The Woman King Review: Turning Violent Slavers Into Heroes, One Lie At A Time

What do you call a historical epic that omits key details to the story to avoid telling the truth…a fantasy.

“The Woman King” is the name of Hollywood’s latest fantasy film masquerading as a historic fact and there is a strong possibility that the film will be showered with awards next year. Of course, it has nothing to do with the quality of the movie. It’s all about what the film represents.

“The Woman King” is the textbook definition of “revisionist history.”

If you look at the face value of this movie, this is a film that brings to life the feminist wet dream of a group of strong black women, playing the role of men, beating up men as heroes against European slave traders. In reality, this is a film that might go down as one of the biggest whitewashings in cinematic history.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood and screenwriter Dana Stevens combine to present moviegoers with a film that is as historically accurate as a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Set in the West African kingdom of Dahomey during the slave trade of the 1820s, “The Woman King” follows the all-female group of warriors called the Agojie led by their General Nanisca (Viola Davis), who protect the kingdom run by King Ghezo (John Boyeda) who is a King in name only. Nanisca trains a new generation of female warriors to fight against slave traders, European slave traders to be specific.

Let’s pause here.

This is the biggest problem with the entire premise of this movie. The filmmakers attempt to turn the Agojie and Dahomey into the heroes of world history as warriors who fought against slavery and oppression when history states that the Dahomey tribe was amongst the most prominent slave traders of their time.

This is an excerpt from the website History vs Hollywood which gives important insight into the tribe that this film glorifies, pay close attention to the last sentence:

“The Agojie (women warriors) fought in slave raids along with the male fighters. There are accounts of Dahomey warriors conducting slave raids on villages where they cut the heads off of the elderly and rip the bottom jaw bones off others. During the raids, they’d burn the villages to the ground. Those who they let live, including the children, were taken captive and sold as slaves. The movie strategically downplays this part of Dahomey’s history, so as to not complicate the story with the truth.”

The true history of the female warriors that Hollywood attempts to immortalize was too uncomfortable for the filmmakers because the truth got in the way. When the Agojie in the film are running down Europeans and Americans as “slavers” and “oppressors”, the film doesn’t want you to know that this tribe was home to some of the worst slavers in African and world history.

The same Atlantic slave trade that modern progressives hold over the head of white people born during the age of PlayStation is the exact same one the heroes of “The Woman King” killed to protect, so in this “historical epic” they decided to get rid of the truth by creating false idols. When you understand that the narrative is a sham, everything else about this film falls apart.

John Boyega plays the King of Dahomey who is emasculated by woke revisionist storytelling. The idea that in 1820s Africa, a King would not only allow LGBT people to serve in his leadership but would allow insubordination by his female soldiers is downright fanfiction. Not even the King’s own wife respects his authority, this is feminist storytelling 101. The only way to prop up women as “equal” to men is to tear down men and make them inferior to women.

“The Woman King” distracts you from its rewriting of history by giving you a story of Viola Davis playing the reluctant mother of a Nawi played by Thuso Mbedu. Nawi is our unofficial protagonist who is young, brash, and defines authority; a common theme for the film. Nawi defines the traditional role of a woman given by her family and is given away to become a soldier for the King. The melodrama in Nawi and Nanisca’s relationship is only outdone when Nawi gets a biracial Brazilian trader as a love interest in an angle that goes nowhere because, with progressive storytelling, heterosexuality isn’t allowed.

It’s never a good sign when the week that a film is released, the star of a movie is trying to guilt audiences into supporting a movie in the face of another woke Hollywood box office bomb.

According to Viola Davis, refusing to support this movie is supporting the narrative that black women cannot lead the box office globally. Perhaps that narrative is true, maybe the rest of the world isn’t interested in giving their money to Hollywood’s latest attempt to replace men with women while blaming the 19th century for their 21st-century shortcomings, just because a black woman is on the poster.

The comparisons to Marvel’s Black Panther movie are inevitable, especially with a female-centric Black Panther film on the horizon that was directly inspired by the female warriors of “The Woman King.” However, Disney’s portrayal of Wakanda, a fictional nation is more rooted in reality than anything that this film presents on screen.

The takeaway message of “The Woman King” is don’t let the truth get in the way of a good fantasy.