RED SONJA: QUEEN OF PLAGUES (2016)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I'll get the main objection to RED SONJA: QUEEN OF PLAGUES out of the way: while hypothetically a barely animated motion comic might work for some genres, the genre of sword-and-sorcery needs lots of visceral bloodletting to have its optimal effects.

QUEEN is based on a "Red Sonja" comic issued by the company Dynamite, and written by big-name author Gail Simone. I haven't read the original comic, but given that Simone adapted her own script for this DTV project, I don't imagine that there are any major differences between the two. QUEEN is never more than an average formulaic S&S adventure, but at least it has a coherent plot and characterization, which is more than one can say of many big-screen efforts.

The backstory for this version of Red Sonja is that years ago she was enslaved and turned into a pit-fighter by King Rylack, the Butcher of Zamora. She and one other female fighter, Dark Annisia, survive the pit's rigors. Rylack is driven from his lands by Good King Dimath, who releases both women from imprisonment. Years later, Dimath's kingdom is under siege by a foreign army. His people have lost the will to fight, so he sends for Sonja to train them in the arts of war. Still grateful for Dimath's actions, Sonja also enters the fray when the enemy forces attack. But guess what former ally, whose name sounds like that of Robert E. Howard's "Dark Agnes" heroine, ends up fighting Sonja in the field, and apparently passing on a plague to the heroine? And guess what absent evildoer is actually pulling Annisia's strings without her knowledge?

None of the big reveals are very engrossing, any more than one revealing that there is no plague, just an insidious poison devised by a proto-scientist. Indeed, there's really no "sorcery" here, though in one short section Simone introduces some fish-humanoids that have nothing to do with the main story. But I give the movie a "fair" rating because even though the animation can't portray blood-and-guts, the script does get across the general sense of a brutal world where right and wrong are entirely decided by who can swing the meanest sword.

Simone's script also gives Sonja a new origin only tangentially related to the first version from 1975. The backstory still stresses that Sonja became a mercenary wanderer after her family was slaughtered by ruthless soldiers, but she isn't raped and she doesn't get any special gifts or counsel from any sort of deity. The revised Sonja-history thus eliminates many aspects of the early origin that feminists found problematic. Still, whether Simone or someone else at Dynamite concocted the new story, there's nothing about it to distinguish it from thousands of other vengeance-seeking warriors in popular fiction.