Zardoz

Rating:
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.

Rating:
Summary: And You Poor Creatures...Who Conjured You From The Clay?
Review: An ambitious sci-fiction satire by John Boorman (Excalibur; Deliverance; Emerald Forest.) This is definitely one of the most unique science fiction movies I have ever seen, even for something that was produced in 1974.

This movie is more of a political and social satire than a science fiction movie. Sean Connery is Zed,an exterminator. He and his tribe are the followers of Zardoz, their god. Tired of blindly following the violent commands of his god, Zed seeks to find the truth at any cost. When Zed finds his god, he sees that he's more in search of himself and soon realizes that he doesn't like what he sees.

The theme is timeless and the plot is excquisite. This movie has an interesting message about the endurance of civilization, its purpose, and its effect on human nature. If you like science fiction movies for state-of-the art special effects, you might be disappointed. If you like science fiction as a satirical medium such as Logan's Run or 1984, you'll probably like it. If you're a Boorman fan, you definitely need to see this one.

Rating:
Summary: not worth a second look
Review: So bad that it's almost laughable. I can just about promise you that you will not watch it twice. .perhaps that's why you can find multiple copies of this at your local used book/music store. avoid. . . otherwise just rent it.

Rating:
Summary: "Is God in show business?"
Review: So asks Arthur Frayn, alias the god Zardoz, as his disembodied head floats before us and invites us to be entertained by Zardoz, a 1974 film directed by John Boorman, starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling.

Arthur Frayn loves magic tricks and says Merlin is his hero. (Did Frayn take the name of Merlin's heroic protege for himself?)

We are, as a subtitle tells us, in the twenty-third century. Here the Eternals live inside Vortex 4, a perfect English village by a lake. In the Vortex there is no death, thanks to a device called the Tabernacle, which takes the memories of an Eternal and implants them into a new fetus should the Eternal be unlucky enough to die in an accident or bored enough to take his or her own life.

That is, there is no death until Zed, one of the Brutals who live outside the Vortex, finds his way inside. Zed is strong, hypermasculine, and sexually active - - everything the Eternals no longer are.

In science fiction movies the future often looks like the present with one or two strange elements thrown in. But in the Vortex the clothes, buildings, and even the scientific instruments are so unlike ours as to make us believe we are watching a far future with little connection to our own life. Even more strange than their accoutrements is the way the Eternals speak and move. Barely perceptible movements and gestures are part of their language.

However details outside the Vortex bring this world closer to us. The clothes the Brutals wear are dirty and torn twentieth-century fashions. The Brutals live like barbarians huddled around fires in a town with an abandoned ruin that was once a municipal library.

In the Vortex not everyone is content. There are renegades, those whose negative thoughts disrupt the Eternals' perfection. The renegades are allowed to age but not die. They are the oldest Eternals.

Besides the renegades, there is another group, the apathetics. They barely move or respond. The Eternals are worried because this disease is spreading throughout the Vortex. So the equilibrium of the Vortex is deteriorating before Zed arrives.

Friend, an Eternal, wants to know from Zed what happened to Arthur Frayn, with whom Friend has been conspiring. But Zed can block his thoughts from Friend and from May, the scientist who gets permission to study Zed for a time before killing him.

By the time Friend and May learn what happened to Arthur Frayn and what Zed is it's too late to save Utopia. Finally, Zed learns what brought Utopia into being.

The renegades are the scientists, politicians, and millionaires who built the Vortex to save themselves and their children from the chaos destroying the outside world. But they were too old to adapt to eternal life and after the centuries went mad. Their spoiled, effete children now rule in the Vortex and it is they who are succumbing to apathy from the lack of a need to struggle for their existence.

The Vortex is not a distant, horrible future. It's the horrible present. The Eternals are literally us - - the generation that saw Zardoz in 1974, the children of the generation that first built the terrible weapons and created the rapacious society that caused the apocalypse. We are the children of the renegades.

In 1974 Boorman was describing the generation he saw inheriting the world. The message isn't that original - - life thrives because of the reality of death. The living feed off the dead and it's the prospect of death that inspires creativity. Sex and violence, no matter how much we might prefer otherwise, are related.

The elite who saw their (our) society crumbling around them, who felt the new Dark Ages coming, sealed themselves off the rest of the world and its lower classes. As in so-called advanced societies today a minority took most of the world's resources and left the majority of the world's people to fend for themselves. Then this elite justified their greed and lack of concern for how their behavior would affect the rest of the planet by claiming they had a duty to survive, in order to preserve and transmit the glories of human history.

When the reborn Arthur Frayn returns to Friend, as they joyfully face the end of their world, they realize it's all been a joke, a story told by an idiot. They, like us, have been "confused . . . and abused . . . and amused."

Rating:
Summary: Boorman's Odd Cod of Sci-fi
Review: ZARDOZ is bizarrely intriquing film.But not,perhaps,for reasons Director John Boorman "wishes" it to be. Geoffrey Unsworth's mist/mystical photography is effective; scenery(near Boorman's home in Ireland)is beautiful.The score--excerpts from Beethoven's 7th Symphony--is moving. Sean Connery,as usual,has excellent screen presence delivering fine performance as mutant/killer Messiah,Zed: ZARDOZ'licensed to kill,Angel of Death.

Only Sean Connery could get away with loping around in glorified jock strap waving a .44 seeming dignified; menacing and "dramatically" engrossed in a film whose script often devolves into high-level home movie, art school project.I'm amazed the Director of EXCALIBUR and DELIVERANCE...beautifully accomplished
adventures evoking icons and archetypal themes...should stumble so often in this one. It's not terrible movie making,technically it does marvelous things on a million dollar budget But, in my estimate, much of this excursion into fairy tales;myth;religion and 2001 Kinsey Report sexuality;is bogus(if not unintentionally goofy).

Boorman's frame-by-frame commentary is fascinating. There are "light years" between what he did on film; what he THOUGHT he did; and what he wanted to do. ZARDOZ has become cult attraction. It's worth a good look(maybe you'll become enamoured of emerald green bread). But it's not the classic it traded-on, or aspired to be. It's merely a not quite wonderous odd cod of sci-fi...

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary and extraordinarily confusing film
Review: The first time you see this film it may bore and confuse you. Some of the visual elements are very engaging. But John Boorman's story telling seems disjointed in this picture. Very worth watching, but you may have to several times, and at least once with diretor's commentary inorder to get it.

A memorable film.

Rating:
Summary: Zardoz does it!
Review: No matter how critical an attitude I bring to it, I simply cannot dislike this film! Its premises, performances, and images are a godsend to a lover of "thinking person's" science fiction. I have no idea what previous reviewers mean when they talk of a hippie sensibility pervading the film. I saw it twice during its initial release and have just seen it again after twenty some odd years; it still holds its special relevance and the satire still connects. Plus, it's a pleasure watching a science fiction film without a surfeit of gratuitous computer generated effects. Most of the story is told with the use of splendid cinematography, interesting sets, and a simple straightforward script with a few compelling twists. Some may argue that the actors' lines are trite; they are, but to wonderful biting effect. The masks worn by the Exterminators are marvelous, as is the floating head of Zardoz. The aerial photography and sound effects are also used to great effect near the beginning of the film to set the stage for the entrance into the Vortex and Zed's "big boy adventure" among the Immortals. Though Sean Connery's Zed chews most of the scenery, my favorite character was Friend played by John Alderton, especially after he received his sentence and was banished to the world of the aging Renegades. Hilarious!
Even the time lapse ending was effective. Normally this device is used as a crutch for a filmmaker simply because he/she doesn't know how to develop a denouement. Not here; it works perfectly!
This DVD release is crisp and vibrant with stunningly saturated colors and fine sound. I concur with a previous reviewer; this has to be the finest use of the Second Movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony ever in a film, heard in both it's original scoring and in a special choral arrangement--slow, stately and at a funeral march tempo, the way it should be despite the composer's score markings! I haven't heard the director's narrative track and am in no hurry to do so; the film speaks well for itself.
In my opinion, this rightfully ranks as a "must have" for fans of lovingly-made, imaginative, and thought-provoking films. Bring an open mind and a sense of humor along with the popcorn; you're in for a treat!

Rating:
Summary: Beyond 1984...Beyond 2001...Zardoz Awaits!
Review: John Boorman's outré film ZARDOZ (1974) is a somewhat campy but visually stunning science-fiction dystopian fantasy set in the distant future. Sporting a ponytail, a red diaper-like loincloth, bandoliers, and thigh-high gold-digger boots, actor Sean Connery plays an clever barbarian who, on the order of his "god" Zardoz, invades The Vortex, an enclave of cultured academics and aesthetes who have grown intellectually stagnant and morally depraved after their many years of isolation from the rest of the world.

Writer/director Boorman is probably best known as the director of DELIVERANCE, James Dickey's screen adaptation of his literate and highly acclaimed novel. While DELIVERANCE is a fairly straightforward story of a clash between a group of northern city dwellers and a clan of depraved backwoodsy southerners, Boorman's ZARDOZ is a deep and complex film that requires viewers to peel back its many layers and ruminate over what they find. The lush cinematography, dazzling visuals, and quirky humor just make up the façade. Underneath is an intricate and sometimes abstruse ontological parable that addresses the nature of reality, class struggle, and the individual's responsibility to society (and vice versa). Thrown into the mix are subtle satirical comments about religion, politics, science, and academics. ZARDOZ is not an audience-friendly movie; it requires the viewer to pay attention and think. In fact, it may take repeated viewings to catch all the symbolism and subtext and thereby understand the film's full meaning. So those who prefer to have their movie themes spoon-fed to them probably won't enjoy ZARDOZ, but those who like for films to stimulate the gray matter--most notably SF fans--should find the film quite entertaining and satisfying.

The acting in the film is a mixed bag, but the principals, especially Connery and Charlotte Rampling, generally do an outstanding job. In a role that is a far cry from his sophisticated and charming James Bond, Connery is very convincing as an intelligent brute who has a difficult time wrapping his head around the philosophy of the denizens of The Vortex. (Some film historians have surmised that Connery's character is a personification of socio-political conservatism, whereas The Vortex folks are philosophically diametric and therefore represent liberalist ideals.) And Ms. Rampling provides sexual tension as a Vortex woman who is physically attracted to Connery but repulsed by what he represents.

The DVD version of this cult classic, from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, is nothing short of outstanding. The film is offered in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and the anamorphic widescreen digital transfer is simply beautiful, with few (if any) noticeable filmic or digital artifacts. Extras include the original theatrical trailer--which blatantly reflects the sensibilities of the post-60s hippie youth of the early 70s--and some radio spots narrated by Rod Serling of THE TWILIGHT ZONE fame. Also available is a feature commentary from writer/director Boorman. (The commentary is interesting, though Boorman's delivery is sometimes halting.)

In short, ZARDOZ is a fascinating SF film that will appeal to the aesthete and the intellectual (i.e., the simple-minded should steer clear). And it's delightful that the DVD age can rescue this oft misunderstood cult film from obscurity and make it available to its fans in its original format. The ZARDOZ disc is well worth the retail price, and all serious SF fans will want it in their DVD collections.

Rating:
Summary: ZARDOZ
Review: Pompus sudo-intellectual nonsense. Strictly for ageing hippies who find subliminal messages from Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The
Moon album. Typical of England in the mid seventies,utter crap avoid!!!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: What if you killed god ?
Review: I will start of a small confession, I have not seen the whole film and cannot comment on the ending or lack of one . I will say this , as a Connery Fan ( are we not all really Connery fans deep inside) I saw this as a must see and since it was butchered by the good people of the Sci-Fi channel , I only saw about half of it before switching to Marnie on HBO. Yet , the half I did veiw was rather smart and Mrs. Rampaling was breathtaking in her youth.Boorman has better films that have helped elevate him to the peak of post sixties British cinema .
Overall on the half of the film I did view I would have to say that my dear Sean has nothing to be a shamed of. ( the visual of the floating head still haunts my dreams and my bouts with Opiuem ).