Attack Force Z, also known as The Z Men, is an Australian/Taiwanese WW2 film directed by Tim Burstall (Stork, Alvin Purple) and starring John Phillip Law, Mel Gibson, Sam Neill, Chris Haywood, John Waters, Koo Chuan-Hsiung, and Sylvia Chang. The film is a fictionalised depiction of the exploits of the elite multi-national Z Special Unit, and focuses primarily on Capt. P.G. Kelly (Gibson) as he leads the unit against Imperial Japan in the later months of WW2.
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- All for Nothing: Kelly (the Sole Survivor of the unit) discovers in the last minute of the film that the man the unit was sent to save was hit by an errant bullet in the heart. He is seemingly breaking down crying as the scene cuts away.
- Artistic License – Ships: The Z Men are deployed from an RAN Oberon-class submarine. You don't have to be a naval buff to notice this either, given the straight sail and lack of a deck gun on the Cold War-era sub. The Taiwanese navy actually had (and still has) a number of WWII-era submarines in service at the time of filming. Unfortunately, they were heavily-modified GUPPY boats, and it's likely the filmmakers simply couldn't get permission from the Taiwanese government.
- Leave No Witnesses: The commando force encounter a villager and ask for directions to their objective, then shoot him with a silenced submachine gun so he won't tell anyone of their presence on the Japanese-occupied island.
- Multinational Team: The titular squad is comprised of British, Australian, and New Zealand army personnel.
- Mutual Kill: Costello tosses a grenade at a machine gun nest in the climactic battle and the soldiers in the nest shoot him dead a second before the grenade goes off.
- No One Gets Left Behind: Subverted. A member of the titular squad is wounded while landing on a Japanese-occupied island. At first the overly casual banter between the wounded man and his commander makes it seem like they're going to leave him behind and pick him up on the way back, then he's Killed Mid-Sentence, so he won't be captured and give away the mission under torture.
- One Last Smoke: One of the Z Men is wounded while landing on the island. After exchanging overly casual banter and a cigarette the commander shoots him, so he won't be captured and give away the mission under torture.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The script is loosely based on Operation Opossum
, where members of the titular squad were brought in to rescue the local sultan on the Japanese-occupied island of Ternate in Indonesia.