Catching up on old movies reviewed. Here is Zulu
Picked by: John Why: Looking up actors he liked in modern films and tracing them back — Michael Caine came up, and outside of Batman the top of his filmography was Zulu. Good ratings, historically relevant, and a genre the club hadn’t touched yet: British military cinema.
The Conversation
John came in genuinely torn. He respected everything about it — the acting, the cinematography, the Technicolor, the score — but felt the runtime in a way he hadn’t with Dead Ringers. “I felt the length” was how he put it. Two hours eighteen minutes, one location, and a battle that comes in waves. He found the repetition of it — here they come, boom boom boom, there they go, repeat — more exhausting than tense by the end. His honest summary: good, not great. Nothing bad to say, nothing that made him love it.
Sam had a different read. He’d actually seen pieces of it on cable as a teenager — remembered Michael Caine (without knowing it was Michael Caine) barking volley commands — and found the wave structure psychologically effective rather than tedious. It put him in the headspace of the soldiers: the Zulus aren’t trying to win each charge, they’re wearing you down. He compared it to Saving Private Ryan in structure — severely outnumbered protagonists with nowhere to go — and appreciated that the film was more interested in military strategy than chaos. He also called out the theatrical quality of the deaths, every kill a clean stage-fall with no blood, and filed it under the movie’s era rather than a flaw.
Sean was the most enthusiastic of the three. He went in expecting to be bored and was hooked almost immediately, even through the long opening wedding scene. He praised the cinematography repeatedly — “so many shots you could just distill and have work as a good photograph” — and gave credit to how clearly the film lays out both sides' strategy without editorializing. The ending landed for him too: the Zulus salute the survivors and walk away, no triumphant score, no flag-waving. For a 1960s movie to hit that note, he said, was impressive. His second film in the 90s club, at 92.
A few threads worth pulling out: John noted that the Zulus were given surprisingly respectful treatment for a film of its era — the opening 20 minutes is their wedding ceremony, the film never calls them savages, and the actual descendant of one of the battle’s chieftains appears in the cast. The Boers who show up, abandon the post, and ride off immediately got the opposite treatment. Sam connected that to the real South African history — the blood feud between Afrikaner settlers and the Zulu that predated and outlasted the British entirely.
Sean made the Helm’s Deep connection — Peter Jackson allegedly drew directly from this film when staging the siege at Hornburg — and John confirmed he’d read the same thing. It tracks: the cresting-over-the-hill shot, the torchlight, the waves of attackers from a single direction. Sam called out that Zulu was probably the original of a type that’s been cheaply copied many times since, including a Middle East version he half-remembered from Amazon that ended with everyone dead.
The color sergeant with the giant mutton chops got a shoutout. So did Hook, the thieving hospital orderly who ends up carving his name in the wood at the end. Sam kept thinking he was someone from Jumanji. He was not.
Michael Caine, for his part, wore eyeliner. Sam confirmed bronzer was also probable. Sean observed that the Technicolor was really popping. John agreed, then spent the last ten minutes of the call trying to find the single frame where a Zulu extra looks directly into the camera. He never found it.