With social justice advocacy being the main marching order for Hollywood, the movies that it releases are next to guaranteed to be leftist message carriers. Nine times out of ten, these flicks are going to follow certain rules that make them predictable, boring, and insufferable.
One of the more popular defenses to a lack of viewers and copious criticisms is to claim that the film suffers from some societal lacking. Racists, sexists, and bigots are just so populous and so powerful that any movie featuring “diversity” or “women’s empowerment” is automatically trashed, bashed, and discarded.
Never mind the movies with primarily black casts and women-led films that do well. It’s the white patriarchy’s influence over society.
Spoiler alert: It’s not.
(READ: The Reason Social Justice-Infected Shows Fail Isn’t Racism, It’s Actually Much Simpler)
The release of “The Woman King” has awoken this fight on the internet once again. The film is facing controversies left and right and the usual defenses have been mounted. However, two things about the movie stand out like a sore thumb and both of them are lies. The first is about the film’s subject and the other is about how it’s being received.
To give you a heads up, “The Woman King” concerns the story of a real-life African kingdom of “Dahomey” in the early 1800s. The focus is put on an all-female warrior group called the “Agojie” and their efforts to stop colonialism and slavery.
Only that’s not what happened historically and both the right and many in the black community seem to be finding issues with it. In fact, it spurred the creation of the hashtag #BoycottWomanKing on Twitter.
According to Bounding Into Comics, many are angry about the portrayal of the main character and her tribe as heroes when really they were brutal enslavers of their fellow Africans:
In reality, the Dahomey were one of the most prominent slave trading states of their time.
According to History vs. Hollywood, the Dahomey not only “conquered neighboring African states and took their citizens as slaves, selling many in the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for items like rifles, tobacco, and alcohol,” but it was their engagement in this trade that “brought Dahomey most of its wealth.”
Regarding the Agojie themselves, the website notes that “The Agojie (women warriors) fought in slave raids along with the male fighters.”
“There are accounts of Dahomey warriors conducting slave raids on villages where they cut the heads off of the elderly and rip the bottom jaw bones off others,” History vs. Hollywood further details. “During the raids, they’d burn the villages to the ground. Those who they let live, including the children, were taken captive and sold as slaves.”
It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the slave trade that the left loves to bring up as the reason white people should feel continuous guilt actually had an African nation with an all-female tribe involved in the sale and movement of Africans across the Atlantic. Moreover, they brutally murdered anyone who wasn’t useful during these raids.
There are other complaints as well. The movie follows the rules of modern woke films. John Boyega plays a king but he’s neutered in order to make the women around him seem more powerful and independent. This makes the film pretty predictable and wildly unbelievable.
The second lie is taking place in the reviews.
As Ryan Kinel of RK Outpost noted in a recent video, audience reviews have this film at a whopping 99 percent, which is ultra-rare for Rotten Tomatoes. As of this writing, the score still stands.
However, as Kinel points out, this score seems a bit off when you head to other websites. On IMDB the score sits at 5.9/10. On Metacritic, the film is only 2.8.
To be fair, the film brought in $19 million box office in its opening weekend, making it the number one film in America, but even with that level of participation, it’s highly unlikely that the film would achieve perfect scores on Rotten Tomatoes is saying it’s getting.
We have to wonder why Rotten Tomatoes is doing this and/or who is paying them for it.
In the end, this is an absolutely perfect example of Hollywood going to extremes to push a lie in the name of social justice. This tribe’s status as noble freedom fighters is about as realistic as their film’s Rotten Tomato score. Moreover, they are willing to glorify African slave traders just because they had female soldiers, making it clear that one of the worst sins in human history is forgivable so long as you have the right skin color and genitals.