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.

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.

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.

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.

This movie is a complete reimagining of history.

Once again trying to convince people that history I somehow subjective. The tribe this movie is based on were slavery. They were not the heros or the victims. They murdered, enslaved, and sold other Africans at every chance they could get.

Not to mention that they lost a war where the other side took little to no casualties.

This movie belongs in the fantasy section since the only people who could possibly believe it was remotely true are living in a fantasy.

Stop trying to re-write history and gaslight everyone who appreciates history for what it is.