The Woman King Reviews

Since I kept hearing some pretty good things about this film, I was quite eager to check it out. Eventually, even if I’m not a huge fan of ‘Black Panther’, without the success of this Marvel installment, it is doubtful that this movie would have ever been greenlighted. Anyway, I thought the damned thing was incredibly inspiring and also terribly heartbreaking. Indeed, as pointed out in this movie, back then, the African nations seemed to be fairly prosperous but the slave trade completely crippled this whole continent and you might wonder if they will ever recover from it. Basically, the various tribes would wage war, make prisoners, sell these prisoners as slaves, buy more guns (of course, from the slave traders) and start all over again which was obviously a dark and vicious circle. What’s so hard to swallow, at least for me, is the fact that, in the mean time, the European countries and the US became so rich in the process and, basically, our current comfortable lifestyle is the results of this ‘business model’. Unfortunately, even though it was a nice touch that King Ghezo was displayed as a wise monarch who understood this problematic, it did seem to be too good to be true and it was indeed actually made up for this movie. Of course, the other uplifting thing was to see all these amazing black women kicking some major asses. Above all, it was just impressive how Viola Davis, at almost 60 years old, was so convincing playing this fearless leader. Eventually, the only real issue was that they kept adding so many sub-plots and, as result, the whole thing did feel unfocused and rather random but there is no doubt that it was always entertaining to behold. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was maybe not a masterpiece, it was still pretty neat and much more rewarding than most of the blockbusters delivered by Hollywood nowadays and it is definitely worth a look.