The pursuit of catharsis is a dreadful disease in art, or at least when it is fulfilled. It promotes a cinema for those uninterested in cinema, those inclined to take toilet breaks and chat and arrive ten minutes late. For the rest of us, that kind of cinema is a horrible bore, quite contrary to its intentions. Zulu exploits inflammatory historical events in pursuit of vivid brutality, a form of catharsis in that it dissipates tension and justifies moral theories. All types of person are hideously violent in Zulu, but some are depicted as senselessly so, while others are bestowed 'good reason' (if there is such a thing) for shooting and pummelling one another to death. It's the ethos of a lazy thriller - one that seeks intense but pithy payoffs - to present conflict in such neat definition, devoid of ambiguity, afraid of stranding any bad in its good characters, anchored to nothing positive, no matter how distantly. As villain after villain meets their grisly demise, Zulu reveals the callousness of its conceit, as a racially-driven exercise in barbarity. The wealth of dramatic material here, ripe for intelligent debate, is undeniable; it is debased in Zulu until small and simplistic enough to demand little of the film's runtime, as more vulgar affairs are attended to. Yet even as each extraneous narrative element is put to bed - normally by killing off its key figures - the potential for subtle, subterranean political discourse remains, and the willingness here to resolve these matters with physical force rather than sensible dialogue is tiring. It may be equally telling though, but if the filmmakers are trying to make any kind of metaphorical point, their approach is as ham-fisted as it is half-hearted. The film's climax involves a long walk in the desert, an admittedly pretty sequence with more emotive heft than the rest of the film combined. Ever wish a film was just one scene repeated ad infinitum?
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