But if you have, I bet it's for another movie that triggers right-wing trolls like The Woman King triggers them.
Now I should say, I wasn't a big fan of The Woman King. I don't remember all the reasons at this point, but I can promise you, it wasn't because it puts Black people in a position of power, defending themselves against the encroachment of white imperialists. (I'll get to one of the reasons, which I think is valid, in a little bit. But there is already enough sabotaging of this movie on Metacritic that I don't want to start out this piece that way.)
The discrepancy between the 77 critic score and the 2.8 audience score is jarring enough, but it becomes even more so when you convert the latter score into numbers. Among the 446 user reviews, 112 are positive, 21 are mixed -- and 313 are negative.
And most of those negative reviews are scores of zero.
Come on, trolls. You're not fooling anyone.
You obviously didn't even see the movie, because why would it benefit your world view to even give it a chance?
Here are two of the examples of what "people" -- as in, maybe Russian bots -- have said about The Woman King, just limited to what appears on the front page:
"Hollywood has no shame and would fake any insane story to attract [sic] woke audience."
"Honestly is just the regular woke racist crap as usual from the leftists."
Yeah, there's that W word rearing its head as well. Didn't some idiot conservative politician recently say that the biggest problem facing the world was woke culture? Maybe they all said it.
Because I was curious how much energy went into making a movie people liked look like a piece of shit, I decided to drill into the negative responses and see how many zeros there really were.
Audience scores start being considered negative at a score of 3. The Woman King has five scores of 3, five scores of 2, 17 scores of 1, and that means ... carry the one ... 286 scores of 0.
Give me a moment while I burst out laughing.
If you are a serious movie person using these sites in a responsible way, you would never give a movie like The Woman King a zero on a ten-point scale. It is competently made. It has rousing fight scenes. At least some of the acting is indisputably impressive. Zero stars is what you give The Room, and only if its amateur terribleness doesn't bring you a sense of joy. It's not what you give The Woman King.
I didn't bother sifting through the actual text of this copious quantity of zero scores, but I bet there would be racist dog whistles throughout.
The thing is, the reason I had The Woman King on my mind today was because I did, indeed, not like it very much, and the idea of whether Viola Davis should have received an Oscar nomination over Andrea Riseborough came up again on a podcast. But for me, not liking it very much means 2.5 stars out of 5. It doesn't mean 0 stars out of 10. (Incidentally, I don't have an actual opinion on the actresses' comparative worthiness for an Oscar nomination because I have not seen To Leslie.)
I came to Metacritic to read an intelligent takedown of The Woman King, and instead I got ... this monstrosity. Which makes me really want to watch it again and give the things I didn't love about it the highest possible benefit of the doubt.
I promised I'd tell you one, so here it is.
There's a moment in the last 30 minutes where Davis' character comes to some realization about feelings she's been having. I wish I could remember the actual dialogue she speaks to another character, but it involves her breakthrough that she has "denied the child inside her," or something along those lines. In other words, totally bogus 20th or 21st century psychiatry speak from a self help book, not a thought a person would express to themselves 200 years ago -- especially not a person unacquainted with western critical thought, especially not a person defined by training herself as a warrior, denying all other potential distractions in the process.
For me that moment was emblematic of other failures in the film, which led to a mildly negative experience.
Checking out the more trustworthy part of Metacritic's offerings as they relate to this movie, I was less dispirited, but still somewhat dispirited, to find the critical bias leaning so far in the other direction. Of the 53 critic reviews that had been tabulated, 49 were positive, with only four mixed and none in the dreaded red. I clicked on the lowest score of 40, issued by critic Kyle Smith from The Wall Street Journal, hoping I'd hear my muted impression of the film echoed back at me.
I couldn't read more than the first 150 words of the review because I hit a paywall, but I also realized ... The Wall Street Journal is a right-leaning organization. So I've got to take this critic's perspective, even as carefully shrouded as it was within some opening praise for Davis, with a grain of salt.
But should I be taking all these perspectives with a grain of salt, not just the negative ones? I started wondering whether there was some truth to the accusations of excessive wokeness by those on the right, whether they might have their finger on a real trend, even if they didn't actually watch this specific movie. If, indeed, any progressive critic is too shy to say anything negative about The Woman King because it would be failing some sort of woke litmus test. And any critic from a right-wing organization has to go more negative just to compensate.
And that by not loving The Woman King, I am somehow aligned with these people.
It's really troubling that we live in an age where if you like something that is mediocre but has honorable intentions, you must love it to death, in order to fight off the people who hate it so much, they'll go to any lengths to drag it through the mud.
It seems that The Woman King is an ideological battleground as much as it's a battleground between Africans and European invaders.
