The Woman King | Viola Davis, John Boyega | Premiering at TIFF! | Sept. 16, 2022

[jimisawesome]

On 9/18/2022 at 4:54 PM, Nikostar said:

The Anti woke crowd are really pissed right now on YouTube. They are mad people saw this film.  Even bring up the IMDB and Metacritic score while interestingly ignoring RT verified score and Cinamascore and Letterbox score. Did they really think people would boycott a film?

 

You do know that the "anti-woke" side here are people pissed that a movie written by white people favorably about a tribe that kidnapped black people and sold them into slavery, right? 

[Krissykins]

Just back from the film, it was excellent. 
 

What a cast.

[DAJK]

Top 5 movie of the year so far for sure.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

Saw it in a very early UK preview.

 

What a great film. Lordy the youtube babies who had their picks out for this one must be crying into their porridge with this. Or they will conveniently avoid actually seeing the film so they pretend their critiques hold up. Literally everything they whined the film wasn't going to address was not only addressed, but the lynchpin of the film. The film was nuanced to a huge extent and bar one little speech at the end where the philosophy of pan-Africanism was evident in a couple of lines to a slightly meta extent this was an immersive experience that avoided bringing in too many modern sensibilities.

 

It pulled the tricks of Hollywood historical epic, but much more to the 'artistic license and needed-simplification' Ridley Scott side than the 'just make stuff up for kool points and never imply there's nuance' Mel Gibson side

 

Viola Davis is as good as you would imagine her and Thusu Mbedu and Sheila Atim are both outstanding, with Mbdedu demonstrating clear future leading lady potential. BUT for me the two revelations in this film for me are Lashana Lynch and John Boyega. These are rich, complex, dynamite performances that are two of the best I've seen this decade. Boyega has to balance so much into his screen time - maybe the hardest role in the film given how much he has to convey and the relationships he has to balance - and he does so brilliantly. Lynch has no archetype for her character - there is little equivalent to what she is doing in other films of this type. It is an original creation and it's incredible. 

 

This and The Northman produce an astonishing 2022 "fear the past" historical double bill.

 

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

On 9/20/2022 at 4:54 PM, jimisawesome said:

 

You do know that the "anti-woke" side here are people pissed that a movie written by white people favorably about a tribe that kidnapped black people and sold them into slavery, right? 

 

Okay so let's deal with all of this just so that it's dealt with in one go.

 

"Written by white people"

 

Okay, now either we are consistent with this complain or we aren't. This film is directed by a Black woman, Produced by a collection of people including Black women, and the star whose vehicle this is and will have had a lot of control over the film is a Black woman. The writer and the co-writer are White. Do you have a problem with this or don't you? I don't. If you do have a problem with this and you want Black-dominant or African-set blockbusters to only have an exclusively Black crew and team I'd want you to justify that and/or suggest how to source that many young Black talents to do so. OR we can just acknowledge that a good, solid foundation of demographic representation is important but doesn't need to be all-encompassing and move on.

 

"About a tribe that kidnapped black people and sold them into slavery."

 

- The Patriot favourably shows a tribe who then went on to commit genocide of Native Americans.

- Master and Commander favourably shows an imperialistic Navy.

- Almost Every Western favourably shows people committed to manifest destiny - one of the most evil concepts in history.

- Hero favourably shows the idea of totalitarianism as a necessity 

- As literally pointed out already in this thread, Das Boot shows actual Nazis in a favourable light as far as resilience and individual acts of heroism.

 

I can continue. Firstly, any historical drama will be portraying a people who have done terrible things and who have living enemy groups because EVERY extant people group have done terrible things and have living enemy groups.

 

Secondly,

Spoiler

Literally the African internal slave trade is unambiguously shown in the film and the first act of the film features a Dahomey attack and subsequent selling of the male prisoners to European slavers. This film in general is a MAINSTREAM MOVIE That UNAMBIGUOUSLY shows African kingdoms and leaders facilitating the European slave trade to such a degree that the Europeans are just showing up in ships and picking them up in port towns. It unambiguously argues that the Dahomey, the Oyo and by implication many African tribes were convinced that the way to settle centuries worth of blood feuds and conflict was the easy fix of sending the warriors away for cash and goods. This kind of nuance and historical accuracy has NEVER been shown in films before. These conversations have NEVER hit the mainstream outside of mainland Africa. How on earth is this a bad thing?

 

Edited September 22, 2022 by Ipickthiswhiterose

[Eric Duncan]

TBH, I do think even with the film's acknowledgement of the slave trade that it wasn't handled perfectly.

 

Spoiler

The movie wraps everything up in a bow with the white man gone, when there's still turmoil that happened after the fact deliberately ignored for a happy ending. I also think the rival tribe being portrayed as one-dimensionally evil is also weird. We're humanizing one tribe that sold slaves, but not the other? Still, I've seen far more egregious examples of inaccuracy out there.

 

[DAJK]

Tbh the only people really bitching about this movie (and I don’t mean complaints like @Eric from Progressive where they’re looking for ways the movie could have handled things better, but I mean LEGIT bitching) are angry 15 year olds on twitter who have no idea how politics or filmmaking work.

[Krissykins]

16 hours ago, DAJK said:

Tbh the only people really bitching about this movie (and I don’t mean complaints like @Eric from Progressive where they’re looking for ways the movie could have handled things better, but I mean LEGIT bitching) are angry 15 year olds on twitter who have no idea how politics or filmmaking work.

Also racists and misogynists. The first time they’ve cared about slavery.   

[Borf the Borf]

Clicked wrong thread lol

Edited September 23, 2022 by Borf the Borf

[WittyUsername]

Looks like the trolls are trying to discredit the movie’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes now. That’s pretty pathetic. These people have taken audience scores as gospel when it came to something like Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, but now they’re claiming it doesn’t count when it goes in the other direction. 

[Eric Duncan]