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So...I saw the Woman King and...it was a deeply American movie.
As expected: totally historically uncredible. Not just the obvious flipping of the Dahomey into the victorious good guys, but falling victim to the same congenital failing that Western media had since maybe Kirk Douglas's Spartacus framed the man as a proto-abolitionist (though iirc this goes back to Marx) : just a total inability to reconcile criticisms of slavery in practice with criticisms of slavery as such. Or, more generally: an inability to recognize the distinction between bad and evil; things that are bad for us have to be seen as universally evil (the other recent historical epic - The Northman - escapes this problem entirely, interestingly)
In the movie the King - who is portrayed as a progressive - defends himself by stating that Dahomey no longer sells its own people (which some internal slavery critics note is weakening the kingdom in the long run) and is told by his more-progressive general that slavery is an evil in and of itself, and so Dahomey needs to transition totally away from slavery into selling palm oil (something they apparently actually tried and abandoned because it -predictably - was not as profitable)
Characters don't just oppose the oppression of their own, they oppose the oppression of "Africa". They don't just want freedom for themselves, it's about freedom as such. Silly but absolutely predictable for American cinema.
Similarly, the plot is just riven through with standard American tropes. Rebellious girl is too good for an arranged marriage so is sent to the Amazons. There she constantly bumps up against the rules of the regiment since she wants it her way but eventually proves herself (without giving up her independence). There's of course a dashing stranger for her to be attracted to, because sexual taboos (the Amazons are celibate) in Hollywood exist to be strained against.
It's probably because this movie was so distinctly American that I was actually defused and really couldn't care as much how inaccurate it was. In essence it just seemed like a black version of an existing set of tropes that already didn't deserve to be taken seriously. Seen in that light, it was actually pretty fun (my one story complaint is that the lead actress looked far too young and small).
I left the movie wondering if this needed to be a culture war issue at all? Couldn't everyone just written it off as a silly, Braveheart-esque vision of history? It's stupid in very similar ways to other American historical fodder.
I think the movie is an obvious victim of a tit-for-tat strategy: well, you won't let us have our slave-bearing ancestors, you won't let us keep the status but contextualize them as products of their time, they have to be evil. You won't let us white-wash them either, cause that's dishonest. So we'll be damned if we let you create a new set of (mythical) heroic ancestors when we're denied that with people who actually existed and actually were ambivalent about slavery.
Helped along by the insistence of the crew that they were reflecting history - with perhaps the worst possible example (the Dahomey king's quote on slavery is incredible and I can see why everyone quoted it.)
One wonders how differently this movie would have been taken in a world where people didn't try to topple statues of people who didn't live totally in accordance with modern values. I expect the heat would be less if we could all take a sardonic stance towards the past.
It's not a congenital failing, it's an intelligent system working as designed. Kirk Douglas wasn't stupid- his goal was never to "reflect history", at least in the way you understand that term. He was creating Myth; he was creating stories that had consciously developed, esoteric messaging for intended audiences. In this way, he created a story about a Marxist (or crypto-Jewish) hero standing up to proto-Fascism:
This messaging is also conveyed through Christian symbolism. Spartacus is crucified at the end, after prophesizing that the rebellion would one day overthrow Roman (i.e. European) dominance for good. This is not a failing, it's an exercise of an immensely powerful cultural influence through well-crafted Mythmaking that has audiences rooting for the slave rebellion and against Roman civilization.
That's not to say these myths are always well-crafted. Based on your review, Woman King seems less well-crafted than Spartacus, although it looks like it has a whopping 99% Audience Score in Rotten Tomatoes.
It's turtles all the way down. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is very different than what would have been Kirk Douglas's Braveheart. The stories we tell, and the messages we try to convey through our stories, are intrinsically part of the culture war. Even by consciously trying to avoid it, you are merely participating with a different strategy.
It's not simply an American phenomenon either. Famously, Jesus taught in parable. The Movie Theater is, in some ways, the modern day temple.
You are Edward Gibbon, and I claim my five pounds. Damned Christians, sapping the vigour of Imperial Rome with their milk-and-water 'love your neighbour' and 'forgive your enemies'!
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I find this so incredibly, laughably unlikely that going forward I think I will no longer be able to take the Rotten Tomatoes audience score seriously. Movies that have gotten a >90% Audience Score on RT are things like Apocalypse Now and Dark Knight, Blade Runner and Casablanca. There is not a single movie in the top 15 of the list of audience score over 90% on RT that I don't recognize the name of, and I am not a film buff. The first movie whose title I don't recognize is #30, Snatch, which appears to have been included by mistake as in tiny print at the bottom it says it's Audience Score is actually 74%.
For god's sake Star Wars only has a score of 92%. Star Wars. It's ridiculous in the extreme to assert that a mediocre piece of Culture War Oscar-bait has a 99%. Either I am completely, totally out of touch with the modern movie-goer, which I will concede is a possibility, or RT is manipulating the score of the movie. Considering that RT has been mucking about with their Audience Score formula/rules since at least 2019, it seems the more likely explanation is that RT's Audience Score is simply no longer a useful tool if the movie in question touches on the culture war.
I think certain movies are self-selected to get good reviews. It's why documentaries have almost always been very highly rated (throughout RTs lifecycle) even if they're not that good because the audience that would be willing to watch a documentary on a subject they don't have an interest in and also rate something poorly which affirmed their views is very low. I'd bet for a movie like this it's about the same sort of self-selection. People who can sense or an anticipate the presentism or pandering even just from the idea/poster/trailer are unlikely to see it and unlikely to review it. Also, RTs % system is based on if a movie is rated a 6 or higher, that's all. Every 100% RT movie could be straight 6/10 reviews across the board.
You read the first link wrong, Snatch is a 93% audience rating the 74% is for the critics rating. Just like Blade Runner has an 89% on that list because that's the critics' rating, the audience rating is 90%.
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RT verified audience rating 99%, all-audience rating 85%, IMDB 6.2/10.
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The stories we tell obviously have implicit norms attached, but that is not the same as being part of "the culture war". Or, to put it another way: something being political doesn't mean it's polarized.
"The culture war" imo is mainly about a narcissistic battle between two sets of Westerners. Thus things that are relatively uncontroversial amongst Westerners are obviously culturally laden but aren't really part of "the culture war".
"Women can choose their own partner" may be a culture war topic in Afghanistan...it isn't really a live issue in the US.
That's the sense in which I question whether the movie needed to be a culture war issue.
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I'm just imagining 1950s Kirk Douglas Braveheart and yeah, that absolutely could have been a movie of the time. Brave independent hero standing up to cruel English king trying to make a claim on their land? The parallels with the Revolution would have been hammered home (but a bit more subtly than modern messaging).
You could even keep Jean Simmons as Princess Isabella of France 😀
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