Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Tonight, I'm joined by 3MA founder, Troy Goodfellow.

Hello.

So tonight we're taking a little break to do something Troy and I've wanted to do for a while,

and which is something we've been discussing since, gosh, the last couple of years we've talked

about rainy day ideas we'd like to pursue.

So now we're going to look at two historical films to see the places where their themes overlap, where attitudes towards historical topics seem to be changing.

And the ways they get, the way that these films get history right, or probably more often, based on how Troy and I's conversations tend to go, how movies can get

history badly wrong.

Tonight we have 1964 Zulu, directed by Cy Enfield, which covers the against all odds victory

of the British Army at Rourke's Drift, and Ridley Scott's 2002 War movie Blackhawk Down,

which is based on the Mark Bowden history of the same name about the Battle of Mogadishu, also known as the Day of the Rangers, between U.S. Special Forces and the Militia's Mohamed Farah IDD.

Troy, there's a lot to both of these movies.

I think they're trying to sell very similar sorts of triumphalist narratives, though I think only one of them is remotely successful. Both have a

complicated political context that changes how they relate to imperialism, and both are movies

about predominantly white Anglo armies battling against, and this is sort of the way things are portrayed in these

movies, hordes of African men.

And both these movies are then trying to be at pains to avoid the racism that's almost

inherent in a premise like that.

And it bears mentioning that obviously you and I are both two white North American men,

and we're going to try to be mindful

of that fact as we discuss these two movies. At the same time, I wasn't going to go around

...