Nostalgia with a Taste of Missed Opportunities
In 2025, the name "Red Sonja" sounds like a ghost from a bygone era. For some, it's Brigitte Nielsen from the clumsy but cult-classic 1985 film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. For others, it's the buxom warrior from the pages of Marvel comics, a symbol of fantasy erotica in the eighties and nineties. And for some, Sonja remained a minor character from "Conan the Barbarian."
Today, when heroines in mass fantasy are increasingly striving for desexualization, Sonja's return could have been an event. A heroine combining attractiveness and militancy would easily attract viewers who miss the archetype where courage coexists with charm. And the choice of Matilda Lutz for the role of Sonja seemed successful. But almost twenty years in production hell took their toll. Sonja's archetype is outdated and inconvenient for modern Hollywood — too sexualized, too straightforward, too alien.
Instead of a legendary return, we got a marketing product that tries to talk about ecology and gender stereotypes, but does it clumsily, without a hint of grace. The viewer gets not a complete story, but a kaleidoscope of scenes with a hackneyed script that rushes from "Gladiator" to "Xena," but never finds a core capable of connecting them. And all this — with a budget that obviously doesn't even reach the level of a passable Netflix series. But let's take it one step at a time.
Thus Begins the Legend
The film opens with the voice of a narrator, transporting us to the prehistoric Hyborian Age, to the lands of Hyrkania. This is an idyllic corner where people live in harmony with nature, worship the goddess of the earth, and know no sorrow. But, according to the laws of the genre, peaceful life is cut short as soon as the barbarian king Anzus appears on the horizon — the enemies "burn down the native hut" and turn the paradise into a lifeless wasteland. Only a few children, including our heroine, manage to escape and survive.
The scene of devastation will appear more than once before the eyes of viewers and Sonja, clumsily trying to add drama to certain moments. In the meantime, it is followed by a leap in time, and the young girl appears before us as a grown-up red-haired warrior. All this time, she apparently survived in the wild, acquired a faithful horse, and somehow learned to handle weapons, and now wanders through the forests in search of her compatriots.
Hunters from the camp of Emperor Dreagan (Robert Sheehan) invade these same forests, killing and kidnapping prehistoric animals for their own purposes. Sonja hides from a group of hunters, but in the dark decides to raid a garrison packed with armed warriors to free the animals. But when have the attempts of eco-activists ever led to anything good?
Here Sonja first encounters Dreagan himself and even clashes in battle with his beloved — the mad Annisia (Wallin Day), who is tormented by voices in her head. At this moment, the film made me laugh for the second time (about the first — later), when I watched the complete amorphousness of those around me. Ordinary workers calmly continue to go about their business while someone is fighting with the future empress, and Dreagan himself, along with the guards, "hurries" to the scene of the battle at a leisurely pace.
Of course, Sonja is captured by the emperor and ends up in fighting pits along with a bunch of cartoonish characters. Among them is a muscleman chewing fat-free cottage cheese non-stop, towards whom, of course, flies the obligatory joke about a tiny appendage, and the local "Prince of Persia" Osin the Untouchable (Luke Pasqualino), who for some reason is considered here to be "the first guy in the village."
From this moment on, the picture begins to move towards the legendary epic — with an attempt to gain freedom through gladiatorial fights, with the inevitable rallying of "slaves", rebellion, the death of minor characters, the fall, rebirth and resurrection of the heroine... and everything that Joseph Campbell knew how to write beautifully about.
And you know, it really is here — of course, under the sauce of an ancient prophecy and the antagonist's plans to conquer the world. Only all this remains a superficial set of clichés, devoid of inner content — neither events nor characters are truly revealed.
Epic at a Discount
There are really enough battles and action in the film, so you can't call the viewing boring. The camera is constantly looking for movement, and fight scenes replace each other with rare breaks. But with all the saturation, there is neither depth nor memorable drama in them.
Sonja is sent to the first battle in the iconic chainmail bikini, which "doesn't protect against anything, but the crowd will like it," as the local gunsmith aptly remarks. In addition — a wooden shield and a sword. It seems that the heroine has to get out of a difficult situation — but the battle never starts, everything is limited to a couple of injured guards.
Then we are waiting for a fight with a horned cyclops — it sounds promising, but in fact everything is limited to a minute of vague fuss of minor characters, after which Sonja in slow-mo in a matter of seconds deals with the monster, without even entering into a full-fledged battle with him.
Before the release, we were promised epic clashes with mythical creatures, but what is the result? Dreagan controls the monster with the help of some device, which Sonja calmly disconnects, simply jumping on the back of a cyclops standing in place.
When it comes to close combat, the operator tries to show as few details as possible so that they do not look fake, but they are still perceived that way — sometimes you can only understand that someone hit someone by moans and sighs.
At the same time, the visual as a whole pleases the eye from the very first frames, demonstrating pleasant naturalistic landscapes with a small number of bright accents — including the red-haired Lutz — allowing the viewer, at least, to enjoy the picturesque nature.
However, the shortcomings of the budget make themselves felt too quickly by computer bees swarming around the hive with an obviously insufficient frame rate — this struck me so much in 2025 that I rewatched this fragment several times to make sure — it didn't seem to me.
Prehistoric animals and monsters are made, let's say, acceptably — somewhere at the level of trolls from "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" (2001), but the landscapes of the city at the junction of the Middle Ages and technofantasy make you involuntarily bring your hand to your face and re-evaluate how good the scenery was in "Red Sonja" in 1985.
Nevertheless, the action and visuals at least try to captivate and entertain the viewer at the most primitive level — and sometimes they even succeed. However, watching the characters, their communication, dynamics and development is another "pleasure".
Emptiness in the Armor Bra
In a good way, the only thing you can really praise here is Matilda Lutz's acting. She honestly carries the whole story on herself, looks good in the frame and demonstrates a wide emotional range, doing everything possible to make the viewer believe in the image of a warrior. But the script cuts her wings again and again.
Personally, I believe that Lutz squeezed the maximum out of the conditions in which she found herself. It's not her fault that there are no moral dilemmas in the script, no stages of internal development of the heroine, no intelligible interactions with minor characters — except for a couple of ridiculous exchanges of barbs. «Bad acting is bad directing» in its purest form.
Emperor Dreagan turns out to be much less formidable and convincing than the story requires. Robert Sheehan is doing his best to squeeze out a parody of Commodus Joaquin Phoenix from "Gladiator", but his psycho-emotional range, it seems, does not fit into the necessary framework — and in the end he is more like a tired Nathan from "Misfits".
Even in moments of cruelty or demonstration of threat, there is a feeling that he is about to start apologizing for his behavior. The picture is complemented by one of the plot twists, according to which the villain turned out to be just a man who could not cope with childhood trauma. He felt abandoned and angry at the whole world — and this motivation further devalues the image, turning him into a banal offended infantile.
And Dreagan's companion, Annisia, who at first is presented as a mad mystical warrior suffering from the voices of her murdered enemies, turns out to be just another victim of domestic violence and manipulation.
All the actions and actions of the characters are most often dictated not by the logic of the story, but by the arbitrariness of the screenwriter — they are presented as accomplished facts, without getting a chance to organically grow out of the events taking place on the screen. As a result, we have a picture in which the viewer is simply indifferent to the fate of each individual character, with rare exceptions — except for the horse named Vihur, which either saves Sonja or suddenly becomes a motivator for her.
This is the main miscalculation of the film. The authors dumped a dozen mandatory elements of heroic fantasy into one pile, without thinking about why they are needed at all and how they should work together.
"Red Sonja" in 2025 could not become either a nostalgic adventure for those who grew up on the original or, as in my case, on "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" and "Xena: Warrior Princess", or at least a coherent rethinking of the classic material.
The film is by no means boring — there is really movement in it, sometimes even spectacular. But all this fuss is not able to compensate for the emptiness hidden behind the armor bra.
Diagnosis
"Red Sonja" is trying hard to seem bigger and more significant than it really is, but in the end it remains just a shell without content. Beautiful outdoor shots and rare successful scenes do not save the situation. Even Matilda Lutz's acting drowns in vague directing, mediocre special effects, chaotic choreography and a script where allusions to modernity are put at the forefront instead of revealing the characters.
The characters do not develop or change, their fate does not cause either empathy or interest. The antagonist is too soft to be a real tyrant, his companion is turned into a victim of manipulation, and the only character that the viewer really gets into is the horse. And this fact itself speaks about the quality of the work done more eloquently than any words.
In skillful hands, "Red Sonja" could have raised the banner of budget fantasy, which today, let's face it, is sometimes lacking. But the viewer gets a fanfic, the ideas of which managed to become boring even before the premiere. However, what could be expected from the duet of the anime screenwriter for "Lara Croft" and the director whose transformation is more noticeable in the biography than on the screen? If this was conceived as a new beginning for the franchise, then now it is clear — it will most likely end there.