If traditional Hollywood and British films made excursions into the Third World to celebrate colonialism, recent films show the subject in a different light. Zulu Dawn, made in 1979, functions as a “prequel” to the 1964 film Zulu, which told of the heroic stand taken by a small band of British soldiers against Zulu warriors thirsting for blood in Natal, South Africa. Vehemently anticolonial, Zulu Dawn uses sequences from the original Zulu to tell what really happened at Rorke's Drift in January 1879, by revealing another “incident"--the Battle of Islandhlwana that preceded the Rorke's Drift encounter. In that battle, some 1500 British soldiers succumbed to Zulu warriors numbering sixteen times their own. The subject of Zulu Dawn is British ineptness in regard to the Zulu nation, both in government and in war. Despite its large-scale battle scenes, the film zeroes in on individual characters to demonstrate the careerism that blinded British officers (Burt Lancaster, Peter O'Toole, John Mills) just as love of Empire blinded the British state. By contrast, the nobility of the legendary Zulu chief Cetshwayo (played by Simon Sabela) is highlighted as he plans and leads the attack against the invading British.