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.

Damn, it's hard to diss a movie that so much work went into, and where so many great performances were offered.

But the disgusting way that the writers have turned villains into heroes and sold a fake history lesson to the public cannot be overlooked.

This country was a despicable, slave-owning, slave-trading, totalitarian regime and its Amazon army, composed of girls who were themselves enslaved as children, were how the country captured its slaves.

Viola Davis is great as the fictional character she plays and the whole thing looks spectacular but none of this matters a damn because its all a cash-grabbing lie.

The Dahomey in real life fueled the slave trade and got smacked the two battles they fought against the French. This movie tries to make the Dahomey heroes fighting against slavery even though they had slave of their own.

In real life the Dahomey barely killed any of the French and instead only raided other smaller tribes to steal women and children in order to sell them into slavery or keep them to work as slaves on their own plantation.

Imagine a movie where the confederacy fought to free slave a from the Union. Sounds crazy right? That is what this movie does takes a group like the Nazis and tries to make them hero's.

Terrible movie. Bad acting. There are much better movies to watch. Story line is typical. Could have made this movie better, but they choose a certain message and certain actors and actresses. In the world of action movies and heroes, this one didn't make the grade. Directing was OK and the cinematography wasn't too bad either. But the whole story line and premise of the movie has been done before and isn't interesting. I'm sure there are people that will find it interesting and entertaining, just wasn't me or the 3 others that watched it with me. I certainly hope they don't do a second one.. cause I won't watch it.

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.