Red Sonja (Aug 13)

If the world were a fair and just place, Red Sonja would be playing in every movie theater in America this summer, instead of a one-night show at an art house. For those who are unfamiliar, Red Sonja is part of what I think of as a class of barbarian-themed comics from the 80s that were so popular at the time that they were iterated and cross-overed into oblivion (Conan, Masters of the Universe, etc.) and gave way to a host of sword-and-sandal television shows that were the staples of 90s after school specials like Hercules and Xena Warrior Princess. My entree into Red Sonja is through the venerable Gail Simone’s comic book run back in the early 2010s. I don’t remember a lot about it besides the amazing art and the pomo-feminist storytelling that did not and still does not fit with the kinds of violence superhero stories that are told on screen today. All of these elements of Red Sonja make her reboot from a 1985 movie starring one Arnold Schwarzenegger seem fairly unlikely but also should really feel like an even more ringing endorsement as a return of one of the four horsemen of 80s kitsch.

I wrote six pages of notes on this movie while watching, which outpaces my normal note-taking for a film by orders of magnitude, but I hope that some of the highlights that I can tantalize you with are things like:

“This is live action Princess Mononoke.” “Rescuers Down Under (Nature Avenger).”

At least three instances of “horse incest,” which I later correct in my notes. “I called ‘bestiality’ ‘horse incest’ which is disrespectful because it means one of those horses is a human.”

There’s this slow aesthetic reveal in which the movie very cleverly leaks elements of different time periods that have been pastiched together for the worldbuilding. We get barbarian-chic which turns into Roman-esque gladiator genre film, which in turn becomes a sword-and-scepter magic meets science Warhammer 40k-type deal.

There’s also this amazingly crafty villain arc, in which we are introduced to a “bad emperor” who was formerly an abused slave in his own land, and then through a series of mishaps, acquires half of a book of power which may or may not be voices in his own head but actually seems to work. He also seems to disdain the religious fervor of the people he is conquering and instead wants to spread education and science throughout the lands, though it becomes obviously through a quick and succinct scene in which he seems to be implanting mind control devices into giant spiders and then also human experimentation that goes deadly that he is in fact evil.

One of the best Easter eggs for the movie is the ongoing joke about collecting a cyclops.

There are more than a few moments while watching this movie when I wondered if it was, in fact, Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule from the Sword of Truth Series from 1994.

My teenage self would be remiss if I did not give a shout out to this massive tome and urge you to read every page of it and then the many sequels right now instead of finishing this review or really any movie ever again. It has a lot of the same kinds of humor and genre-bending arcs and aesthetic borrowing that typify the vibe of Red Sonja and really Goodkind is like one of the most fun reads you will ever have in fantasy.

The coliseum sequence is very strong because of all the trope headfakes that the movie is able to do, but also because it is one of the most deft ways that the movie throws exposition at you without making you feel like you are gnawing on storytelling vegetables the whole time. Instead of a long monologue, we get a montage of Sonja developing reasons why she might need to disavow her vegan pacifist vows and become the bloodthirsty berzerker we know she’s to become. It just so happens that the emperor is using gladiatorial fights as a means of destroying entire cultures, so Sonja is learning to be a gladiator from a tribe which requires she learn its laws and stories, but also they happen to have some familiarity with her lost people as well!

There’s this henchman to the Big Bad, the white haired girl, who has a lot of gay energy about her whenever she engages with Sonja, but also her status as a conflicted villain is cemented by the way that she is plagued with voices which push her to do violence, which in turn has forced her into a strange chemical dependency on a drug provided by her husband/master who, for some reason, is unwilling to have sex with her (!!!) for reasons never really explained.

The final scene of the movie is a bit of a headfake on its own. We get the sense from Sonja that the Big Boss fight has to happen, but by the time she reaches him, he’s already been injured grievously and she sits beside him and they talk, which is such a cool misdirect, yet again, and so in character for Sonja herself to try to understand and comfort even the person who has given her so much trouble lo these many days.

Red Sonja finds ways to give its audience fan service and be true to the art of the comics, while also including sharp feminist jokes to blunt the most toxic elements of the original stories. By every stretch of the imagination, it is a solid first entry into what should be a long and prosperous franchise, but it’ll probably languish without more than a few hundred viewers, because it lacks a core demographic and the terminal velocity needed to achieve lift (is that a sound metaphor?).