A Mulher Rei

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.

In some ways this movie feels like a student that is trying to get to the minimum page/ word count on an essay by recycling the same information and presenting it in slightly different ways. In the end it certainly met the metaphorical page count with a run time over 2 hours, but like essays that use filler and don't advance the thesis or plot it receives a poor score in my books.

Despite taking such a methodical approach to building the story it makes a critical error by not building its characters deeply enough. This was troublesome for me as the director was clearly aiming to succeed by displaying the deep human connections that developed between the women. Unfortunately, that success is hindered by the fact that the connection between two characters is not as convincing when each individual character on their own is lacking in depth.

A couple examples where this issue manifests is during the battle scenes. In my opinion, these scenes were some of the more entertaining moments, but there are so many characters that we knew so little about that it was less impactful when one or several of them were lost in battle.

There were some other issues with it that further detracted from its success. The cinematography was unimpressive and some of the fake accents are difficult to understand.

Perhaps I'm too harsh on it with my review because there is nothing about the movie that makes it horrible, but it just lacks in some critical aspects that strongly diminish its entertainment value.

It's odd with all it's patronising preaching that Hollywood are happy to glorify a character and story as long as the character is diverse.

The fact the Dahomey Tribe are the tribe that not only killed their brothers and sisters from neighbouring tribes for dominance ( normally broadcast as a white pursuit ) but also caged their people and sold them to the white slave traders, a fact omitted by " open-minded " kollywood.

Viola's character only became a leader as most of the men had been killed or sold by other communities to the slave trading fleet.

Viola Davis is a superbly diverse actress in terms or her movies and so varied characters. The fact she took this job with the tribe in questions' horrific humanitarian slaughter as well as selling tribesmen and women for goods, cigarettes and alcohol really shocks me. Only in this twisted world would humans who capture, cage and sell their kin be proclaimed as heroic figures and those who buy said humans be monsters.

I only watched 30 mins of this movie and have boycotted the rest in solidarity with victims and survivors of slavery past, present and sadly future.

( The stars are in respect of Viola Davi's and John Boyega )

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.

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.