Zardoz (1974)

A lot of fun.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

What movie would Sean Connery choose to follow up his run as James Bond with? Well, it's The Offence, but this was his second movie after. And it's definitely the first film John Boorman did after Deliverance. What they created was a film that absolutely cannot be easily explained. I've watched it in the double digits and there are whole sequences that I can't unpack.In the year 2293, Earth has lived beyond the end of the world. There are two populations, the immortal Eternals and the mortal Brutals. The Eternals live in the Vortex, a country estate that affords them comfort at the expense of excitement. The Brutals live in a wasteland growing food for the immortals, yet face constant danger.The group that ties them together are the Brutals, exterminators who are ordered by a giant flying stone head named Zardoz to kill other Brutals and exchange food for more weapons.One of the Brutals, Zed (Connery) goes for a ride on Zardoz, even temporarily killing its pilot, Arthur Frayn. Zed goes to the Vortex, where he meets Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, The Damned, Asylum) and May (Sara Kestelman, Liztomania). They defeat him with psychic powers and use him for menial labor. Consuella wants hm destroyed, while May and Friend want to keep him alive.Zed learns that the Eternals are watched over by an artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. Because they live forever, they have become bored and no longer have sex. Some of them have fallen into comas and are known as Apathetics. And despite their vast resources of knowledge, all they care about is making special bread, meditating and enforcing their social rules by artificial aging anyone who violates their byzantine rules.The Eternals misjudge Zed - he is far more intelligent than he lets on. He learns that he is part of Arthur Frayn's eugenics experiment and that Frayn is also Zardoz. He's also learned to read, and once he discovers that Zardoz isn't a god but a play on the Wizard of Oz, he becomes enraged.Zed lives up to Arthur's goal for him - to deliver death and freedom (one and the same) to the Eternals. He absorbs all of their knowledge as he leads the Brutals on a killing spree against the Eternals.The film ends with still images of Consuella and Zed falling in love to the tune of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - an ode to soldiers - and giving birth to a son before they age into skeletons. It's complex and simple and moving and silly all at the same time. Kind of like the rest of Zardoz.I didn't even mention the animated scene of how erections work or Connery in a wedding dress or the weird outfit Zed and the Brutals wear - knee-high boots and a giant red thong.The film was inspired by Boorman almost making The Lord of the Rings. Although the project ended, he wanted to see if he could create his own fantasy world. A fantasy world that makes little or no sense, as evidenced by the spoken word intro that 20th Century Fox executives asked Boorman to create. The goal was to help the audience understand the film. But just look at this dialogue:"I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die. But death is no longer possible. I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue - rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred, but they may. Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation - and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment - and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?"There's no way to really prepare you for this movie. Trust me when I say that there has never been a movie like it before or since.

A truly weird sci-fi film. Some of the effects (specifically the stone head shots) are pretty cheesy, but it isn't fair to judge them by modern standards. Parts of the plot are highly interesting, and a few other parts are a bit ridiculous, but Sean Connery plays it straight throughout. (Although at the beginning of the film, he fires a pistol directly at the camera, seemingly a nod to his James Bond character) Charlotte Rampling is oddly good in this film as well. Sarah Kestelman and Niall Buggy played parts too odd to really describe. I liked it OK, partly FOR its weirdness.

This seemingly bizarre futuristic science fiction saga is almost a parable of what it is like to be brainwashed and complacent with whatever new bird-brained idea takes over society. While the story is set in some futuristic so-called paradise, it's almost frightfully current in it's ideal of hiding what truth is simply to live in a completely ideal world. This is a warning in it's message of mind controlling manipulation, showing how those who go against the ideals in this freaky world either end up periodically aging or in complete apathy or facing eternal senility. Sean Connery is suddenly transformed from an earthly, violent world into this seemingly peaceful vortex, all the while worshiping some godlike creature called Zardoz, a stone image that resembles a shark. In this vortex, he's questioned about everything he's been through, analyzed by strange hippy like young people, and pretty much manipulated by them to comply with their ways...or else. Connery witnessed others tried by the vortex leaders (among them Charlotte Rampling) and then finds himself threatened one of their other worldly punishments. I will be honest in saying that it took me a while to figure what the heck was going on, but it quickly became obvious of what was going on. It's a disturbing view of a world free from individuality where only those of a certain like mind (or weak mind) will find the rewards.I'm sure that everybody who watches this movie will get something completely different from it, but for me, it's a companion feature to "1984" to warn us about dimensions of society that are quite disturbing. The world outside this vortex is futuristic, but as we know it, still violent, lustful and abusive of power. Connery is shown raping women savagely, and inside the vortex, there are examinations of mortal sexuality and even a testing of what makes different people become aroused. In that sense, it's a bit gratuitous, but there is a point. The film builds to a strange climax where the world outside attacks the world inside, and Connery and Rampling end up in a cave that shows the passage of time with the most hysterical ending. Hollywood has shown in films such as "Fahrenheit 511", "Soylent Green", "Logan's Run" and "Westworld" that we are heading to grim times, so if seeing these films makes you keep an eye on your newspaper more aggressively, then it has accomplished at least something, no matter how absurd the plot line is.

In the distant future, a savage (Sean Connery) trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity's achievements.Roger Ebert called it a "genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators... The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence." Well, that is is a very polite way of putting it.Of course, it was inevitable that this would be a cult film. Sean Connery in a weird outfit somewhere in the future where the 1970s still exist, only in a strange way. How can that not find a home as a midnight movie? Not really a very good one, but with enough strange moments (including the "erection experiment") to amuse some viewers.