entertaining from start to finish, with a great amount of ruthless and authentic action scenes mixed with well-paced character development that makes you genuinely care about the people on screen. viola davis is unsurprisingly amazing, playing a hardcore and seemingly emotionless leader until she starts letting you in, and lashana lynch and thuso mbedu are brilliant supporting characters and i hope to see a lot more of them in the future. the score was slightly confusing as it seemed to not line up with what was happening on screen and dissipated the tensity of some scenes that without score would've felt very intense. my main issue was that it seemed to focus more on crowd-pleasing elements rather than celebrating how extraordinary and ferocious these women were. there were 2 storylines that felt so 'hollywood' and didn't need to be there, which isn't necessarily a bad thing because you want people to enjoy the film first and foremost, but when you have a premise as original and exciting as this one, it did seem at some points to be a bit 'oh i know where this is going' and a bit of a missed opportunity at portraying this (slightly fabled) moment in history . but regardless, it's an epic that will be easy to rewatch and tells a story that needs to be heard, and the fight scenes are really fucking cool.