Hacker Cinema
The Woman King
2022 · Film · 135 min
Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood
The story of the Agojie, the all-female unit of warriors who protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s with skills and a fierceness unlike anything the world has ever seen, and General Nanisca as she trains the next generation of recruits and readies them for battle against an enemy determined to destroy their way of life.
3 negative1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
>That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only
I was referencing the text as a whole with more varied examples there including the bit about making the main character black.
>And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.
Honestly I think an movie on asian mythology or medieval china or japan with american demographic inserts would draw criticism as well. And there's a reason we don't see it in the woman king or the like (which twists extremely in other ways some may deem progressive or woke)
>By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women.
Yes they do. It's right there in the odessey. What was written out of the movie for example? Most of the maidservants being killed on oddyseus's return because of their disloyalty because Nolan said it was misogynistic. And in that bit about the backwards archaic values Emily points it out herself how to make it less 'backwards' nolan distorts the story without mending it in a sensible way. Beyond that he condenses in a way that doesn't favour focusing on these individual women (and various other characters which she cares less about) in a way that Emily would like according to her sensibilities. Same with not ommiting other bits so he can lay bare and focus on the victims of war rather makign them just opponents to the protagonist.
> The point of the book is that religious fanatics can take over even in the USA
That's her point. My point are the gymnastics done to substitute Islam with Christianity. If her work was the exception, with lots of other made-into-Netflix-miniseries works warning of Sharia, I would share your opinion.
It gets even more skewed than Handmaid's Tale: The Woman King was perfectly fine depicting things that happened "far away", to "other people", "a long time ago". What the films was not fine with was accurately depicting the African kingdom of Dahomey as slavers, and the French as (belatedly) fighting against slavery. So the film simply reversed their roles [1].
For a more topical example, look at how the Apollo affair [2] made it into popular media: Israel stole plutonium from the US for their weapons program. It inspired the book Sum of All Fears, in which the plutonium was instead stolen by Palestinians. By the time it was made into a star-studded movie, the villains became Neo-Nazis.
There is always some artistic excuse to justify these politically useful alterations.
[1] https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/woman-king/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair
Interesting website. I was rather shocked by the Woman King entry - I knew that historical films like to take liberties, but did not think they had the audacity to completely reverse the roles of heroes and villains, or in that case, the pro- and anti-slavery sides.
> Surprisingly
Nothing about this is surprising. When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
Free speech is simply not the main value of what can loosely be called the left. Nor is historical truth or even opposition to slavery, as a review of The Woman King [0] (and the film itself, casting Black slavers as heroes and White abolitionists as villains), and alternating ignorance of or apologetics for the historical Middle Eastern slave trade [1,2,3,4] or present-day African slavery reveal [5].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967317
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade
[4] How Islam moderated slavery - https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slavery_1.shtml
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa - nominally they are against it, yet reserve all their moral outrage and rhetoric only for cases when whites were slavers. The 600 thousand dead, sacrificed in the civil war to end slavery, failed to appease them.
> Ironically, Dahomey’s rehabilitation is undercut by the demonization of Oyo, a fascinating society in its own right.
How naive of me to think the article might also lament the demonization of Europeans, whose role in this conflict was flipped upside-down, from fighting to abolish slavery, to fighting to preserve it. The article excuses it with "Why, then, should “The Woman King” be held to a moral standard ignored by the thousands of period dramas about violent Western states" - proof that even the worst historical lies will be excused as long as they harm the correct group.
> Viola Davis’s new feature is a rousing tribute to the world’s only all-female army. But how true is the story it tells?
To save you reading the drawn-out article and its tepid conclusion: as true as a civil war movie where the North fought to impose slavery on the South.