Red Sonja

NOW IN THEATERS! For the best Robert E Howard adaptation since the oceans last drank Atlantis, aim your axe at Red Sonja, directed by M.J. Bassett and written by Tasha Huo.

Red Sonja (Matilda Lutz) is an uncivilized barbarian who lives with her horse in the great forest. Her village was invaded by ruthless warlords when she was a child, so she is without a tribe. After an atrocity is committed upon a family of peaceful woodland dinosaurs, she follows the poachers on her horse to a fort in a recently cleared out section of the woods. It is covered in soldiers and strange machines, with the evil emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan) plotting further conquest of the great forest. He is looking for the other half of a mystic book of knowledge that will allow him to take over the world. It is somewhere in a lost city of a dead tribe deep in the woods. He has caught several large forest creatures to use in his bloody games.

When some guards try to stop Sonja from freeing her forest friends, she rips the throat out of one, then the heart out of another. That is when she meets the blade of Annisia (Wallis Day), the white haired warrior woman in winter furs who hears voices in her head of everyone she has slain. However, Sonja turns out to be a worthy opponent and nearly subdues Annisia when the emperor’s giant war ape, General Karlak (Martyn Ford), knocks her the f**k out. Sonja wakes up crucified in front of the emperor and his entourage, as Draygan wants to question her about what is in the forest. When Sonja still tries to kill everyone with one hand nailed behind her back, Draygan is impressed with her spunk so much that her drafts her to fight for her life with the other prisoners in the arena.

Robert Sheehan as Emperor Draygan presides over a candlelit gathering in Red Sonja.

“…he is looking for the other half of a mystic book of knowledge that will allow him to take over the world.”

On the scale of storytelling ambition, Red Sonja is pure pulp, exactly like the fiction it is based on by Robert E. Howard, who invented the sword and sorcery literary sub-genre 100 years ago. It is meant to entertain on the basest level of high adventure, founded on the notion that splitting heads is fun.

Here, it is way more difficult to measure faithfulness to the source material, as Howard’s character was a musket-packing mama in 16th-century Turkey. It was in the 70s, when Marvel comics had a license on Conan from the Howard estate, that the modern version of Red Sonja came to be.

Comic writer Roy Thomas transported her thousands of years back in time to the Hyborian Age for Marvel’s Red Sonja series, while artist Barry Windsor-Smith stuck her in the famous chain mail bikini. As this imagery is her pop culture imprint, it was jarring at first to be asked to accept Lutz as the famously statuesque barbarian.