owenthurman

Red Sonja (2025). Sword and sorcery fantasy about a young woman who is captured and made a gladiator by the emperor threatening to invade her beloved forest.

This was an absolute joy. I cannot say whether it was good, but I had so much fun, and I'm so glad I got to see it on the big screen on the one (1) day it was in theaters. This movie has all the classic sword and sorcery cheese melted on top of a big ol' overpowered hero(ine)'s journey. Matilda Lutz stars as Sonja, and she is very hot and has great big eyes full of feelings. The other place I know her from is the lead in Coralie Fargeat's movie Revenge, so it kinda seems like she got cast here for her ability to run around being badass in her underwear, but she's great at it, so!

I need to stress that Sonja is hilariously overpowered, and it's fucking delightful. Sometimes you just want a woman beating the shit out of bad guys who are hurting animals. (I love that her first important character note is having a soft heart for the funky CGI fantasy rhinos.)

There are also some other characters! Emperor Dragan has a surprisingly complicated backstory about being a slave child who invents a bunch of new technologies, is probably gay, and is maybe fucking his giant mandrill-guy captain. Annisia is Dragan's star gladiator-turned-concubine except they don't sleep together, and she is haunted to the point of incapacitation by... ghosts? mental illness? who can say. She gets a surprising amount of focus and has a lot of very pointed chemistry with Sonja, and I will say my only disappointment is that the movie didn't really take that to any kind of logical conclusion. And also there's Osin, hot fellow gladiator and Sonja's nominal love interest, who's honestly very charming, not least because he takes no more attention from Sonja than he ought to.

The CGI is dodgy, but the scenery is lovely, and some of the casual worldbuilding is a lot of fun. (What's the deal with the mandrill people, anyway?) There are a lot of horses running everywhere when they should be walking. There's a whole thing where Sonja sings one of the songs of her people, and according to the credits it's a traditional Irish folk song.

There's also a bunch of plot, which you can discover for yourself once the movie's on streaming at the end of the month, which you should absolutely do. Again, I do not promise that this movie is good, but if any of what I've said sounds like fun, run do not walk.

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Weapons (2025). One night, a bunch of children ran out of their houses and didn't come home again.

This is Zach Cregger's sophomore outing after Barbarian, which came out three years ago and which I liked quite a lot, partly for tackling a lot of chewy thematic material and partly for its absolutely fearless disregard for conventional Hollywood narrative structure. I would not say Barbarian was entirely successful at what it was trying to do or that it even knew precisely what that was, but boy it was trying a lot of things in a lot of directions, and it gave me a lot to think about.

Weapons, by contrast, feels more conventional and generally more successful in its aims, but those aims are so much less interesting to me than Barbarian's. It doesn't appear to have any themes it's trying to tackle at all. It feels like Cregger decided he just wanted to make a fun horror movie about [spoiler]. And I'm not opposed to that! I think overall Weapons is a lot of fun and definitely has its good points. However, I wish it'd shown some more ambition.

I also wish it had any sense of character development in it. The gimmick is that this movie is being told from successive overlapping perspectives of more or less the same time frame. This is absolutely my shit; I love stuff like this. (In this Cregger reminds me a bit of early Christopher Nolan, who also loved weird structural stuff in his movies.) Unfortunately, I didn't feel like these multiple perspectives really built to anything other than eventually revealing the mystery. We get to reevaluate certain characters as we go, but there's only one character who feels like they get any kind of arc to speak of, and we don't get to dig into that character until halfway through the movie. There's no one like Tess from Barbarian who acts as an emotional throughline for the audience.

( spoilers )

Overall: less messy than Barbarian, less ambitious, not quite as pee-your-pants scary (there's nothing on par with the multiple tunnel scenes in Barbarian), but a fun time and still enough creativity and interesting angles on things to keep me looking forward to more movies from Cregger. And from the box office numbers, it looks like we will definitely be getting more from him. Yay.

I signed up for Battleship this year, my second time, knowing that I would leave for vacation nine days in. That seemed fine, since I figured eight days of Battleship would probably be enough for me, and then I burned out in six days. 😅 Still, I received some things and I wrote a bunch of things, and as always the team atmosphere was very fun. I'll put the stuff I wrote in a different post.

Things I received:
no alarms and no surprises by ElasticElla, Suspiria 2019, Susie/Madame Blanc, 800 words. A trippy little post-canon piece, and the one gift I received for one of my requests.

Dirty Water by darkrosaleen, Jaws/The Witch crossover, Martin Brody/Thomasin, 900 words. I got offered this in DMs (as someonetimes happens in Battleship), and the combo was so wild I couldn't resist.

Wrist Day by Nary, Letterkenny, Jonesy/Katy/Reilly, 1.5k. A very silly PWP with the humor and voices of the show, which I adopted when it was offered up on discord (as also sometimes happens in Battleship).

Meme yoinked from muccamukk and sholio, because I can never resist a list.

( big list )

( musings )

At long last I have been reading again! A tiny bit, mostly on airplanes!

Wild Spaces (2023), SL Coney. A boy's grandfather unexpectedly moves in and disrupts the boy's contented family life; also the boy might be turning into a monster.

I hated this! Unreservedly! This has pretensions of being literary, the kind where nobody gets a proper name except the dog, and the focus is entirely on small, sad family drama seen through the eyes of someone too young to correctly interpret all the details. The fact that the grandfather eventually turns out to be a shapeshifting eldritch horror who murders the boy's parents and his dog did not make me like it any better. Then the boy, who inherited the eldritch shapeshifter gene, murders his grandfather and reflects he is now alone in the world, an inhuman monster with only a transforming revived dog for a companion. Okay!!!

Deeplight (2019), Frances Hardinge. Born and orphaned on one of hundreds of islands who used to worship sea gods until the gods all killed each other a few decades prior, youngster Hark is determined to save his friend(?) Jelt from himself, the law, criminals who are rightfully angry with him, and being transformed into something unimaginable, all whether Jelt wants to be saved or not.

On one hand, I found the toxic friendship at the center of this story pretty difficult to read. Jelt is such a manipulative asshole, and there was so many points where I just wanted to get Hark away from him. OTOH, the execution is very strong, and I think it's probably a really good theme for kids to read about and think through, so A+ there.

But really what I am here for and the reason multiple people have recced this to me is the stuff with the sea gods, and friends, that stuff is very good. The gods when they lived were all enormous, all different, all awesome and horrible in their own unique ways, and I loved everything about them and how they played into the story. Hardinge's worldbuilding never disappoints, and it's fantastic here while also tying into bigger themes that feel very salient. But mostly: fucking amazing eldritch horrors.

In terms of sheer joy the story brought to me, this is probably now my second favorite Hardinge after Cuckoo Song.