The Woman King
An hardcore family drama veering into political intrigue, with some PG-13 action scenes for the ratings. Worth it for the massive fuck you in the face of several conservative movement, I bet many people blew a gasket at the poster alone.
Maybe its historically inaccurate, everybody knows matriarchal societies, woman warriors, slave rebellions, abolitionist movements, all recent woke inventions that have no place in the early 19 century. Racism wasn’t even invented yet!
About as inaccurate as most medium budget films about the 19th century, at least there’s an ethos. It’s better this than some anodyne milquetoast liberal propaganda. Yes, Brianna is not an African name, but it’s more important to homage an innocent murdered by cops in her own home.
The protagonist is the Darth Vader of an underdog regional power in the Nigeria-adjacent area, somewhere around the west coast of Africa. Regional rivals are struggling for control of the land for centuries, but the wildcard in the European slave trade that upsets the balance of power by arming factions against other factions.
Both kingdoms get so much of its revenue in the slave trade, wars for prisoners are constant. Some advisers see this as an immoral trade, even rival tribes are their people, in a larger sense. Our protagonist wants to repel this external threat and shift the economy into selling commodities like palm oil, or gold.
Our protagonist is so well regarded, she disobeys a direct order but still gets a bunch of followers to kick the slavers’ asses. They do, the raid goes well, their prisoners are freed, and they fuck up the slavers outpost, which means they can’t sell slaves even if they wanted to. For this policy shift, our protagonist is rewarded with co-kingship, like the name of the movie implies.
The personal plot runs sort of parallel. The other protagonist is a bratty kid that refuses all husbands her family arranges. This last one was even worse, after being slapped our protagonist fights back, so the marriage is annulled. Her father had enough, and dumps her in the palace so she can be a warrior.
This is actually what she always wanted, she is immediately taken under the wing of an older woman that shows her the ropes and provides useful advice she ignores. Her arrogance knows no bounds, she talks back to her leader and even rigs some training strawmen to explode on impact. This makes her noticed at the top.
The warrior chief watches our protagonist intensely, and she reminds her of her own daughter, a product of rape she decided to give away to keep her warrior position. Before that, she marked her with a shark tooth beneath the skin, and lo and behold, this little kid is her daughter! They keep this secret to avoid a major kerfuffle.
The protagonist is also in a forbidden relationship with some half-slave slaver, some guy that came from Brazil to inspect the merchandise, but has a change of heart when he sees his ancestors as sovereign kings, not just slaves. His transformation is not fully complete though, his emancipation is timid.
The final slavers outpost raid is actually to free our child protagonist. She was captured during the main battle against the rival tribe, where they won their freedom from tribute. They are an independent nation now.
The film is filled with ocre imagery but not many landscapes, establishing shots, and B-roll, which means it was mostly filmed in a sound stage, this is not Lawrence of Arabia.
The main problem are the ridiculous PG-13 battle scenes, why go for absolute brutality if you want this to be clean? Focus on the drama as you want then.
The second main problem are the Portuguese accents, they are hideous! It’s Fast Five-levels of cringe, cut it out! If their native language was coded as English with Nigerian accents (ah-ah eh-eh, as Little Miss Jocelyn), make the Portuguese talk something else, it’s just embarrassing. There are some lines I simply did not understand.
Maybe some of the “historical accuracy” crowd did not like they had modern elastic underwear beneath their cool battle costumes, but if this is PG-13, there’s no way to avoid it. I also think censorship is bad.
Those are core problems, but nothing that seeing Viola Davis acting the fuck out cannot balance. The whole cast does a good job, particularly the little protagonist.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.