“It’s not about whether the British troops had any right to be over there fighting in the first place, attempting to colonize and consume every country in it’s path… They were just following orders, fighting for their country.”

Don’t mean to get political, but isn’t this a little contradictory? They were fighting for someone else’s coutry, not their own. And “just following orders” is the least honorable defense of a soldiers’ actions.

I wonder why it is that Hollywood’s never seen fit to produce a movie in which the British/Americans or some other western country are attacking an inferior number of non-whites, only to be beaten. Like the American indians against the European invaders. Instead the indians are cast as savages attacking the peaceful wayfarers and today any movie about the slaughtering of the indians always tries to portray the whites in as sympathetic a light as possible, as if the violence was some aberration rather than policy. We shouldn’t be taking wars of aggression and genocide and trying to vault them to the status of valorous deeds.
If this movie had wanted to be honest it would have portrayed the Zulus as they were, an agrarian society of mostly farmers and artisans who were pounced on by Europeans hwo wanted what they had and were willing to do anything to get it. Were these the Germans attacking the British or Americans I doubt we’d be avoiding showing how evil the Germans were. Instead we’d be cheering how “honest” the film was in “showing how it really was and what the Germans were like back then.”

I meant that the soldiers were fighting for the orders of Britain. It’s the men in power that should be criticized for them being over there… what else could the soldiers do?

I agree with what your saying mostly though but that’s why I champion Zulu for what it was attempting to achieve by being mostly un-biased, and I think it does a remarkable job.

I’m not sure they were portrayed as being savages, only at a few lapses was that hinted at, but I think that was more the p.o.v. of some soldiers in blind panic.

I was talking to my Girlfriend about this the other day, and IMO it seems the further we get away from the horrific events of WWII and as the last brave veterans of the war are increasingly becoming fewer in number… I believe we are really starting to look at those times with more clarity, rather than just saying “Hitler was evil”, etc.

Great movies like Der Untergang (The Downfall) which I realize is a German movie (which is even more remarkable in many ways actually) show him as a fully formed person rather than a caricature.

I understand your perspective, but I would like to go a step further. There’s two old sayings about history. The first is that history is, for the most part, a lie agreed upon. The second of course, is that hsitory is written by the winners. You may or may not be aware what movies like Zulu mean to many people, especially those who like it. They see it as fantasy on the screen, historical pornography, where their sick fanstasy of the race war is played out, always with the “right” outcome. Of course reviweers like you rewrite the intent of these movies, and try to cast them as nothing more than a straight-forward comparison of combat. I’ve read many reviews of this movie on DVD over at Amazon.com and it was pure race-hatred on display. One reviewer had said she was glad the film wasn’t “politically correct.” But when she listed what the criterion for that was she said the film didn’t make any attempt to explain what they were fighting about or to explain what the africans thought of the British occupation. And she was PROUD of this! After lauding how the film butcherd history for the sake of making the villains seem like the good guys, and deliberately throws out why the Africans were trying to repel the Brtish invders the reviewer (who just got through applauding the flim for not bothering to explain the reason for the fight) then goes on to recount how the british were up against savages who only a few days before had killed 1,500 Brit soldiers. So it’s not okay to say what the Africans and brits were at war about unless you only give the British take on things? This isn’t history, it’s propaganda. And it says a lot about whites that this is what they’ve been reduced to: beating their chests like Tarzan when some blatantly fictional movie is made casting them as the heroes and their victims as the villains. In what other case can you think of occupiers who enslaved a nation being celebrated as heroes? This isn’t Saving Private Ryan, it’s Birth of a Nation.
You should also know that the British occupation of South Africa led directly to the apartheid regieme that followed. When you celebrate this film, you celebrate that. apartheid led to hundred of thousands being murdered, including children, and it only ended sixteen years ago. The echoes of British imperialism still ring in the present.
You mentioned 300 in your recommendation but do remember that the Persians did not have slavery, the Greeks however did. The Greeks fought for “Freedom!” Which, like the Confederate army meant the freedom to own slaves. Zulu is in the same category.
The folks who cheer for these kinds of movies see it as validating their twisted beliefs about themselves. They label the truth as “politically correct” and call lies, distortions and obfuscations “bold storytelling.”
And I repeat my earlier point: at what point do we see a historically accuarate film that portrays the wars the Europens waged against the Africans, mexicans, East Indians, or the Chinese and does from their perspective instead of the Europeans? Being in the US I’d like to see a movie about the war agasint the American Indians (broken treaties, small-pox laced blankets, poisoning the water supplies, spreading new diseases the Europeans brought with them that the indians immune systems weren’t prepared for) and then how it led to defeat of the psychopathic Gen Custer. There should be no attempt made to make the whites sympatheitc or to have the token “good” white, which we all know was no more real than Santa Claus. Instead show it as it was -a holy war by the Euros to take what wasn’t theirs. Dances with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans etc are very careful to make sure that the systematic genocide of the whites against the indians is portrayed as a few bad apples and the by-products of a mostly benevolent government. The truth of course was exactly the opposite. The US government was backing the effort the same way the Sudanese are backing the “militias” in the Darfur. And whites weren’t sympatheitc -they saw the land as their, granted by God, and they were simply taking what was theirs and wiping out the heathens. Gee, if we showed history from any perspective other than the white one it would be pretty damned ugly, wouldn’t it?
Amazingly Spike Lee gets assailed every time he makes a movie.
Where is the film that shows the 19th century through non-white eyes? But white film buffs automatic reply to that is, “A film doesn’t need all that.” What does it need? Apparently not the truth.
There were tens of millions of indians in North America at the dawn of the 16th century. By the end of the 19th there were less than one million. Who’s the savage? Why don’t we see any movies about this? Where are the movies about British and American colonialism told from the perspective of the people who suffered because of it? Where are the movies extolling how the non-white world fought valiantly against the never-ending hordes of white invaders?
Better yet, would you cheer it if they made one?

Some great points, very well made.

It’s certainly given me something more to think about in the future when looking at movies like this.