A United Kingdom

At first I thought this movie would ruin this story. It's a painful, yet hopeful and loving chapter of African history. This is NOT a love story. If people should come to watch this movie hoping for a "love conquers all" plot... They should be very disappointed. And I'm fairly glad for that. I congratulate the director, Amma Asante, for rendering this story into the big screen with delicacy and respect to all involved. I thank her for realizing all this story was NOT, and putting it out for the public from the first frame. I also love her for showing almost everything this story was about, without going into great detail.

This movie is based on the true relationship between the King of (now) Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama, and a white British woman, Ruth Williams. Today we might know Ruth and Khama as leaders in the fight for the country's independence (since it was, when they married, a British protectorate), but their struggle started way sooner. Their story became their country's story. A fight for their right to choose.

It's not about their love. It's about his choice, not to marry within his tribe's customs, and her choice, to up and leave her home, building herself a new life from scratch. It's about a country's choice to their leader - and how much the world hates him, her and the country for the nerve to demand their voices be heard with such fire.

Amma Asante thrives on sewing up Seretse and Ruth deep within the political setting, in a beautiful dance, until we cannot see the lines between them. She also shows how much resistance change can face - and overcome. Their marriage becomes a set of lens for the viewer to analyze strength and frailty confined in this tiny world full of hope. And it gets you going.

Rosamund Pike and Daniel Oyelowo are simply superb. His performance here is stronger than Selma's, which is saying something. And though Pike had less screen time than Oyelowo, her presence is felt throughout every scene. It doesn't fail. Pike gives a poignant performance of a true turnaround in life, and she gets us engaged with her every move. She doesn't have to show her face; every spin this movie gives gets the viewer thinking about Ruth's reaction, thanks to her powerful deliverance.

With that power couple, I thought the supporting cast would be weak and acceptable... I was surprised. Again. Tom Felton, Jack Davenport, Laura Carmichael (why, hello, Lady Edith!), Terry Pheto, Vusi Kunene, Jessica Oyelowo and Abena Ayivor, to name a (very) few, were splendid in their roles and really brought the tension between marriage and politics alive.

Cinematography is delightful, which goes really well with the dazzling music score. The somber tones of post-war London are contrast to the joyful sounds and colors of the southern borders of Africa; yet you hear pain in their laughter as well as you see smiles in British tears. Everything is designed to really bring the viewer there and then.

It's an interesting and delicate take in a true story, that happened not so long ago. It's a solid 7, because of historical inconsistencies throughout the film (the lasting of the protectorate, Indian's ruler at the time of independence, and so on), but it's definitely worth at least a screening.

This is an outstanding film about a story I knew nothing about. However, my review is more a review of IMDb and its voting system.

I note that this film has, at the time of writing twenty-two 1 star reviews. Maybe these are genuine but I suspect they are not. For one thing the film has not had many screenings so have as many as twenty-two different people really hated it that much?

Secondly, 1 star films do not get selected for the Toronto Film Festival or for the opening night film for the London Film Festival. The programmers and selectors of these highly regarded festivals are at the top of their game and each year they are offered several thousand films. None of them are going to risk their hard fought reputations on selecting a bad 1-star film.

My feeling is that these 22 people are members of the KKK who hate black people or else they are people who are jealous of the those involved in the production.

Either way IMDb needs to have an algorithm that can deduce whether these people are genuine, or not. Maybe they are and the press reviews so far, which rave about the film, are wrong, but maybe these people are racist bitter bigots who hate the success of others because they themselves are failures and they have nothing better to do in their small sad lives but set up false IMDb accounts and vent their spleen in the only way they can.

Time as they say will tell.

The English film A United Kingdom (2016) was directed by Amma Asante. It's an interesting love story, based on real events. David Oyelowo plays Prince Seretse Khama, a young African man studying law in London. Rosamund Pike plays Ruth Williams, an intelligent, fun-loving civil servant. They fall in love, and we know that their marriage will be a difficult one, because of prejudice both in England and in Africa.

What we don't know is that their marriage has implications far beyond each of them. In 1947, South Africa was gearing up for its apartheid program. Bechuanaland was a British protectorate, and Seretse Khama was its rightful prince. However, South Africa borders Bechuanaland, and the South African government refused to tolerate a mixed race couple in a neighboring protectorate.

That meant that not only did Seretse and Ruth face prejudice from the people around them, but they were pawns in an international standoff in which Great Britain was willing to sacrifice them to appease South Africa. What happened next became the plot of the movie.

David Oyelowo is a superb actor. So is Rosamund Pike. Ms. Pike has 42 movie credits, but I believe the only other film in which I saw her was Pride and Prejudice (2005), in which she portrayed Jane Bennet. I reviewed that movie for IMDb, and wrote that her performance was "luminous."

Director Asante is skillful, and the acting and cinematography are wonderful. We saw the movie at the excellent Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. It won't work quite as well on the small screen, because the film has some breathtaking scenes of the African desert.

For some reason A United Kingdom has a dismal IMDb rating of 6.7. I don't understand this--it's much better than that. Find it and judge for yourself.

A United Kingdom is a true and gripping tale which handles it true historical source material with aplomb. With fantastic performances from Oyelowo and especially Pike, the central characters plight is beautifully illustrated. It's not perfect; some of the writing is a little clunky, but the character chemistry is there, and you leave the movie theatre feeling like a part of the story.

Quite how this movie receives the rating it does is completely beyond me. I can only imagine that half the voters didn't in fact see the movie.

I love it when a story is told that many of us haven't heard of or known much about.

Although possibly oversimplified due to the necessity of keeping the movie within a normal viewing time, nonetheless, it's a very good story about an amazing piece of history.

Well acted, well directed and beautifully filmed, this is a film I'm very happy to have seen. It's an inspirational look at enduring love and intelligence, at people power and a nation's faith in their leader, as well as credibly showing yet again how the British Empire and their bevy of crooked prime ministers deem to destroy nations for greed and profit, and to boot, having the gall to treat anyone but themselves as underdogs.

An excellent film for what it is and I would recommend it.