As I have not yet seen the movie, I can't really comment on its quality. However, it sounds as if the film's creators cherry-picked aspects of Solomon Kane's character to suit their vision for the character, and in doing so, managed to twist facts about Kane as written by his creator, Robert E. Howard.
As conceived by Howard, Solomon Kane was a puritan adventurer (a bit of an oxymoron) who was driven- for reasons never fully explained-- to hunt down evil wherever he might find it. There was no book about Kane written by Howard, only several short stories, short story fragments, and three poems. However, at various times over the past years, publishers have gathered these writings into a collected volume.
Most of Kane's adventures took place in Africa, where the majority of the people he encountered were, indeed, pagans. He also wandered England, France, and Germany, as well as parts of the Americas; most notably Patagonia, South America, where he had a fictional encounter- based on an actual historical event- with Sir Francis Drake.
As written by Howard, Kane was a humorless wanderer who was not on a mission to convert pagans to Christianity or, alternatively, kill them for failing to do so. He generally would encounter some wrongdoing and then set out to punish the wrongdoers. In fact, in "Red Shadows," the first published tale featuring Kane, he is determined to track down a group of bandits who have killed a young girl. He tracks their leader, a man known as "Le Loup," across France and to Africa.
Neither Le Loup nor his band are ever described as pagans. And Kane's pursuit of them is driven more by the desire to avenge the death of the girl then anything else.
And nowhere in Howard's writings was there any hint at an origin story as the film's producers have apparently created. Nor was there any hint in Howard's stories of any religious progaganda. Kane's Christian roots were pretty much just background to the character's personality.
That doesn't mean the film producers might not have had some kind of agenda, but I can tell you Howard's only agenda in writing the Solomon Kane stories-- or any of his other characters' stories-- was to get published, entertain the readers, and get paid.
reply
share