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 Dahomey in real life fueled the slave trade and got smacked the two battles they fought against the French. This movie tries to make the Dahomey heroes fighting against slavery even though they had slave of their own.

In real life the Dahomey barely killed any of the French and instead only raided other smaller tribes to steal women and children in order to sell them into slavery or keep them to work as slaves on their own plantation.

Imagine a movie where the confederacy fought to free slave a from the Union. Sounds crazy right? That is what this movie does takes a group like the Nazis and tries to make them hero's.

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.

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.

This movie is far from the historic facts. That just one of its problems. The acting was meh, and "the message" being forced in the movie is laughable. Look you should not change a whole tribe of people history just to gaslight people. So I blame the writers and the producers for this. We should go into a movie because we want to not because we are scared we might get cancelled. Has Hollywood learn yet to stop attacking movie goers. I guess not since they been doing same thing for decades. So my final thoughts on this movie? It was not good fictional and not based on facts movie. Don't waste your money.