THE WOMAN KING

From the moment Gina Prince-Bythewood became a director, her strength has always resided in her commitment to love stories. In her films, sumptuous twilight passions happen on a basketball court, they occur between generations, on the ladder rungs of show business, and between immortals. They center Black women carrying power and interiority, while finding strength within themselves, and often, other Black women. With her Netflix produced film, “The Old Guard,” she continued those themes on a grander scale. But nothing in her filmography can wholly prepare you for the lushness of her latest work.

In going into “The Woman King,” a big-hearted action-epic whose major challenge is being sincere and historical while fulfilling its blockbuster requirements, you might feel some hesitation. Especially in a cinematic landscape that prizes broad statements on race over sturdy storytelling. You might wonder how Prince-Bythewood can shape a tale centering the Agojie warriors—an all-woman group of soldiers sworn to honor and sisterhood—hailing from the West African kingdom of Dahomey, when one considers their hand in perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade. It’s a towering task approached by Prince-Bythewood and screenwriter Dana Stevens with gentle sensitivity, and a fierce desire to show Black women as the charters of their own destiny.

…But when “The Woman King” works, it’s majestic. The tactile costumes by Gersha Phillips (“Star Trek Discovery”) and the detailed production design by Akin McKenzie (“Wild Life” and “When They See Us”) feel lived in and vibrant, especially in the vital rendering of the Dahomey Kingdom, which is teeming with scenes of color and community. Terilyn A. Shropshire’s slick, intelligent editing allows this grand epic to breathe. And the evocative score by Terence Blanchard and Lebo M. gives voice to the Agojie’s fighting spirit.

At the start of The Woman King, Viola Davis (Nanisca) lets out a war whoop that sends her all-female army into battle, mercilessly wielding spears and machetes. It takes nothing away from Davis’s typically fierce performance, as a fictional 19th-Century African general named Nanisca, that the film’s true star is its director. Gina Prince-Bythewood doesn’t make a wrong move as she orchestrates all the elements of this action-filled historical epic, filled with vivid characters and cultural resonance. Known for the character-driven Love and Basketball (2000) and the action movie The Old Guard (2020), Prince-Bythewood blends the strengths of both films to spectacular effect in The Woman King.

…The Woman King is about strength and will, about independence and abolishing slavery, themes that Dana Stevens’ screenplay announces too bluntly at times. “We are the blade of freedom,” Nanisca yells, inspiring her troops into one more battle. But Prince-Bythewood never lets social themes get in the way of crowd-pleasing action. Especially in the film’s last section, the battles are relentless and kinetic, as the camera takes us inside the hand-to-hand combat, with warriors plunging spears into bodies and slicing throats. This is not benign, cartoonish action. There are Agojie deaths, the price of being a soldier.

In 2019, Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o travelled to Benin for a television documentary about the real Agojie, Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o. She admires the Dahomey women’s strength while acknowledging what she calls their crimes of human trafficking, pointing to the need for truth as well as the part movies can play. “The role of fantasy is to create the heroes that we cannot have in the real world, because people are complicated,” she says. The Woman King leans toward fantasy in its heroic moments, but is rooted in truth about war, brutality and freedom. It is a splashy popcorn movie with a social conscience.

Film Facts

• The actors trained for four months before shooting to get in shape for the action sequences: every day, they would lift weights for 90 minutes, and then trained for three and a half hours with a stunt coordinator, where they learned martial arts, how to use swords and spears, and did some cardio.
• While the Agojie are very much real—they existed for over a century—they also have inspired plenty of interpretations in pop culture, perhaps most notably the Dora Milaje in Black Panther.
• The film’s title comes from the fact that the people of Dahomey believed in a legend of two kings, a man and a woman who are exact equals, and Nanisca is expected to be crowned a Woman King, hence why the film isn’t simply called “The Queen” or something similar.