Two older Schwarzenegger movies, one a rewatch and one new to me.

The rewatch is Total Recall. What’s interesting about this movie is that it’s a very straightforward Schwarzenegger movie with lots of action and guns and what-not; some memorable science fictional imagery (the two things I clearly remembered from watching it 25+ years ago were 1) his eyes and tongue bulging out in a vacuum, and 2) a woman with three breasts — both things are not only in the movie, but are in the movie repeatedly); but also a total mindfuck “what is reality” storyline that’s surprisingly complex.

I actually think when I watched it as a kid, I didn’t completely follow the levels of questionable reality, because I remember it as just a dumb action movie (and suspect that much of the audience watched it that way), but there’s actually a lot of interesting complexity to the story. (Though tbf, also some implausibilities if you take it all straight — or if you don’t.) It’s still not a great movie, but it’s better, and more legit SF, than I remembered it as.

The new movie is Conan the Barbarian. Despite loving fantasy books as a kid, I never watched fantasy movies, because I thought they all looked stupid and cheesy. (The Princess Bride got away with it by virtue of being a movie-within-a-movie and a comedy; but other than that, I don’t think there was a good fantasy movie until Peter Jackson came along.)

So from that perspective, I have to say that this was surprisingly non-cheesy. The special effects were done reasonably well, and the general aesthetic and production values of the movie are way less cheesy than I would have predicted. (Though it is swords-and-sorcery style, which I wouldn’t have loved as a kid, either.)

When you get to the actual story and the dialogue, though, hoo boy. It’s not good. You can describe the movie in such a way that it sounds like it has a coherent plot, but however you do that, there’s at least an hour of it that won’t fit into your plot description (unless you put a bunch of “ands” into it). It’s just a shaggy structure of “this happened, then this, then this, then this” with very little connective tissue until you get to the last 45 minutes of the movie. Like, the most famous line from it, about what is good in life? It’s just a random scene with a couple of characters who I think don’t even have names, and has no connection to anything that came before or after.

But also probably if I had wanted to watch it as a kid, my parents wouldn’t have let me, because this movie is full of sex. Like, it’s too big-budget to be a late night Cinemax softcore movie, but there are times it’s not that far away. The ratio of bosoms to beheadings might be like 1:1. Or I guess 2:1 depending on how you count.

On the whole, the movie convinces me that I made the right choice in avoiding fantasy movies back then. It’s not terrible, given the context of what it is (and of course, like all older movies, it has aged into extra interest as a snapshot of a different world), but it doesn’t rise above the level of mediocrity, even graded on a curve.