According to its star Matilda Lutz, the upcoming Red Sonja film will be seeking to abandon the “male-gazed orientation” of the heroines’ previous and original adventures in favor of a narrative that is overall “very women-empowered”.
Lutz, who audiences may best know for her starring roles in 2017’s Revenge and 2021’s Zone 414, offered this insight into the chainmail-bikini-clad warrior’s next cinematic outing while speaking to CBR‘s Tessa Smith ahead of the South by Southwest premiere of her new film, Magpie.
Pressed by Smith for any and all information she could tease about the film, the actress asserted, “So, what I can tell about Red Sonja, is that the first ones and the comics were [made] with a very male-gazed orientation. This is a completely different story, and it’s very women-empowered, which I loved about the script.”
Unfortunately for fans of the crimson-haired heroine, this is not the first time that this next Red Sonja has thrown up such a red flag regarding its narrative direction.
Speaking to Variety in honor of her being ranked fifth on the 2023 entry of their annual ‘10 Screenwriters to Watch‘ list, the film’s scribe, The Witcher: Blood Origin writer Tasha Huo, teased that the Red Sonja would provide audiences with both stories of “great female friendship” as well as a glimpse into “how women uniquely survive out in the world”.
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Interestingly, despite this ‘feminist’ bent to its story, Red Sonja producer Les Weldon told Collider that the film “is also a little bit of a, I don’t wanna say a darker take, but a little bit darker take than you would expect, certainly compared to the original Red Sonja.”
However, despite the film offering such a ‘little bit darker take’, its director M.J. Bassett has confirmed that it will abandon perhaps one of the most harrowing elements of her 1985 silver screen adventure: Her sexual assault by a gang of bandits.
“I have no interest in fictional women who use [rape] as an engine of motivation,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Johnson in January 2023. “It’s not a strong motivation. She’s just a human being in the world of femininity.”
Further, though details as to Red Sonja‘s exact plot currently remain under wraps, according to a summation of Bassett’s words provided by Johnson, the film will “be an allegory for more existential questions around the survival of the species in the face of climate change.”
Directed by Bassett, whose filmography includes both Solomon Kane (2009) and Silent Hill: Revelation, and starring Lutz as the titular heroine and The Umbrella Academy actor Robert Sheehan as her nemesis Dragan the Magnificant, Red Sonja is currently set to slice its way across the battlefield sometime in 2024.