I finally watched Red Sonja (2025) and, with several caveats, I liked it. First of all, I'm both the target audience and the dreaded nemesis of a movie like this. I'm very familiar with Robert E Howard's Conan, so I'm always (maybe whether I like it or not) ready to find things I don't like about any adaptation of the Hyborean Age. For that very reason, though, I also know that Red Sonja isn't actually in Robert E Howard's Conan universe. I came to the Red Sonja movie hoping it would be a sort of ret-conned start to a Conan Cinematic Universe, one where everything that is canon remains canon, and just the good parts of apocryphal tradition gets rolled into it. It isn't that, but that's OK. It can be a fun movie anyway, and that's what it is.
I'll start this review with only minor spoilers you'd either get or surmise from a trailer, or that you find out quickly in the first 10 minutes of the film.
In this version of the Hyborian Age, the Hyrkanians are a destroyed people. They're all but wiped out, with just one tribe still existing. The Shemites have also been dominated, and it's implied that there are other civilsations that have been brought to heel by an evil emperor known as Draygan.
If I try to make this fit into the canonical history of Hyborea, then I guess it's a future time beyond what Howard wrote. But that doesn't quite work, because at the end of the movie there's a line providing obvious fan service about a man in the kingdom of Cimmeria who Sonja feels compelled to meet. In other words, this is an alternate timeline to the one Howard wrote about, and along with a different political climate there are very pronounced differences in the cultures of the Hyborian peoples.
The Hyrkanians come across as very generic swords-andsandals villagers. You'd never guess that they were nomadic warrior equestrians. Sonja herself is actually the most Hyrkanian character, but the point of Sonja in this movie is lost her village at a young age, so it feels odd that she's the most Hyrkanian of them all. The moments when she does feel Hyrkanian are pretty great, though. Her horse is a full-fledged major character in the story, and the movie does a very good job of belabouring that. In fact, she and her horse have the most developed relationship in the movie, which is a good thing in this conext.
The thing that made me turn the movie off when I first started it was the way the movie handles religion. For some reason, Sonja and I think the Hyrkanians as a whole, worship a forest goddess that 's basically Mother Earth. It's fine, actually, but I had a hard time accepting it at first, because it just didn't feel like a Robert E Howard god. Howard's gods are mysterious, a little threatening, or sometimes just indifferent (you know which one I mean.) A peaceful Gaia-style goddess just didn't feel right to me for anyone in Hyboria, much less for a people who roam the plains and raise horses.
To sum it up, this isn't Robert E Howard's Hyborian Age, and that's OK. I wish they wouldn't use the names of the Hyborian Age, becuase that only further confuses the pop culture understanding of the Conan universe. But the movie exists, and if you can accept that it's not Conan canon (which arguably ought to be easy, because Sonja herself isn't), and you enjoy sword-and-sandal movies, then this scores pretty highly (not that the competition is all that great.)
A man in Cimmeria, man worth meeting
The plot of the movie is Red Sonja against the power-hungry Draygan, which immediately feels a little contrived. Sonja is just a random "barbarian" (actually a Hrykanian, but in this version of the universe, I think the term is applied to anyone as a perjorative), but for some reason once she's captured everyone's focus is on her. There's no reason for it, but you can lull yourself into believing that she's made an impression in the gladitorial ring (even though the movie explicitly establishes that Draygan takes interest in her from the very start, which is some serious plot convenience, given that she's obviously the only character in the movie that's going to defeat Draygan.)
I get the sense that the screenplay had a lot it needed to convey but was never sure quite how to get it all across in an emotionally meaningful way. Sonja was definitely meant to be a unifying force among her fellow gladiators, but I never felt she earned their allegiance. I can identify the scenes where I think the screenplay thought it was making me believe she was earning trust, but I never felt it. Sonja's own "tragic history" is conveyed through flashbacks that could have been out-takes from Beastmaster or Yar and I'd never know the difference. There were a lot of things that felt either trite or obligatory, and they just don't connect with the audience.
Despite the lack of emotional connection, Sonja is a likeable character in this, and I was on her side the whole time. She's broadly on the "good" side, and says as much when she's talking to her goddess, saying literally "I choose to fight for what I believe in." I thought that was a little on the nose, but then again it does successfully communicate what the character's about. She no mercenary, she's a bringer of justice.
Sonja goes through at least one major change during the course of the movie, and it's a twist I didn't see coming. The proboem with the twist is that, emotionally at least, she starts and finishes her transformation in exactly the same place. She doesn't actually change, she just dies and is reborn with redder hair. When it happens, you think it's a Gandalf moment, and I guess in a way it is. Gandalf doesn't really change that much after he returns as Gandalf the White, so maybe this is the same story beat. Regardless of what narrative function it was meant to play, I enjoyed it. I thought it was a neat trick, because I hadn't expected Sonja to die half way throught the movie.
Speaking of Sonja's death, her killer and co-lead villain is called Annisia, a woman tortured by the voices of spirits of those she's murdered. If you try to fit her into canon, she's sort of the witch archetype, but with an interesting twist that satisfyingly subverts expectations. I won't spoil the twist, although I will say that its reveal is pretty clumsy. Still, she's a cool character, and I found it intriguing to have 2 villains that get balanced screen and story time.
Although I've watched them since Beastmaster, I never had any swords-and-sandals movies I felt great about going back to for a rewatch. Red Sonja (2025) has changed that. It's not an amazing movie, and it's not doing anything to contribute to the canon of Conan, but it's a fun movie with lots of people fighting with swords, and wearing sandals and, in the lead character's case, looking super cool in her trademark chainmail bikini. It's definitely good enough to rewatch, and I've added it to my list of good casual fantasy movies