How The Woman King can take so many shortcuts and still be over two hours long, I haven’t the foggiest. There’s hardly a single, simple detail that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to oversimplify.
Geographically and demographically, the Kingdom of Dahomey comprises little more than King Ghezo’s palace and court, respectively. Similarly, the large and powerful Oyo Empire is represented by an army so small that, when defeated by the all-female Agojie, Ghezo gleefully declares the end of Oyo rule over Dahomey — after all of one (1) battle.
Since all of the main characters are either royals or soldiers, and the action is confined to only two places (the port at Ouidah and the Dahomean palace; there are other locations, but none, mind you, relevant enough to be given a name), there’s never any sense that anything important is really at stake.
“Slaves” are mentioned quite often, but never seen; like I just pointed out, the only two visible classes are the nobility and the military. We’re left wondering what exactly Ghezo is fighting for, and over whom exactly does he rule.
So small in every way possible is this world that when two key characters turn out to be related, the coincidence isn’t all that surprising, nor is it a surprise that everybody speaks the same language — and I don’t mean fongbe.
According to one Agojie, whisky is “The only thing the white men bring worth having;” that and the English language, of course. She doesn’t say the latter in so many words, and she doesn’t have to, because everyone says it in almost all of the words all of the time.
To put it in perspective, two minor Portuguese characters speak more Portuguese (which is not a lot) than the entirety of the African protagonists speak fongbe.
I’d be willing to suspend my disbelief and assume that the English dialogue is a stand-in for fongbe, but then the script would have to be consistent; you can’t have 90% English and 10% fongbe and claim it’s all the same.
Worst of all, the film itself draws too much unwanted attention to these inconsistencies. Consider this silly exchange this exchange between two characters who are both speaking the same third linguistic alternative to their respective native tongues:
“You understand me?”
“[Yes,] My mother was Dahomey.”
And when Ghezo demands that one of the Portuguese “Speak my language when you are in my palace,” and that language is, once again, English, let’s just say it doesn’t do wonders to establish the proud King’s African identity.
The movie looks almost as inauthentic as it sounds thanks in particular to the aforementioned battle, wherein we discover that along with whisky and English, white men have also introduced computer-generated imagery to the continent. Never mind that fire is so elemental it’s literally one of the four classical elements; when exactly did it stop being fire and become a shitty visual effect?
Add to that the fact that, as far as we can discern, the two warring factions are fighting over a desolate patch of hinterland, and this supposedly decisive battle has about all the urgency of an Age of Empires melée. All things considered, Ghezo’s closing anti-slavery speech can’t help ringing utterly hollow in a film whose African setting is only slightly less phony than Wakanda.
90% of Everything is Crap 