Zardoz

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bob C @RT46426964 Apr 9 If you like Sean Connery in a red diaper, man bun and long boots: ok. Otherwise junk. Junk with Charlotte Rampling, but. See more Ari V @RT59419633 Apr 8 Perhaps I gave it a little extra for its time capsule qualities, but really not much. Genuinely surprising what quality PhiScifi this is. Not without a minor shortcoming here and there, put far deeper than its facade lets on. See more Taylor H. @TH0809 Sep 21 Creative, original, relevant, with something to say. See more Eddy d @RT21492917 Jul 23 This is not a film for everyone, but for those who have the wit to understand its subtext, it is a hidden gem. See more Richard P @RT55141072 02/09/2025 Zardoz is an odd – but striking – film. It has flaws, not least a wooden performance from Sean Connery (as Zed), but it has stayed with me over the past fifty years. And as countries have become increasingly obsessed with building walls to keep unwanted people out, the scenes of the “Brutals” locked out of “the Vortex”, while being terrorised and killed by the “Exterminators”, many of the film’s images and ideas have come back to haunt me. In fact, if perhaps only accidentally, Boorman anticipated many of the ills of the world we now inhabit – a world in which an excessively wealthy and privileged technocratic and political class talk and plan together in gated communities (the Vortex), or at privileged events like the Davos Summit, while the rest of us labour to feed and increase the wealth of these “Eternals”, or slide into becoming “Apathetics”. The Eternals manage to achieve one of the dreams of today’s Silicon Valley technocracy (eternal life) only to realise that it is not a blissful condition but a new burden, a reality that Swift’s struldbruggs were confronted with in Gulliver’s Travels. Also noteworthy is that in Zardoz the Eternals are protected by another dream of today’s techno-authoritarians – artificial intelligence (in the form of the Tabernacle, which gives them eternal life but fails them when Zed destroys it). And like the Eternals, today’s technocrats dream of conquering distant stars. The Eternals discovered that this was “just another dead end”. So too, perhaps, will the technocrats. To borrow a phrase from Henry James, Zardoz’s greatest weakness is that it is something of a “large, loose, baggy monster” that tends to tell rather than show (dramatize). But perhaps there is a place for such films. My takeaway: power groups, elites, empires and civilisations come and go, but they don’t last, usually because they harbour the seeds of their own destruction. At which point all that is left to say is, “How the mighty have fallen”. See more Lars M @RT17133850 02/03/2025 This film has more magic in it's little finger than the whole Harry-Potter-Series together. See more Read all reviews

Zardoz

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