body to death. The creature is eye-less, has long arms, huge stranglers hands, mucus all over it and is bald. Conan stabs the creature, much like that Ron Cobb drawing on the Special Edition DVD, with the two hands on the handle of the sword, driving it through the beast's stomach.

It then cuts to Yasmina and Valthemos the mage, who are discussing the menace that plagues the kingdom. They discover that Thulsa Doom is behind it. Valthemos: "There is a serpent in your house, Yasmina - came up from Stygia in foul wind, to slay the human soul... As it was long ago in the days of Kull, before Atlantis sank..." Yasmina asks, "Where is this snake?" Valthemos: "The serpent was called Set. He warred with the Heavens and lived deep in the earth - he gave birth in six days in giant egg to a great sorcerer. The sorcerer has many names, many forms. Some call him 'Acheron,' others in far off lands 'Xachuxtel'... and some call him Thulsa Doom... the Minion of Set..." Thulsa Doom wants to bring about some kind of holocaust, reduce humanity to ruin and slavery, bring the world into flames and chaos, make man sub-human again, like in the dawn of their beginnings, etc. Set will be all powerful once more, like in the ancient times. It's very Lovecrat-like feel to this Set and Thulsa Doom, some parts and similarities you can find appear in CONAN THE DESTROYER and KULL THE CONQUEROR film.

After Yasmina and Valthemos talk, it then cuts back to Conan in the Tower, he sees the Stone of Set. As he walks towards the Stone, he sees the giant snake coiled around, guarding it. Then the beast-man, who he thought he killed, leaps on his back and they fight again! The snake awakens and attacks Conan. After a particular drawn out struggle with the Serpent, he kills it, but looses the Stone. The priests run down to stop Conan, one of the priests pick up the Stone of Set which Conan dropped.

We then find Conan walking down a street in a bad mood, because he lost his booty along with his sword in the Tower. This is where he finally meets Yasmina in the story. After she left Valthemos, thieves (Shevas and Strabo) ambush her and Rinaldo, who gets killed. Conan intervenes and fights Strabo again. Conan kills both Shevas and Strabo. Afterwards, Conan presses himself, because he, of course, is very taken by her dark beauty. But she, of course, doesn't like his advances, she bites and scratches him, cursing him: "You ass! You dumb ignorant, stupid barbarian ass!" Conan mentions how he just saved her life and she should be more grateful. He laughs and says: "Don't bother following me; you smell worse than a Hyrkanian whore..." Yasmina: "Wait - Wait a moment! Please." She then wants Conan to take her home to her palace. Conan agrees but doesn't believe her... until they arrive at the palace. Once they are here, she tells Conan who she is: "Princess Yasmina of Zamora". After the introduction of them both, she then hires Conan's sword arm. Volmano, her captain of the guard, doesn't of course like this idea and protests. Both Volmano and Conan get into the usual heated arguments.

Cut to: Two hooded figures moving around in the palace, who walk up to Volmano. He's in league with Taramis! Figure 1 is a female (Taramis) and Figure 2 is Brak [3], a beast-man with red eyes and pig/ape-like face. Almuric, a royal suitor, suddenly stumbles into the trio accidentally, he sees that Figure 1 is Yasmina, or who looks like her, but he is then killed by Brak, who snaps Almuric's neck. Taramis enters Yasmina's bedroom. Yasmina is shocked by her sister who was believed dead after a snake bit her when they were young. Yasmina glances at a mirror and, to her horror, it reveals Taramis' inhuman snake head and form. [4] Yasmina reaches for her dagger, but Taramis grabs her hand, and then makes Yasmina look at her hand, and the dagger turns into a snake that coils around her wrist.

While all this happens, Conan awakes from a drunken stupor, with Zenobia next to him on his bed. He walks to the balcony and begins to puke from all the alcohol and food. He then sees mutants moving across one of the courtyards of the palace. Cut back to Taramis, who has fooled most of the palace into thinking she is Yasmina. She walks to the gate and opens it... In comes the tall, thin and hooded Thulsa Doom! Brak and his mutant warriors are slaughtering everyone of the queen's priests. Conan walks into the chamber, is stunned by the carnage. He fights to get to Yasmina, but then realizes it's not her. He sees Thulsa Doom, who has dropped his hood to reveal his hideous face. Conan escapes down a stone column, with mutants after him. He dispatches them. Brak does some kind of "kung-fu leap" (exact wording from the script!) down the pillars to get to Conan. He smashes Conan's face again and again into the marble pillar. But Volmano wants him alive... He tells Brak to crucify him.

Conan is hung on the Tree of Death in a wasteland, he watches the vultures fly by. Volmano rides up to Conan and says: "Your guards are anxious for us to leave... I've seen scum hang for hours, eyeless, earless, scalpless - waiting, begging for their sharp beaks to eat into their hearts and end the pain..." Conan, great angry and in agony, says to Volmano: "What have you done with Yasmina?" Valmano, impatient, responds: "Yasmina? In the deepest, darkest dungeon of Shadizar - where she'll grow old waiting you to rescue her... Walk in hell, barbarian pig!" He then rides off. Here much is the same, as Conan kills a vulture, but then four horsemen come out of nowhere, Conan looks up and see them... The riders ponder who he was to deserve such a fate. Valeria is one of the riders, she gives Conan water to drink from her flask. This angers Janus, one of the riders.

Cut back to Yasmina in a cell. Taramis pulls from a cloak sack the heads of Zenobia and Almuric... Yasmina is deeply saddened. We then find out that it was Janus who was the One-Eyed Mercenary who raided Conan's village! [5] The two quarrel. Janus: "I took pity on him and gave him life." Conan: "Aye! And that was the biggest mistake you ever made, you one-eye scum." Valeria is startled. Conan: "And the other was letting me live the day you rode mercenary into a Cimmerian village and slaughtered my mother and father!" [6] Janus' men then subdue Conan... Valeria intervenes and pulls her sword and dagger to help Conan. She says: "Wait, the laws of the Brotherhood, Janus! A fair fight, one sword against the other, a life against a life... Call off your band!" Janus and Conan duel, Conan kills Janus (almost like Rocky, he looses at first, then has a flashback and wins). Conan is now the champion amongst the Freebooters.

Here, the story is very gobbled, it's overloaded with characters and all sorts of things that come out of nowhere and are really serving no real purpose other than to drag on the story. It also becomes very silly again, with hairy mutants that look like little rabbits and other such crap, sort of like out of the cantina scene in STAR WARS, which a lot of these mutants seemed like they did belong.

The script is split in two parts. Part 2 begins with Valeria and Conan and their Freebooters being chased by armies of hostile kingdoms. A Shemite calvary, who resemble Babylonians, chasing the fleeing Brotherhood in a rainstorm. Then you have strange Chinese-like archers, with painted faces, who are attacking the Freebooters as well. This is thrown in the story, for really no reason, and takes away from the narrative, as it goes off in another direction. Conan supposedly was with Valeria for something like two months after the crucifixion, engaging in freebooter activity, raiding, plundering and in it for the booty like her. They get trapped in some ravine, fighting these armies on horseback. Conan and Valeria are fighting back to back. They manage to break out with 400 Freebooters.

Then, after this battle, all of a sudden, in a tent, Conan tells Valeria to join him in fighting Thulsa Doom and attacking Zamora. Valeria doesn't see the need to attack Zamora or Doom, she says to wait a year or so, and then maybe, when they have more men and more plunder. Valeria thinks he's mad with vengeance. Conan and her have verbal skirmish, as well as engage in a little sensual rough fighting, then make love.

It then cuts to Zamora again. Conan managed to convince Valeria to join him in retaking Zamora. Here, in Zamora, the once great kingdom is now some kind of decadent hedonistic bloody land, where human females are giving birth to halfling mutants, people being executed for not worshipping Set, piles of skulls stacked up in places, insect headed mutants walking about. There is also a three-headed mongrel dog (sort of like Cerberus), walking the streets when Conan and Valeria enter the city. It walks by Conan, but doesn't attack him, because Conan is too big, it then runs off to attack some poor begger down the street. Conan manages to locate Zang, who gives Conan a secret underground tunnel layout of the palace. Conan andValeria, along with a number of men, infiltrate the palace. Conan frees the Princess Yasmina, they make their way from the dungeon to the chamber, till they come across a giant pinkish rat (!) that kills one of the Freebooters. Valeria comes across Taramis, who is being fucked by Brak the beast-man with music playing in the background. She draws her sword and begins to kills a couple of mutants. Brak gets up, grabs a giant two-bladed axe and starts choping away freebooter after freebooter to get to Valeria. Valeria faces Brak, but cannot hold her own against the man-beast. Conan then rushes in the chamber, throws a knife into Brak. Valeria goes after Taramis. Brak and Conan wrestle around on the floor, Conan butchering Brak with the dagger. He then finishes off Brak. Valeria is killing Taramis (she's like Rasputin - these villains don't die easy in the script!). Taramis is flicking her snake tongue hissing while bleeding and dying on the floor. While this happens, 100 Freebooters smash through the gates of Zamora and attack the mutants who are unsuspecting an attack.

The battle of Zamora is over. Valeria meets Yasmina. Valeria feels betrayed by Conan, so she punches out Yasmina in a fit of jealous rage. Conan was unable to reason with the hot tempered Valeria. So she rides out of the city of Shadizar, with her Brotherhood. Conan is left there with Yasmina. Yasmina manages, after Zamora is free, to summon/recruit the noble general Pallentides and his knights. A general Trocero shows up, and Murillo (these characters pop out of nowhere, without explanation, and were absent before all this). Yasmina will allow Conan to lead her armies to victory or defeat. This angers Pallentides and Trocero, who do not think this barbarian is capable or worthy to command such a force. They quickly recant after hearing Conan's wise words and Yasmina's forceful command.

Two mutants, who escaped Zamora's defeat, ride off to find Thulsa Doom, who is engaged in a military operation against Aquilonia in the West. With this new unforeseen conflict, Doom is forced to turn around East and ride with his army back to Zamora, to destroy Conan. Thulsa Doom summons his father Set, who comes out of the ground, with huge tentacles ripping through the earth one at a time. This part is really, again, without a satisfactory or logical good reason.

At night, in the camp, Conan is in tent, and senses the Wolf Witch; he notices the strange shadow, but doesn't see her, he feels her presence and then sees her grinning. She disappears... Conan is scared, he closes his eyes, and gets on his knees and prays to Crom:

CONAN
By Crom - My father told me long ago you were a savage god - and judging from what I've seen, he was right - You're a miserable son of a bitch... But, right now, things are bad - These people we're fighting, they're the enemy of all mankind, and you know it. I've never prayed to you before, I've no tongue for this sort of thing - but I am asking you now, Crom, to... help us tomorrow, to give us your strenght, so we can take the field and kill these bastards before they kill us...

Dawn. There's a fog (sort of like in EXCALIBUR). These two armies, one of light, the other of darkness, face each other, in an unholy war. A lot of this battle is very hard to follow, characters get lost in the maelstrom, sometimes it's comical. Conan kills a leather clad harpy after being mauled by it. Pallentides takes on the Death Machines, these armored mechanical things with red eyes (weird - I think they are really just armored mutants; "full detailed descriptions are being left to the SFX guys": Stone has these notes on the script). There is also the Stygian horses, who spout flames from their nostrils.

Well, Pallentides is fooled and thinks the fog has blinded the enemy. Against Conan's orders, he rides with his knights into a trap. Doom summons a flame to engulf Pallentides and his men, the flame eats away at his armor, like white acid (ALIEN?), and he desintegrates. Conan orders his men to stand their ground against the Armored Horde. The Pig-mutants are described with having nazi-like helmets (it reminds me of Orks used in Ralph Bakshi's LORD OF THE RINGS). Then we have the Hyena Head Mutants, the Legion of Flies that black out the sky. Conan and his armies are almost being routed by Thulsa Doom, who sits meditating while his armies kill. Doom summoned harpies, one which kills Murillo by tearing his head off and tosses it at Conan. Then Valeria comes back, riding with her 400 Freebooters to help save the day. There is a part where Volmano on horseback smashs Conan's head with a spiked war club, which dents Conan's helmet from the impact and knocks him to the ground. Then, when Volmano turns around to mount the death charge, a arrow hits him, and he falls off his horse: we see it was Valeria, she saved Conan's life, and showed up with her army. This, of course, is reminiscent of the Thorgrim/Rexor scene at the Mounds battle.

They turn the tide of the battle. Doom awakes, takes his sword, gets on his war-chariot [7] and rides down the mountain and starts killing everything and everyone, even his own mutants! Conan and Valeria fight back to back again. "A filthy monster springs out of nowhere - bald, bumps all over his face, no eye-brows, a huge chain and spiked ball whirling toward Valeria who pulls her horse over, the ball misses... Conan slices at the creature, a horrific scream and strange muttering is heard, white liquid blood, like ice fish of the Antarctic, shoots all over the place and the creature crashes down." Conan and Doom battle. It's really a series of battles and images, it's very hard to follow. Doom turns into a gargoyle with wings and four arms and attacks Conan. Conan hacks and hacks at the gargoyle creature... Conan hacks at its head, but then the head floats up and dances around. Doom's head and jaws goes after Conan's neck with its 3 foot tongue flopping. Doom's torso rises on its paws and flops its wings, and a new snake head oozes out of the shoulders. It's like Doom's head never dies! Each time he kills him, something else is happening, Doom's head even mocks Conan, with a silly smirk on its face, it winks and smiles at him (ALIEN again?). Well, he's finally able kill Thulsa Doom. Set again rises from the earth in a fierce showing, but only to claim the body of Thulsa Doom and take it back to Hell.

Conan rides back to Yasmina, who offers him her kingdom. Conan says no, though it's clear Conan loves her. [8] He then rides back out to his other love, Valeria, and then they ride out together with the Freebooters... What is interesting is that, on his way back to Valeria, he rides back out the Tree of Death, there we find that Conan had crucified Volmano, the man who had crucified him previously. Volmano begs for mercy, but Conan leaves him there to rot.

Very weird fucking script! Very hard to follow often as Stone's writing style is a bit odd. There's no depth at certain points, silly, weak dialogue at times. And, at other points, some good fucking dialogue, which is very, very nice. You can even use some points to sort of fill in the gaps in Milius' script, where a lot of things are alluded to, but never explained, like Thulsa Doom's origins and his motives.

The cover of the script says "Screenplay by Oliver Stone, based on the stories of R.E. Howard, with later additions by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter". I think, though, the "later additions" are just to mark credit because of the Conan books De Camp wrote or had his name on at the time (he held rights). I didn't find any of his pastiches in Stone's script. It's mainly all bits of Howard, like names plucked from all over (Prospero, Almuric, Murillo, etc.), but mainly "A Witch Shall be Born" and "The Black Colossus" are used as the basis. The only exception being the use of the beginning of "The Thing in Crypt", when Conan is chased by wolves, runs up the rocky mounds and kills them with his chains. But, like previously mentioned, there's no skeleton-to-sword sequence. The wolves are simply called off by the Witch, when Conan is battling them on the rocks with his chains. In fact, it's not mentioned how Conan gets a sword. Which afterwards, in Shadizar, he has one. [9]

Stone's description of young Conan sounds more like an Amerindian savage (so much for his Conan being more like Howard's in this department too!):

The boy framed by the tall trees circumventing the stream, reaches down and swings a hoop of dead frogs and crayfish over his shoulder - and goes off, a handsome youth of 13 with shiny black hair, big black eyes, and wiry muscular body, in laced mocassins and scraps of wolfskin...

The Black Lotus thing is in the script however. But plays a bit differently. We see Conan just watching a conversation between to men arguing. The man buying the Black Lotus warns the seller "It better not be Yara!" (the sequence is pretty much the same dialogue). The drug is exactly like cocaine in Stone's story, except it's brown in color, it's cut up on a mirror on the table like you would coke, and sniffed.

Stone's CONAN plays like a Howard/Lovecraft horror sword and sorcery story, but think it more along the lines of Conan meets Dante's Inferno, PLANET OF THE APES and THE EVIL DEAD. Here is, for example, the part in the city when Conan and Valeria entered (this is where, I think, Milius got his cannibal pot/Kitchen idea from. Also the Stygian Witch's from CLASH OF THE TITANS comes to mind):

Boiling vats - Steam rising. Insect headed mutants with wings are holding up old people by their ankles and plunging them like wailing lobsters in vats of boiling oil, which other bat-like mutants stir with long flat spatulas... Inside the vats, portions of old people float to the surface screaming - only to batted down again into oil and stirred like they were soup - and off to the side supervising: a huge mutant, combination of bird and insect characteristics, is calmly - so calmly chewing up an old women in its cavernous beak with mandibles, a strange four foot orange tongue flicking out, lathering the body of the woman, and simultaneously shoving it further into the beak... and in background, another mutant, of similar characteristic, is forcing coals down an old women's mouth... and in even further background, another mutant, similar characteristics, is bending with a hammer and piercing the tongue of an old woman with red out nails as she writhes on the ground, screaming mutely.

Dante's Inferno's descriptions of hell are pretty much used by Stone here, along with other medieval ideas.

Some criticism I have:

Conan in this script does not get hurt, he's definitely a "Superman", and his skills and his motives are never explained, which suspends the level of disbelief way too much. He seemingly knows where he wants to go, despite having been a slave for seven years of his life, and having never been out of Cimmeria when he was boy. He was muscled when he escaped, without explanation. He has no idea why he wants to go to Zamora; in this script, he does not ask about snakes, nor does the Witch mentions Zamora. It's amazing all the beatings Conan takes and, yet, still goes on and on without much loss. To be honest, he should have never made it passed the head pounding he received early on by Brak, when his face was being pounded into the stone pillar. Conan's skill is never made clear, how he become so big, how he become such a great swordsman, why/how he is able to lead trained armies, why he even wants to go to Zamora, let alone even how he knows where it is (on a map). His motives are unsound. There are many silly parts, like in that part in the Tower, where he even looses his sword along with the Stone of Set, it's a total waste! And right after he's crucified, he fights and kills Janus, yep, just like that!

The Stone script really does lack narrative and focus and details. Like, "assumably", the dark mysterious hooded figure, who is seen in Conan's village with the vulture bats on his shoulder, is Thulsa Doom. But other than that, nothing, not even a detailed description. As there is no futher information or mentioning about it... It's simply forgotten throughout the rest of the story, and never brought up again. Which kills it, as you are left scratching your head for a second, like "What the fuck, where's the rest?" There's no further connection with the raid on Conan's Cimmerian village. Doom, we know, was there, but his reason for being there is really pointless, Conan never has a reason for hating him, there's no link made between the two characters, nor why Conan will be the one to crush the snakes of the earth, which is his destiny. Lots of subplot is either lost or simply forgotten as the story/script unfolds. Volmano and Janus are isolated from the main focus of the story, and are estranged and separate when they should be part of the main story (like Milius connected everything with Doom and Rexor). It's like everything miraculously comes together for no apparent reason at all... It's all taken for granted here in the Stone script, like it's just cribbed out of the author's mind.

Now, wasn't Conan to have discovered a KING KONG poster in a cave? This passage is very small, I almost missed it! It happens under a lot of heavy complicated descriptions of the city taken over by the mutants and what they are doing... It drags at this point. When he's making his way past the mutants through the streets of Shadizar, to find Zang the Priest, so he can sneak into the castle and rescue the princess, Conan spots something on a building wall: "By passing a little alleyway - a faded movie poster on the wall - half a face - 'Tyrone Pow... BLOOD AND ST...' (only one hint of this in the entire film and left at that) - peering in"

That's all Stone's writing and description. Letters are supposed to be faded out. But the title wasn't fucking KONG (that was a surprise!), it was BLOOD AND SAND, a Tyrone Power movie from the 1940's (the KING KONG/cave poster idea may have been written in to lure Dino De Laurentiis maybe, which is where I think this rumor came from?). This kills the movie, because the opening scene with the world turning into Hyboria says it's ancient:

A map of present-day Europe, Asia, Africa, America... as the music theme wells, the map starts to move and crumble - an ocean contracts, another expands; convulsions of the earth carve out new lands masses, eradicate others, mountains rise, glacers shift, wastes vanish beneath the waves... and the map of the Ancient Kingdoms arises - Aquilonia, Nemedia, Cimmeria, Shem, Zingara, Vanaheim, Hyperborea, Zamora, Koth, Turan, Hrykania, Stygia, etc, each dotted with their capital cities... Moving closer on Cimmeria in the north-east region of old Europe.

So it doesn't make sense, nor when Volthemos mentions the coming of the future. Valthemos is like some half-mad mystic prophet version of Leonardo Da Vinci, I guess a kind of Da Vinci/Nostradamus composite character... Here is the passage:

VOLTHEMOS
There is nothing you can do. Your kingdom will be the first. Then the remainder of the civilized world. Freedom and enlightenment will perish - Barbarism will return. As it once was.
Men will retreat to caves and live without fire and procreate creatures who will climb back up into the trees and crawl into the womb of the ocean... and Thulsa Doom will rule in fear - with sorcery and slavery and Set... and that too will pass - and the New World will come - and man will rediscover fire and steel and the Reason and Beauty and once again He will be King - and one day he'll sail through the stars - THROUGH THE STARS, Yasmina! In ships of ice! In ships... of ice.

He reaches out and indicates his fly machine in his book, then dies in a vision.

So, it's obviously the space shuttles that are painted a silver white color. Valthemos is the only other hint of the future modern world referenced in the script. I guess Stone's story takes place in some kind of complicated time paradox crap!

But, like I was saying, there are also some very good parts and ideas, some wonderful shadings. Like for example, Stone creates a mutant language for Thulsa Doom, Taramis, Brak and the mutants, using English, but it's all completely distorted and twisted, where you couldn't really read it. For example: "Wab dabo abou kakeeb abu tabis fabark"? (Why do you keep up this farce?) Whole lines of dialogue are spoken like this at times by Brak and the others. I like it, it's clever. Milius only retained one sentence (well, words actually) from this mutant tongue, for the High Priest Yaro, at the stairs, at the end of the movie (but which was cut out, anyway): "Kabil--Kabil---hakim--" Stone also mentions in brackets a Rimky Korsakov's war themes from ALEXANDER NEVSKY, to be attached to certain fighting scenes... I guess Stone wanted to use NEVSKY music (like Milius), even Wagner I believe too.

All in all, being 100% objective... It was honestly a good enjoyable read, but not very realistic or focused. As a movie, it would have been poor. Was missing something, had too much going on, lack of character development, mainly on Conan and Thulsa Doom's characters, and was rather episodic but often sloppy, comical, silly and dragged on in endless descriptions of things, too many characters being introduced, then being forgotten for number of pages.

What Stone should have done was do what Milius did: made Thulsa Doom more personal, tighten up the story, made Doom the one who had Conan's village raided, with his Serpent banners and standards to be edged in Conan's mind and memory, and give him a reason and a quest, as Doom had a central search for Steel or something, create a one Brak (Rexor) and eliminate the Volmano and Janus retards, do away with these silly mutants and giant fur balls things and bring in just the Serpent-men as his minions. Delete the love triangle between Conan-Yasmina-Valeria. Make Conan being seen as a champion gladiator and a wise warrior in the Oriental tradition, which would give untolds amount of credibility to Conan's might and skill.

I'm more than pleased with the Milius script, which is by far of course superior... But I like and share a lot of Stone's ideas and many of his images, which sadly were not retained. He did a pretty good job, but needed help.

Review by: Cromulus

ConanCompletist 2006