द वुमन किंग

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.

The Woman King is one of those movies they make en masse these days - solid production, solid action, solid acting, boring story - and a running time that is far too long for the story provided. I would cut at least 30 minutes, maybe 45, and it would for sure improve the movie. These days it looks like it's all about quantity and not quality - thanks to cheap digital recording. Anyway, the story and characters never really draw me into the story and the combat scenes are average choreographed, nothing remarkable here. I really can't imagine that someone will remember this one in a few years. Verdict: just another mediocre affair.

It's not a bad film. It does mangle history beyond all belief.

The Dahomey didn't stop capturing, enslaving and selling captured fellow Africans because of a sudden attack of conscious. They did it because the British Royal Navy shut down all forms of trafficking in the Mediterranean and West coast of Africa from the early 19th century onwards. Dahomey, now Benin, ceased as a kingdom in 1904 as a direct result.

The film is weak in the first hour, but gets better in the second. Direction and script are poor, the fight sequences are heavily choreographed to the point of being quite laughable. Overall the production lacked a little grit and believability.

If The Woman King's only issue we're the fact that it presents itself as a "true story" yet is about as historically accurate as Space Jam, that would be one thing. (I'll get to this later.)

Unfortunately, aside from the committed performances from most of the cast (especially Viola Davis), this is also one of the clunkiest narratives I've seen put to screen in some time.

The romantic subplot is rushed and entirely without substance or feeling. The central young woman Nawi supposedly has a traumatic past that we are barely told about, and she has no character growth at all. She wants to be a soldier, so she does. She's arrogant and disobedient at the beginning of the film and continues to be like this to the end.

Davis's character Nanisca has an arc-at least on paper. She is emotionally closed off due to trauma and then decides not to be. But this change happens within two minutes of screen time and occurs off screen. It's kind of hilarious how unearned it is.

The story has no actual fleshed-out antagonist. There are a couple of villainous persons but their goals are vague at best and cartoonish at worst.

All this could occasionally fall to the wayside if the action sequences were good. But this film has some of the worst action I've seen put to film this year.

Nearly all of the fight scenes are exceptionally clumsy in how they're shot and edited. Far more often than not, the shots consist of our heroes swinging at someone off screen or so visibly for away from them that it's obvious to anyone with functioning depth perception that no actual strike took place.

Equally as often is the occasional shot in which the enemy soldiers literally-and hilariously-just patiently stand there waiting for the good gals to come take them down.

Okay, now for the elephant in the theater: the insulting historical "basis" for the film.

For a movie that wants to bemoan the evils of colonialism, the filmmakers really are colonializing the culture of nineteenth century west Africa.

How? By paving over the Dahomey's centuries-old historical acts of human sacrifice and voluntary brutal enslavement of both their own and foreign people. The writers slap their 21st century feminism on top of a historically brutal culture and call it a day.

In reality, the Dahomey would have scoffed at the idea of ending the slave trade, as they only stopped trading slaves in the mid-19th century because the British forced them to stop. But this film depicts most of them as freedom-fighting abolishionists and acts as though the slave trade didn't exist until Europeans invented it. This is nonsense.

Imagine if there were a film made today about the American civil war in which the confederates were portrayed as freedom-fighting abolishionists who had slavery forced upon them by the north.

This would be rightly condemned, so why aren't people enraged at the convenient erasure of uncomfortable history that is propagated by this film?

It's a largely incompetent piece of filmmaking, and it's an insulting, culturally offensive piece of writing.

It's shameful.