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Summary: Toto, I don't think we're in ZARDOZ anymore!
Review: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Working on maybe two hours of sleep over the past forty-eight hours, I caught this film at 6am on the Sci-fi channel back in 1996. I think I was in the right frame of mind because the film made a peverse sense to me that has been lost in subsequent viewings when I've been in a more rational state.Zardoz, released in the late 70's, is a coda for that great period of cinema sci-fi as pure social commentary, from Planet of the Apes in the late 60's and including Silent Running, Soylient Green, and Logan's Run. That being said, I don't mean that Zardoz is necessarily successful in getting its point across. What I really mean is that, much like Connery's trip in the big Zardoz head early on, the fun here is in the ride. Filled with wonderful Boorman visuals, outlandish dialogue delivered in a pricelessly comedic monotone, and with concepts and themes present enough for the serious film student to chew on, Zardoz is a worthwhile purchase for any cult film enthusiast.
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Summary: Every year I throw a Zardoz party...
Review: ... for my friends and I, this is one of the most anticipated events of the year. about 50 of us scramble into my living room, or a friend's living room and we turn this movie on. As a child of the 80's, I didn't appreciate the TV edited version my sci fi loving dad made me watch with him at the age of 12. 3 years later, my father ordered a real copy of Zardoz on VHS and the fun started. What was initially a romp of bad acting and T&A became what i thought to be one of the unintentionally funniest movies ever made. It tries to make all these points about life, the curse of immortality and what could happen in a possible future, but the inherent campiness of the era this was filmed in makes the film miss it's point almost entirely. However, this flaw is actually the films' strength, in showing how this sitirical look on an alternate future makes for some ground breaking, shocking and downright hysterical entertainment. Where else does a giant stone head give lectures about the penis being evil? Where else are you introduced to a movie by a guy's face with a badly painted on mustache floating around? Where esle is plastic wrap referred to as "Indestructible" and a defendant's plea includes the words "I try to supress these thoughts, but they leak out in second level through the head wound of my 3rd death?" This is only skimming the gems found in this film. It gets better and better. Take it seriously, or laugh out loud. Everyone must see this film. I'm almost 20 now and I still laugh as loud as i di the first time i saw this film unedited. I can't wait to own this DVD and hear the commentary. It'll make for the best Zardoz Party yet!!! Enjoy, happy viewing and show all your friends. they'll love you for it :)
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Summary: for those about to mock
Review: I will not rest until every person on earth has seen this film. "Zardoz" is a work of staggering genius, from the twisted re-scoring of the Allegretto of Beethoven's 7th Symphony for organ and warbling female voice to the time-lapse finale: there truly has never been a film like this. Possibly John Boorman's own "Metal Machine Music," this was his first film after the successful "Deliverance." Unlike Lou Reed's twisted creation, there is some actual content to this film, though you'll have to slog through several viewings just to grasp the basic structure of it. Mr. Boorman suggested as much to critics, and was probably crucified for it. While "Zardoz" has been relegated to cult-film status, and it is awfully hilarious at times, it's also oddly fascinating. First off, it starts with the floating, slowly spiraling head of a man in a silly hat and penciled-on mustache mocking us, the audience. Oh boy. This will either pique the curiosity of the masochistic or scare off the less easily amused. Trust me, you should stick with it. Arthur Frayne's head gives way to the giant floating stone head "Zardoz," from which the picture gets it's name. Soon we are introduced to Sean Connery's Zed, an exterminator for Zardoz, who hunts down the Brutals as part of a population reduction program. Zed realizes he's a pawn in someone else's game, however, and breaks his way into the society of immortals (the Eternals, who don't in any way resemble the immortals of Connery's "Highlander") via Zardoz, the only link between his world and theirs. Hijinks ensue. Other reviewers have given a pretty good idea of what you can expect. Part of the difficulty in watching this film stems from a few 70's stylistic oddities- first, the metatextual opening segment. Second, the weird sound effects and repeated images that at first confuse, and eventually become recognizable as Boorman's filmic representation of psychic powers. Third, Charlotte Rampling's cool, scary eys. These may be offputting to some viewers. Fourth, Sean Connery running around in a red diaper, shooting anything that confuses him. That's actually the beauty of this character, at first. Then he becomes the traditional Matrix/Star Wars/Jesus-like savior figure. Usually this annoys me but here it's entertaining. Zed's progress from plaything of the Eternals to bringer of chaos is not exactly inspiring, but it is pretty satisfying. Ultimately the most confusing part of this film (from my perspective) is Zed's final showdown with "the Taberacle," a sort of HAL-like super-intelligent computer network represented as, variously, a disembodied voice, a house of mirrors, and a roundish crystal. And thus we find the great value of purchasing this video: it is worth repeated veiwings. Many, many viewings if at first you find the movie bizarre and intractable, and then increasingly compelling. The biggest failing of the film is that despite it's rather modest 105 minute (or so) running time, it feels like about a two and a half hour long film. I'm notorious for falling asleep during "Zardoz" after I've forced my poor friends to watch it. The best thing, to me, is not the giant stone head intoning "The gun is good! The penis is evil!" (though that's pretty great), nor is it the image of Sean Connery in a wedding dress (tough to beat), nor the coniving Friend's (John Alderton) refusal to go to second level ("Renegade!") nor Friend talking backwards for the entertainment of his fellows, and it's not even the Eternals attempt to "stimulate an erection" in the hapless Zed- no, my favorite thing about this movie is that my father wanted to rent it once a long time ago when I was a kid. Little did he know that he would spark a life-long obsession in his son. I ask my dad today if he remembers seeing "Zardoz" and he looks at me blankly. How this film could fail to make an impression on a person is a mystery to me, but I thank him anyway. Make my obsession yours. Buy "Zardoz" today.
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Summary: Coming to DVD on March 20th !
Review: This excellent film comes to DVD on March 20th. Check this web site to order. Here is a succinct description of Zardoz : - When the gulf between the "haves" and the "have nots" becomes extreme... - When a commune is linked not by a common purpose, but instead telepathically... - When social engineering is taken to its logical endpoint (in a manner similar to Brave New World)... - When an artificial intelligence controls society (over 20 years before The Matrix)... - When immortality becomes a very real possibility... In my opinion, one of the all time top films for people of above average intelligence. Certainly in my top 25.
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Summary: It's weird, you'll never forget it
Review: A group of friends and I got together for what we called "Bad Movie Night." Zardoz was an immediate request for the list since one of our coworkers had found a picture from the movie online. Of course it was a photo of Sean Connery in his lovely red diaper outfit complete with bullets slung across his chest. The picture was goofy enough, we knew we had to see the movie. The movie is weird from start to finish. Just plain weird. But it sticks with you. It has a sort of Alice in Wonderland meets B-Movie Sci-Fi feel to it (the floating Zardoz head was primo). The next day that was what we were talking about - Zardoz. The movie's dialogue and plot can be very hard to follow at times. Bafflement is a given with this film, although I'm sure if I watched it a couple more times it would all be clear to me. There are some stunning visual 'effects' in this film. As a photographer, my favorite visual effect was projecting what I'm guessing were famous pieces of art onto people's bodies with a black background. Very visually interesting and some interesting messages if you can decipher them. This is a very very artsy movie, not one for the fan of predictable plotlines.
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Summary: An Intriguing Science Fiction Sleeper With Sean Connery!
Review: It is interesting to note that a science fiction movie made by Sean Connery at the height of his popularity in the mid 1970s would be so little known and played. Yet "Zardoz" is virtually unknown, and is regarded as a cult film. This is an intriguing, well acted, and absorbing movie, albeit uneven at points, and it is also one with quite a provocative premise at its core. It depicts a futuristic world in which the rich and educated live inside a protective bubble and the workers/barbarians live outside the protective enclosure in the dangerously polluted elements, and must fend for themselves. It is a play on both the kind of insane prognostications of H.G. Wells "Time Machine" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" wrapped into a single screenplay. Also quite interesting is the fact that it is now can be used as a symbolic parable for our own times. Another reviewer has the right idea when he says the enfeebled effete intellectuals hiding in the enclosure would be comfortable selling IPOs to each other. Done before the days of big-budget special effects, it is much like "Fahrenheit 451" in requiring a little poetic license in its sets and depictions. Yet you will find yourself rooting for the barbarians as the plot unfolds and the parable works its way to the movie's conclusion. This isn't for everyone, but it is an interesting, provocative, and thoughtful movie that I recommend highly. Enjoy!
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Summary: The ideal type of the Nietzschean movie
Review: How little sense this movie made the first time I saw it: those goofy costumes, that strange plot! But for all the weirdness I could never forget it, it remained in a corner of my head. And then, the second time I had the occasion to see Zardoz, everything fell into place: like HG WEll's Time machine, Zardoz was a sci-fi interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. THe plot in a few words: mankind is doomed because it is crumbling under the burden of its own historical consciousness (remember the ruined library in the beginning?), most of the men have been wiped out by a world war-type catastrophe, their descendants have fallen back into animality, struggling to survive in brutish conditions and revering the Titan-like Zardoz. Meanwhile, literally preserved in a bubble are a happy few last men, a bunch of superior spirits who have discovered the secret of immortality, or so they believe, but the secret is quite awful: immortality is sterility. Of course the immortals are playing a losing hand (Nietzsche didn't like the Last Men, the ones who come after history's pendulum movement has spent itself and come to a standstill). Apparently happy, apparently dominating, the dwindling bunch of immortals feel like prisoners in their pastoral bubble, and the only way out for them is the sweet oblivion of senility. Now just a stylistic comment: the immortals are dressed in 70s futuristic gear, the senile old farts don Edwardian formal dress: the movie was not about some hypothetic future situation, it was about the here and now of 1970s Britain; senile establishment, futile youth with the illusion they will be forever young, and the starving third world knocking at the gates of the bubble. In Also sprachte Zarathustra, Nietzsche tells us the saviour is an Ubermensch, a "superman" who will shake off the sterility of the last men to push them back into the meaningful and necessary movement of history, launching a new cycle where others pretended there was only a single line, from beginning to end, with progress in between (Hegelian/Christian view of History/Divine Providence). Incidentally, a new cycle means both shedding (the illusion of) immortality and recovering the capacity to (pro-)create. Hence the final scene of the movie. It's interesting to see how, while the catastrophist vision of the future has receded since the 1970s, the obsession of Western societies with the illusion of eternal youth has only grown stronger... I can't think of another movie so ladden with deep and cryptic philosophical metaphors, even more stunning as it is quite entertaining without possessing an MA in phil.
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Summary: The Inevitability of Mortality
Review: Films can be great for many reasons. For myself, one of the most powerful achievements of a great movie is the way it can combine music and image to create a special insight into what is usually an ineffable emotion. In 'Zardoz', Boorman utilises the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony as a theme. In the film's finale, Ludwig van B's sweeping music is combined with snapshots of the lives of the two protagonists, to create a pin sharp insight into the ephemerality of our lives.
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Summary: The Gun is Good! (I need no convincing.)
Review: I first saw a hideously butchered version of this film on late night television many years ago. It did not make a lick of sense, but it was visually intriguing enough to induce me to return and buy the videotape. Science fiction is not my genre, strictly speaking, but this is an intriguing, quirky little film. It's not all that predictable, and it left me struggling to fill in the blanks-- not necessarily a fatal defect in sci-fi. What really jarred was Charlotte Rampling's character, Consuella, and her abrupt about-face. It doesn't work. Much more believable and interesting is Sara Kestelman as May. Though objectively "plainer," she is 100% more believable, sensuous and alluring than Consuella. Even more than Zed (Sean Connery), May is the central character of the film. A good film for those with a taste for the well-done bizarre.
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Summary: One that wouldn't go away
Review: I first saw this film back in the late 70's (I think) on late night television. Twenty years later, I had forgotten the title, but I remembered a few things: it had naked women in it(I was 12 or so and the station ran it unedited--bless them); it had Sean Connery shooting just about everything and running around in an orange diaper and wearing a pigtail; and it was strange, strange, strange, and I liked that. Twenty years later, I grabbed a movie guide and searched for Sean Connery films. "Zardoz" I found. That had to be it. I rented it and sat down and watched it all over. It was as wonderfully strange and goofy as I remembered. I loved the big floating head of the god Zardoz at the beginning. My wife hated it, and watched only 30 seconds of it. If you must have your movie spoon-fed to you, forget this one. If you're brave enough to be baffled at times, strong enough to see Sean Connery in a wedding dress, and tough enough for some laughable dialog, then you've come to the right movie.
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