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.

Poor execution. No character development. Villans are mostly just waiting to be executed.

The most interesting part of the movie is that it says it is based on historic events but it is not.

Dahomey tribe became powerful over a period of time by selling slaves. In the movie the tribe is fighting slave traders. May be they fight some slave traders and help others. The helping part is left out in the movie.

There are high profile actors in the movie but the script does not give them enough screen time to portray their best. But still we can see their acting brilliance in few scenes. I do not want to get in to details of the scenes.

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.

I enjoy history and like to see accurate representations in films. I will say straight away that I intensely dislike films that have an agenda and are incredibly historically inaccurate as a result, e.g., Braveheart, 300, The Patriot. However, I can easily accept and enjoy films a bit historically inaccurate as films primarily exist to entertain, i.e., most Hollwood historical films.

Unfortunately, TWK falls into the former category. If they had stuck to the real story, then it could have been an interesting film about a little-known African Kingdom, particularly with the lovely images of Africa. Instead, they decided to make it as a black female empowerment, anti-European propaganda piece. Sure, slavery is central to the film but with a twist, in that slavery was in place to make money from Europeans, for which Dahomey reluctantly supplied slaves to feed a European need. The truth is that Africans had been supplying slaves for thousands of years to Arabs, Egyptians, Romans, etc, and keeping hundreds of thousands for themselves. Europeans had a relatively 'short' involvement with the African slave trade, and Europe's largest contribution (primarily British) was to end the African slave trade, against the wishes of African kings and slave traders. The female warriors are shown as some sort of Spartan elite, which they were not, as they primarily attacked and seized women and children as slaves and were easily defeated by the French in hand-to-hand combat. In fact, the French lost 6 soldiers killed whilst the Dahomey warriors, including the female 'elite', lost many hundreds killed. The female warriors and their general were misrepresented in the same way that the Waffen SS would be misrepresented if portrayed as peace-loving pacifists!

A good film could have been made of court intrigue or the impact of Dahomey slavers on raided villages, but no, propaganda and politics rules the roost in Hollywood.

It's a story that would be better told through an animated Disney film with an all-encompassing musical soundtrack (maybe it will one day), most performances are fine, although I thought Thuso Mbedu stole the limelight from Viola Davis who looked perpetually glum, while John Boyega added little and was unconvincing in his role. It's the kind of film you'd expect Janelle Monae to pop up in (but sadly she didn't). There are some good battle scenes, but there's little escalation and it doesn't really grab your attention and engage, although it did leave me reflecting once again how disgusting and disgraceful the history of this planet has been, and if a film can do that, then it's not a bad thing - which is what this is, not a bad thing, but not that good either.