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 Woman King" is a historical drama film that tells the story of a powerful all-female warrior army in 18th century West Africa. Despite its intriguing premise and star-studded cast, the film fails to deliver a compelling and engaging story.

The pacing is slow and uneven, with long stretches of time where nothing seems to happen, followed by sudden bursts of violence and action that feel out of place and disconnected from the plot. The characters are one-dimensional and poorly developed, making it difficult to care about their struggles and motivations.

The dialogue is also clunky and unnatural, making it hard to follow the conversations and understand the characters' relationships with each other. Additionally, the film's attempts at exploring themes of gender and power are heavy-handed and lack nuance, reducing complex issues to simplistic and cliched stereotypes.

Even the production values, which are usually a strength of historical dramas, are disappointing. The sets and costumes are uninspired and lack authenticity, with a noticeable lack of attention to detail that takes viewers out of the story.

Overall, "The Woman King" is a lackluster and forgettable film that fails to live up to its potential. It's a shame, given the talented cast and fascinating subject matter, but the weak script and direction leave little to recommend. Save your time and skip this one.

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.

Dahomey was a tribe in which enslaved surrounding tribes and sold/fueled the slave trade. This movie is a social justice project to fictionalize the past. We're there actual female warriors who defended the king? Yes. Did they perform well fighting the French? No. While it's not that cut and dry. The French had about 5,000 soldiers and the Dahomey had 10,000. The French had 85 deaths from battle and 205 from disease. The Dahomey had anywhere from 2,000-4,000 killed and 3,000 wounded. That's a 70% casualty rate. Not necessarily the fearsome domination depicted in this movie. Don't claim something based on true events when it's clearly not.

This is a historically unreliable movie. And the slavegrowers are exposed as good. The authors hide the name of the product, which the tribe sold, sold slaves to America. They make good people who ritually killed children, cut the throats of children, knitted other Africans and sold them as slaves to America. A pseudo-historical film, the Portuguese who were absent during this time period, and all the action shows a fictional world and actions. They are trying to impose a false story to show that white men are evil. Although this African country was bathed in blood and enslaved other African countries into slavery.