The Woman King

The Woman King (2022) is a movie my wife and I caught in theatres last night. The storyline follows an African kingdom with a new(er) king in 1823 who posses the only female army in Africa. The leader of the female Army has a past that haunts her but the respect of her king, enough to be on his council. She strongly urges him to avoid the slave trade and find alternative methods of riches. Meanwhile, those who do believe strongly in the slave trade look to march on the kingdom and bring them down. A new recruitment class to the female army brings brashness, new ideas to defend the kingdom, and the female leader's ghosts back to the forefront...

This movie is directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) and stars Viola Davis (The Help), Thuso Mbedu (The Underground Railroad), Lashana Lynch (No Time to Die), Sheila Atim (Doctor Strange: In the Mouth of Madness), John Boyega (Star Wars: Episode VII-IV) and Jimmy Odukoya (Mamba's Diamond).

This movie has so much depth and contains a great primary plot and even better sub plots. The writing is remarkable, thorough and very impressive. The character's inner demons are well portrayed as is their struggle to overcome them. The acting is out of this world across the board. You feel for every character; and if anything happens to anyone, you feel personally hurt. The villains were also excellent as is the outcome of each of them. The settings and cinematography is outstanding and there is impressive use of lighting. The action scenes are remarkable and the fight choreography is award winning caliber. My only complaint is an awkward love story that is obviously in here to show maturity and self discovery but I could have done without it.

Overall, this movie has literally everything you'd want in a movie - tremendous action, great villains, self discovery and character triumph. I would strongly, strongly recommend seeing this movie and score it a 10/10. We loved it.

In some ways this movie feels like a student that is trying to get to the minimum page/ word count on an essay by recycling the same information and presenting it in slightly different ways. In the end it certainly met the metaphorical page count with a run time over 2 hours, but like essays that use filler and don't advance the thesis or plot it receives a poor score in my books.

Despite taking such a methodical approach to building the story it makes a critical error by not building its characters deeply enough. This was troublesome for me as the director was clearly aiming to succeed by displaying the deep human connections that developed between the women. Unfortunately, that success is hindered by the fact that the connection between two characters is not as convincing when each individual character on their own is lacking in depth.

A couple examples where this issue manifests is during the battle scenes. In my opinion, these scenes were some of the more entertaining moments, but there are so many characters that we knew so little about that it was less impactful when one or several of them were lost in battle.

There were some other issues with it that further detracted from its success. The cinematography was unimpressive and some of the fake accents are difficult to understand.

Perhaps I'm too harsh on it with my review because there is nothing about the movie that makes it horrible, but it just lacks in some critical aspects that strongly diminish its entertainment value.

"It's true and real" a direct quote from one of the cast members of this film.

Why don't we do some changing of history too.

The British Stopped dahome from doing the slave trade.

Oh wait no that's true.

Let's try again The women warriors of Dahome stopped the slave trade

No that isn't true Well that's what this movie seems to think happened.

It feels like a history teacher who hates white people made this movie, lying, changing, history.

Here is a summary of what actually happened.

In 1851-1852, the British imposed a naval blockade on the ports of Dahomey in order to force them to end the slave trade.

Ah so it wasn't the women warriors who stopped it I see..

If The Woman King's only issue we're the fact that it presents itself as a "true story" yet is about as historically accurate as Space Jam, that would be one thing. (I'll get to this later.)

Unfortunately, aside from the committed performances from most of the cast (especially Viola Davis), this is also one of the clunkiest narratives I've seen put to screen in some time.

The romantic subplot is rushed and entirely without substance or feeling. The central young woman Nawi supposedly has a traumatic past that we are barely told about, and she has no character growth at all. She wants to be a soldier, so she does. She's arrogant and disobedient at the beginning of the film and continues to be like this to the end.

Davis's character Nanisca has an arc-at least on paper. She is emotionally closed off due to trauma and then decides not to be. But this change happens within two minutes of screen time and occurs off screen. It's kind of hilarious how unearned it is.

The story has no actual fleshed-out antagonist. There are a couple of villainous persons but their goals are vague at best and cartoonish at worst.

All this could occasionally fall to the wayside if the action sequences were good. But this film has some of the worst action I've seen put to film this year.

Nearly all of the fight scenes are exceptionally clumsy in how they're shot and edited. Far more often than not, the shots consist of our heroes swinging at someone off screen or so visibly for away from them that it's obvious to anyone with functioning depth perception that no actual strike took place.

Equally as often is the occasional shot in which the enemy soldiers literally-and hilariously-just patiently stand there waiting for the good gals to come take them down.

Okay, now for the elephant in the theater: the insulting historical "basis" for the film.

For a movie that wants to bemoan the evils of colonialism, the filmmakers really are colonializing the culture of nineteenth century west Africa.

How? By paving over the Dahomey's centuries-old historical acts of human sacrifice and voluntary brutal enslavement of both their own and foreign people. The writers slap their 21st century feminism on top of a historically brutal culture and call it a day.

In reality, the Dahomey would have scoffed at the idea of ending the slave trade, as they only stopped trading slaves in the mid-19th century because the British forced them to stop. But this film depicts most of them as freedom-fighting abolishionists and acts as though the slave trade didn't exist until Europeans invented it. This is nonsense.

Imagine if there were a film made today about the American civil war in which the confederates were portrayed as freedom-fighting abolishionists who had slavery forced upon them by the north.

This would be rightly condemned, so why aren't people enraged at the convenient erasure of uncomfortable history that is propagated by this film?

It's a largely incompetent piece of filmmaking, and it's an insulting, culturally offensive piece of writing.

It's shameful.

First of all, this movie does not have any historic resemblance. The sad truth is that Dahomey tribe was actually slaved and also, they were part of the slavers that went on killing and capturing rest of the tribes. This movie is trying to sell the idea, that only white people were bad, but the history is telling us differently.

Movies should show the TRUTH, what ever that truth might be. Movies are there to teach us, so that history may never repeat it self!

By forcing falls truth on people, that will not change the past, but only confuse people more. Would not watch it, movie is nicely filmed but story line is crap.