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Zulu was a more interesting film than we expected; certainly closer to Lawrence of Arabia than The Dambusters. The production values are spectacular, the story isn't a familiar one to Americans in 2025 and the acting is great. It's a big, bold movie that suffers less because it's a boring war movie and more because it's about the sort of war we no longer find familiar. Wing Commander movie club member bob was the person that found the Zulu reference in Action Stations in the first place and he noted that it's one of his favorite movies. We asked him if he wanted to say a few words about the film... and here they are!:
It's fitting that the line "because we're here" was the impetus to watch Zulu: it sums up the entirety of the film. William Forstchen may have reused it but the contexts could not have been more different. The pilots in Action Stations are fighting for not only their own lives but those of their families and country. The men of the 24th Regiment of Foot have no such noble motives: they're explicitly fighting for themselves and nothing else. They know nobody in this country and they give little thought to their own, except for the Welsh who we possibly learn more about than the Zulus. As for their cause, we can't judge it because the reasons why the war broke out are never explained. No appeals to Empire and the Queen here, or even any mention of them.
And yet despite, or perhaps because of, all this, there's a somber poignancy in the film's final moments. Michael Caine's character, Gonville Bromhead, is an aristocrat from a family of soldiers. At Caine's urging, he was rewritten from the pompous twit he starts out as to a more introspective character, who wishes, as the Zulus first attack, that he was not an officer and a gentleman, but a "damn drinker". And at the very end, surveying the battlefield after the British victory, he chokes out that he feels "sick" and "ashamed". It's not a sentiment that appears much in Forstchen's writing, nor in Wing Commander in general, with the notable exception of Academy.And here's the scene that Action Stations... borrows...:
Sully and his sister will hold the bed, no matter what.