Red Sonja (2025) Directed by MJ Bassett starring Matilda Lutz, Wallis Day and Robert Sheehan.

I saw this in the cinema – as luck would have it, I had the day off and I randomly looked up the third cinema near me and they were showing it. The other two weren’t. Pure luck.

 So off I go and I saw this movie in a theatre with six other people – all men. 

There’s thing that some movies need to reviewed multiple times.  Some demand it.  Any adaptation/remake/reimagining by its nature demands that it be compared to other iterations.  Does the movie work as its own thing? Where and how it sits in the participant’s filmography.

Red Sonja is a quasi-adaption of a 1934 Robert E. Howard story “Shadow of the Vulture” starring Red Sonya – not a spelling error – set in the 16th century. In turn that story was retold in the Hyborian age as a Conan comic tale by Roy Thomas and art by Barry Windsor-Smith in 1973. Sonja was successful and soon made the leap to her own series and novels.

In 1985, Brigitte Neilson starred in a movie featuring definitely not Conan played by Arnold Schwartezegger. 

Red Sonja appeared in one episode of the 1998 Conan TV series starring Rolf Moeller.

This latest version went through a rogue’s gallery of actresses and directors before we got this movie.

MJ Bassett had previously adapted Howard’s Solomon Kane in a 2009 movie of the same name. 

Now I haven’t read any of the Sonja comics or books or seen the earlier movie (working through the Rolf Moeller TV series right now) so I had to judge this movie as its own thing.

And I enjoyed it.  Lutz did a good job – her Sonja is very physical and has some good fight scenes, the make up, special effects and CGI were quite good.  There’s a baboon man who looks amazing and the CGI cyclops looks great. 

We got the chain mail bikini with a sly wink and a nod (interestingly in the original stories Sonja did not wear the bikini – according to legend Esteban Maroto sent Marvel an unsolicited sketch with the bikini and Roy Thomas loved it so they adopted it for the comics and hired Maroto to draw the comics.)

The story isn’t something ground-breaking and super-innovative.  Sonja’s village is attacked when she is a child, she grows up, ends up as a gladiator, leads a rebellion and fights the evil emperor.  We cover many of the beats that I know about Sonja so I wasn’t mad. 

I’m not going to lie and say it’s a perfect movie.  I have some issues, Sonja seems to pick up the fighting as a gladiator very quickly and gains the respect of her fellow prisoners almost instantly and similarly after the escape Sonja and her fellow gladiators form a guerilla Robin Hood group of freedom fighters and the climatic fight with the bad guys seems like it comes only a couple of days after their escape and a character who left earlier to return to his kingdom rides in with the cavalry.  Neither of these developments felt earnt by the heroine and that there needed to be a montage or something to better show me that there had been a passage of time – hell sod showing me TELL ME that time had past a line “the rebels have been hiding in the forest for 6 months” would have helped.

Look, it’s a nice B movie throw back to sword and sorcery movies or Xena Warrior Princess.  It didn’t reinvent the wheel and told me a story I quite enjoyed.