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.

It's not the first time that Hollywood makes a film set in a different culture while showing little respect for that culture or history. Think El Cid with Charlton Heston, Mulan or even Ben Hur. The difference is it is now the turn of African historic characters and events to be butchered. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. After all, artists should be able to take any story and reinterpret it as they see fit. The issue is when you position yourself as a hero for doing it. As if all Africans should be thankful that Hollywood finally decided to butcher one of their stories, and tell it the only way a valid movie can be made: the American way.

While the production design is admittedly strong, everything else is bland and poor, and insulting to African culture. From the costumes to the character motivations to the horrible lines, everything is reduced to a traditional American action movie, and not one of the best. Often times, you have the feeling of watching Mulan or Pocahontas, which are likely the filmmaker's primary film references. It's that bad.

With its unashamed cultural imperialism, The Woman King is a symptom of the worst our times have to offer.

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.

The Agojie warriors played a significant role in Ghezo's campaign for expansion through the export of African slaves. Plus the movie was terrible. Bad acting. Bad story. Boring based off a bunch of lies."How accurate is The Woman King?" we learned that in real life, the Dahomey are much more the villains than the heroes. The Kingdom of Dahomey was a bloodthirsty society bent on conquest. It was customary for the Dahomey to return home with the rotting heads and genitals of those they killed in battle. They conquered neighboring African states and took their citizens as slaves, selling many in the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for items like rifles, tobacco, and alcohol. Many of the slaves they sold ended up in America. They also kept some slaves for themselves to work on royal plantations. The business of slavery is what brought Dahomey most of its wealth. For them, it very much came down to either enslave others or become enslaved yourself.

I wish I hadn't spent my time seeing this because it was a complete waste of time. "YAAAS QUEEN" and "FWEEDOM" does not a good movie make. The scenes in this movie not only go against historical facts but also the tenets of movie composition and basic cinematography. I see reviews saying this movie is "very educational"; I would argue this claim would only hold merit if it was used as an example of how not to film a historical epic. The film makers and the stars of this film, predominantly Viola Davis, should be ashamed to have created such a failure of a film that is meant to be based on actual history. This movie is akin to defending slavery and I highly recommend you do not watch this film, as I unfortunately had the displeasure of doing. Not entertaining and not educational at all.