I don’t review documentaries that often, but The Conqueror was one that I had my eye on from the very first time I saw the lineup for CineJoy. I love movies about movie history and the idea that there was a John Wayne film from the 50s in which he and a bunch of white people play Genghis Khan in the desert of Utah felt so absolutely juicy that I couldn’t pass it up. The first act of this movie really drives home how disastrous this movie was, directed by the elusive and strange, country’s richest man, Howard Hughes, with a star drinking his way through intentionally archaic script. There’s a second story cleverly interwoven into the telling of the making of the movie from the perspective of the local kids who are now well into their 70s and the hundreds of nuclear tests that took place not 200 miles away from their hometown. The incidences of cancer for actors and extras is eye popping and the barrage of government propaganda and gaslighting of government agencies makes The Conqueror feel like the rare sort of mix of activism and love letter to a D-list movie with A-list actors. Totally worth radicalizing yourself on the stupidity of the ultra wealthy, the vanity of actors, and the casual evil of government.
