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Notes -
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.
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