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 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.

Davis's performance could not make up for the children's fairy tale script. In 2022 this is just embarrassing for women, for Africa, for everyone. It is as if they could not decide which issue of women they'd wanted to discuss, so just did them all. Less 'd been more.

After like 10 minutes I realized that the actresses had to be oiled, because otherwise they could not have shot it. And that is the almost the only revelation of this movie. The other one being the very convenient choosing of time period for the film. In 1823 the south-Americans can be the bad slavers, while only a a few years back half of the "civilized" world bought Africans form other Africans, what is quite minorized here.

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.

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 )