PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*"[Hyrkania] was a place of breathtaking beauty and pristine nature, where people lived as one with the Goddess of the Earth ... it was a time of peace and harmony, until the rise of the barbarian king Anzus, who swept across the land, bringing terror and destruction wherever he went."-- Initial voiceover to RED SONJA.
"It's knowledge that brings civilization to the barbarians."-- Draygan, haranguing a defeated ruler about the foolishness of theism.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
My first reaction to the voiceover was that writer Tasha Huo was putting some heavy symbolic baggage upon Hyrkania, the native land of heroine Red Sonja. The "Red Sonya" created by Robert E. Howard was a denizen of 16th-century Poland, so Marvel comics editor Roy Thomas probably decided that Marvel's version, "Red Sonja," would hail from Howard's quasi-Russian realm of Hyrkania. Since Marvel writers never made much of Sonja's national origins, it's likely Huo conceived the movie's opposition between a prelapsarian, paradisical Hyrkania, violated by barbarians, and evil Draygan's vision of a grand future that eliminates both gods and barbarians.
The comics-Sonja became a woman warrior after losing just her immediate family, but this Sonja (Matilda Lutz) loses her whole village when it's ravaged by Anzus the Barbarian. She and a few others escape death in the forests, but the other refugees perish. Sonja spends the next decade or so looking for any other survivors in the vast Hyrkanian forests, accompanied only by her loyal steed Vihur. Aside from her fruitless searches, Sonja does little but worship her people's goddess Asherah (modeled on one of the fertility deities of the ancient Near East) and hone her swordfighting skills, like a blade-wielding Sheena of the Jungle. Meanwhile, her fated enemy Emperor Draygan (Robert Sheehan) has tapped the powers of strange science to conquer many realms including that of Anzus. Then Draygan decides to extend his empire into the Hyrkanian forests, along with a retinue of soldiers and some key henchpeople. The most notable of these is Annisia (Wallis Day), a swordswoman who was given her freedom after killing dozens of opponents in Draygan's gladiatorial games, but who is now haunted by the voices of those slain in the arena. Once Draygan starts clear-cutting trees and caging wild creatures, Sonja utters the classic line, "Now we have a quarrel." (Just kidding, that was from SWORD AND THE SORCERER.)
Later Huo's script will get confused about whether Sonja should be termed a Hyrkanian or not, despite the voiceover's clear implication that she belonged to that realm. And here's where I unleash my only major "spoiler:" Huo allows this confusion because she wants to sell a "big reveal" at picture's end: that Draygan was also a survivor from Sonja's village. However, though young Draygan was enslaved by the ravagers, the boy somehow kept hold of an incomplete "Book of Secrets, taken from the village temple. While Sonja grew up in the forest, venerating the Earth Goddess, Draygan reviled all deities and used the proto-science from his Book to become a new Emperor. When Sonja gets in Draygan's path of conquest, he gets the idea that she, being a Hyrkanian, can lead him to the missing parts of his Book of Secrets, which supposedly will give him even greater power.
Since Draygan wants Sonja's supposed knowledge, the Emperor tries to break her by sentencing her to the arena. This backfires, for Sonja gathers her fellow gladiators into a fighting-force, and after a nice (albeit short) battle with a giant Cyclops, she and her allies escape. As a further touch of irony, one of the other gladiators, name of Daix, really is one of the "special Hyrkanians" both Draygan and Sonja have been looking for. This development leads to an equally ironic resolution of the Book-subplot, which I'll pass over. Annisia and Sonja duel just twice before both Draygan and his forces are defeated by Sonja and her warriors. After much carnage, I'll state that the concluding face-off between the three opponents isn't like any other sword-and-sorcery film I've ever seen.
It's fair to argue that Huo and director W.J. Bassett may have cadged their dialectic from a lot of earlier, non-Howardian sources, particularly the 2009 AVATAR, with its opposition between nature-worshipping primitives and materialistic, acquisitive invaders from Earth. Yet in one respect RED SONJA plays fair with its dialectic more than AVATAR does, in that SONJA addresses (to revise Ingmar Bergman) "the Silence of Goddess." Comics-Sonja lives in a world of demonstrable gods and sorcery. But there's no real magic in the SONJA world-- only scientific devices and some nonhuman species. Both theist Sonja and atheist Draygan complain that Asherah does not answer their appeals, and the Goddess only speaks to Sonja once, when the wounded heroine hovers between life and death. So is Asherah real, or is Draygan right, that all gods are just conjured from the imagination?
Now I've written so much about SONJA's plot and theme that one might think it's some feminist lecture against toxic masculinity, like the execrable 2020 BIRDS OF PREY, to name another adventure-flick with both a writer and director from the XX side of the gene pool. SONJA might not be a great adventure-movie like the classic 1982 CONAN, but it shows the same excellent bloody-mindedness seen in the early Kathryn Bigelow films. Star Matilda Lutz, despite standing only a little over 5'6", displays a tigerish quality foreign to other Sonja-actresses (all two of them). If all one wants from a barbarian fantasy is throats slashed and guts stabbed, SONJA ought to fulfill those needs. I've avoided looking at other reviews, but if it's true that most of SONJA's reviews have been negative, they must have all come from people who never saw a really bad S&S film.
