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Babe-alicious comic-book favorite Red Sonja is about to get a woke makeover because Hollywood just can’t help themselves — but I can help you save eight bucks or whatever on watching a movie that fantasy fans are willing to hate even before it starts filming.
Red Sonya of Rogatino might have been the fantasy genre’s first female genuine badass. Originally written in 1934 as a gunslinging 16th-century Russian redhead waging a one-woman war against the Ottoman Empire, she was recast by Marvel Comics in 1973 as a sword-and-sorcery heroine.
Both Conan the Barbarian and Sonya were the creations of Robert E. Howard. She and her Marvel Comics doppelganger were fleshed out, as it were, with the prurient interests of teenage boys in mind. Red Sonja’s signature outfit is a scale armor bikini. Because that’s practical.
Well, no — but it surely did the job of fueling adolescent imaginations.
There was a 1985 movie version that boasted impressive fantasy flick firepower, including title star Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Kalidor, not Conan), and ’80s action queen Sandahl Bergman. Plus, of course, Nielson’s Sonja-worthy physique. It still sucked. Nobody has been waiting with bated breath these last 39 years for another cinematic go at Red Sonja.
We’re even less thrilled by the prospect of Woke Sonja, coming later this year.
Playing the title character for the new outing is Italian actress Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, probably best known for a 2017 gross-out revenge thriller aptly titled, « Revenge.
