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.

This movie makes no sense. The furore around it lead to me research the Dahomey origins on top of watching it. I normally don't mind minor revisions of historical tales if the acting and cohesion can pull through, but once again Hollywood seems to have fallen flat on its face with a rather bizarre take on what seems like the most dubious tribe for enabling slavery and one, that was obliterated time and time again. I'd rather not spoiler it and perhaps suggest you watch it if you want to compare reality but the wholesale value of this movie is action over substance. The fight scenes are good, I'll give it that, but I've personally never liked John Boyega, especially after Star Wars but that's another story. Viola I quite like and I think she probably held this one together, despite being close (but not quite) to an action packed disaster. It's one of those films that had it been more accurate, it wouldn't have been made, but to me it felt like they relied on the action to carry a poorly written revision, so as I say, it makes no sense, just like the title from a comprehension point of view.

I stayed to the end but I wouldn't watch it again. I think if you want to see the action on big screen it's worth a punt otherwise give it a miss.

I enjoy history and like to see accurate representations in films. I will say straight away that I intensely dislike films that have an agenda and are incredibly historically inaccurate as a result, e.g., Braveheart, 300, The Patriot. However, I can easily accept and enjoy films a bit historically inaccurate as films primarily exist to entertain, i.e., most Hollwood historical films.

Unfortunately, TWK falls into the former category. If they had stuck to the real story, then it could have been an interesting film about a little-known African Kingdom, particularly with the lovely images of Africa. Instead, they decided to make it as a black female empowerment, anti-European propaganda piece. Sure, slavery is central to the film but with a twist, in that slavery was in place to make money from Europeans, for which Dahomey reluctantly supplied slaves to feed a European need. The truth is that Africans had been supplying slaves for thousands of years to Arabs, Egyptians, Romans, etc, and keeping hundreds of thousands for themselves. Europeans had a relatively 'short' involvement with the African slave trade, and Europe's largest contribution (primarily British) was to end the African slave trade, against the wishes of African kings and slave traders. The female warriors are shown as some sort of Spartan elite, which they were not, as they primarily attacked and seized women and children as slaves and were easily defeated by the French in hand-to-hand combat. In fact, the French lost 6 soldiers killed whilst the Dahomey warriors, including the female 'elite', lost many hundreds killed. The female warriors and their general were misrepresented in the same way that the Waffen SS would be misrepresented if portrayed as peace-loving pacifists!

A good film could have been made of court intrigue or the impact of Dahomey slavers on raided villages, but no, propaganda and politics rules the roost in Hollywood.

The movie looks awesome and has great acting, love the scenes, but what I find difficult to reconcile was the insistence from this production in stating the movie is Historical, this movie is as historical as Glorious Bastards from Tarantino, the only difference is that Tarantino and crew were not going around insisting that this is what happened, as a fiction movie from it gets an 8th, so why the 3? Well gets a 3 because the production themselves insist that we qualify this movie as a historic piece, and in that matter it fails miserably plus I understand why the Afro-american community was shocked and insulted by Hollywood making a movie about the people who enslave them and went as far as to changing historic facts, so yes, it gets a 3 and will not recommend it if history facts are what you are looking for.

There's a reason this movie wasn't a box office hit. It's not very good. Nor is it historically accurate. Yes there wasa prosperous kingdom of Dahomey and yes there was an army of females. That's it. The rest is all made up. All of it.

Thre was never a woman king. No idea who thought that was a good idea for a movie they try to pawn off as historical! Why not just make a fictional movie and say it's fiction?

Anyway, there are lots of familiar faces and others who are really bad actors.

But that's not the real problem. The problem with the movie is that it's not very good. The action scenes are fast and violent but then there are lulls in the action with people talking and talking and talking and the talking does absoutely nothing to further the plot. One of these lulls lasted a full tenty-five minutes.

It's all just filler until the next action scene.

You never care one bit about any of the characters. It's like a stuffed shirt. Nothing innside.