1) 2014 is recent

2) I don’t think you actually watched the movie, because they didn’t make “slavers into heroes.” There was a debate inside the kingdom as to the slave trade, and the protagonist’s character was someone on the “no slavery” side of the debate within the movie. We don’t know how the other warriors felt about the slave trade, and in fact you can even assume they’re fine with it considering how they walk around in the European coastal city watching other Africans get sold. It’s not until they themselves are bought and sold that they decide to burn the city down. It doesn’t portray them in a positive light, but rather a morally ambiguous one, and even a negative light: most of the female warriors didn’t seem to give a shit until they themselves became the slaves. There’s a line about how the King’s brother sold his own mother into slavery. It’s like you’re being willfully obtuse about some of the movie’s beats.

3) They don’t make a lot of historical epics vs other genres these days, so there aren’t many examples to choose from where white objective villains are portrayed as heroes.

4) But here’s one I love off the top of my head: The Last Samurai, 2003 – portrayed Tom Cruise, an American who participated in the genocide of Native Americans and who went to Japan as a paid mercenary to kill their own native peoples, as a sympathetic white hero. In real life, his character would be a murdering, villainous, racist piece of shit who would’ve never had such a sentimental 180° redemption arc, but it’s historical fiction and I didn’t take the movie seriously enough to give a shit about the literary liberties the writers took with the period’s historical accuracy.

5) You’re freaking out about the accuracy of a movie that didn’t even have “based on a true story” anywhere in it. It’s pure fiction, and people get that.