Education is great — it is necessary as a foundation for knowledge of anything and everything in this world.  But it is also highly selective.  Until I saw The Woman King I was completely unaware of the African kingdom of Dahomey, or the Oyo Empire.  Or the Agojie, the fierce Amazon warriors who protect Dahomey and end the slave trade that plagues Africa in the nineteenth century.  My midwestern education never revealed any of this to me.  Thank goodness for the movies.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s film introduces us to the Agojie, female warriors of Dahomey, who use spears, machetes, knives and incredible martial arts training to defeat the male warriors who threaten Dahomey’s existence.  A young woman, Nawi (Thuso Mbedu), joins the warrior force and gradually proves herself worthy.  General Nanisca (Viola Davis) works to change Dahomey from within, persuading King Ghezo (John Boyega) to withdraw from the nation’s practice of selling slaves to Europeans in favor of farming palm oil, but such change will not occur without a battle.  A big battle.

Part of this story feels like revisionist history, since the Dahomeans were, according to brief research, active participants in the slavery trade for a long time.  But eventually, during the reign of King Ghezo, they did end the practice.  The movie does not reference the human sacrifices they made through the years.  But the story, which originated with producer Maria Bello, is essentially true, and is quite dramatically staged and enacted.  These women sacrifice everything to their duty, a dilemma made clear by the incisive and clever script — although it is a bit daunting that the language they speak is sometimes akin to pidgin English.

This is what movies can do so well — show us something or somewhere we’ve never seen before, that we could never have imagined.  In that regard The Woman King is an amazing movie.  It repaints global history with new color and perspective.  Yet it also plays like a female ninja training movie, which is also kind of cool.  The mixture is somewhat odd but thoroughly engrossing, especially when Izogie (Lashana Lynch) is on screen.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  17 January 2023.