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.

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.

Would have loved the story if they told it more historically accurate. It's clear the writing is lazy and the reason is likely because they hired lazy people. Think about it.. they hired people to tell a story that already exists but they didn't want to tell the real story because that was too difficult so all they got were lazy writers. Learn the real story and you'll discover it's all lies. She was a slave holder herself - owned more slaves than most Americans. The writers went out of their way to not only ignore this fact but turn the movie into propaganda by suggesting she was anti-slave. So the movie is just a scheme.... don't watch it.

This is an insult on those people who were killed/enslaved, sold and used. History should not be rewritten and slavers should never be glorified! It completely baffles me how this movie is excused and celebrated by some people. (But I guess that's what happen when the education system fails people and children grow up learning their entire skillset from social media...)

Hollywood should have create a female empowerment movie about a different story, because this whole thing is just entirely infuriating.

I never would have imagine that one day I will see a movie come out about slavers being the good guys and somehow this should be about empowerment? What are you empowering? Betrayal? Slavery? The exploitation of people who are conquered, beaten, stolen from their homes? This is morally disgusting, no matter how well executed the movie is.

THE WOMAN KING is a fictionalized historical epic about the female warriors in the old West African Kingdom of Dahomey. Set in 1823, the movie tells how King Ghezo of Dahomey uses the female warriors to defeat the African Kingdom of the Oyo Empire, which was allegedly supported by Portuguese slave traders. Viola Davis plays the general leading the female warriors. Several bloody battles occur. Also, the movie alleges that the female general tries to encourage King Ghezo to end Dahomey's own reliance on the international slave trade.

THE WOMAN KING has some impressive production values and solid performances. However, the movie whitewashes the Kingdom of Dahomey, its people and King Ghezo. In reality, Dahomey and Ghezo were very much involved in the international slave trade. Ghezo also engaged in ceremonial human sacrifices and used his female warriors to go into the interior to hunt for captives to be sold as slaves. THE WOMAN KING has an extremely strong Romantic, politically correct worldview with lots of false, leftist revisionist history. Its revisionist history contains lots of bloody war violence that will repel or disturb many viewers.

It's one thing to rearrange some historical details to make a story flow better, in a more exciting manner. However, it's quite another to falsify historical facts or create false straw man arguments to fit a controversial sociopolitical agenda or to whitewash a group or "race" of people so you can demonize another group or "race" of people. In that light, descendants of the people of the Oyo Empire in Africa might have a special grievance or two against THE WOMAN KING since the movie depicts their ancestors to be in cahoots with the European slave traders while it absolves King Ghezo and Dahomey.