Benefit
Bluelighter
Zardoz is a sci-fi thriller from 1974 starring Sean Connery as a murderous thug wearing a bright red loincloth and suspenders. This movie is amazing.
Set in 2239 in a barren, windswept Earth populated by Brutals – dirty, ravenous, poor bands of marauding degenerates that worship a giant flying stone head called Zardoz. Zardoz bequeaths the gift of guns to a particularly rambunctious group of red suspendered miscreants and sets them loose killing everyone else. Suddenly, we cut to a crazy shot of Sean Connery rising out of a mountain of grain and from that moment on are plunged into this utterly and wonderfully bizarre sci-fi landscape where blobs of metaphysics, biblical references, literary allusions, German expressionism, existentialism and a lot of other things start falling off the screen.
There are obvious parallels here with Jesus and Lazarus and other tangential Biblical allusions - T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche quotes start getting dropped a bit haphazardly after Zed makes the leap from brute to Nietzsche’s Overman, and the Wizard of Oz makes an appearance. There is plenty of hokey philosophizing but the film doesn’t take itself all that seriously, going for brilliant weirdness over gravitas, and the myriad allusions to art and philosophy give it a little more depth than a lot of films; it’s hard to take it super seriously because of the new age hippy tie-dyed elements, but it definitely has the power to make you think in a creepy, disturbing sort of way, a hallmark of good post apocalyptic sci fi. From the very opening shot, the film makes no pretense about its own theatricality and meta-fictionality, as the mustachioed character of Zardoz breaks the fourth wall to address us, the audience, from the future – about the film we are going to watch.
Visually the film never drags; there are so many terrifically composed shots featuring beautiful lighting, dramatic staging and very nice color contrasts. While the optical effects might look a little dated to a modern viewer spoiled by the slickness of digital media, I thought they were spectacular – especially the scenes where Zed gets a psychic crash course in all human knowledge; it’s impressive to think what can be accomplished with light, mirrors and glass. The closing montage sequence featuring Sean Connery side by side with Charlotte Rampling as they age into skeletons in a cave to Beethoven’s 7th – sounds stupid, but it’s simply brilliant. There are some breathtaking wide angle landscape shots of the pristine Irish countryside. Niall Buggy and John Alderton deliver superb, playful performances as a pair of renegade Eternals bent on dying. The only real knock is Connery’s costume, which borders on and then invades the absurd, but it was the 70s.
The movie deals with some heavy issues and gets heavy at times, but never loses its sense of humor and aesthetic grip. While lacking the sweeping, lyrical breadth of Kubrick’s 2001, Zardoz is nonetheless an excellent film that captures the spirit of science fiction while giving it a weird 1970s hippie commune vibe, helped along by lots, and I do mean lots, of full frontal nudity. I bet you didn't think I could write 4 full paragraphs about a movie where Sean Connery walks around in red suspenders beating people up, but I did.
Set in 2239 in a barren, windswept Earth populated by Brutals – dirty, ravenous, poor bands of marauding degenerates that worship a giant flying stone head called Zardoz. Zardoz bequeaths the gift of guns to a particularly rambunctious group of red suspendered miscreants and sets them loose killing everyone else. Suddenly, we cut to a crazy shot of Sean Connery rising out of a mountain of grain and from that moment on are plunged into this utterly and wonderfully bizarre sci-fi landscape where blobs of metaphysics, biblical references, literary allusions, German expressionism, existentialism and a lot of other things start falling off the screen.
There are obvious parallels here with Jesus and Lazarus and other tangential Biblical allusions - T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche quotes start getting dropped a bit haphazardly after Zed makes the leap from brute to Nietzsche’s Overman, and the Wizard of Oz makes an appearance. There is plenty of hokey philosophizing but the film doesn’t take itself all that seriously, going for brilliant weirdness over gravitas, and the myriad allusions to art and philosophy give it a little more depth than a lot of films; it’s hard to take it super seriously because of the new age hippy tie-dyed elements, but it definitely has the power to make you think in a creepy, disturbing sort of way, a hallmark of good post apocalyptic sci fi. From the very opening shot, the film makes no pretense about its own theatricality and meta-fictionality, as the mustachioed character of Zardoz breaks the fourth wall to address us, the audience, from the future – about the film we are going to watch.
Visually the film never drags; there are so many terrifically composed shots featuring beautiful lighting, dramatic staging and very nice color contrasts. While the optical effects might look a little dated to a modern viewer spoiled by the slickness of digital media, I thought they were spectacular – especially the scenes where Zed gets a psychic crash course in all human knowledge; it’s impressive to think what can be accomplished with light, mirrors and glass. The closing montage sequence featuring Sean Connery side by side with Charlotte Rampling as they age into skeletons in a cave to Beethoven’s 7th – sounds stupid, but it’s simply brilliant. There are some breathtaking wide angle landscape shots of the pristine Irish countryside. Niall Buggy and John Alderton deliver superb, playful performances as a pair of renegade Eternals bent on dying. The only real knock is Connery’s costume, which borders on and then invades the absurd, but it was the 70s.
The movie deals with some heavy issues and gets heavy at times, but never loses its sense of humor and aesthetic grip. While lacking the sweeping, lyrical breadth of Kubrick’s 2001, Zardoz is nonetheless an excellent film that captures the spirit of science fiction while giving it a weird 1970s hippie commune vibe, helped along by lots, and I do mean lots, of full frontal nudity. I bet you didn't think I could write 4 full paragraphs about a movie where Sean Connery walks around in red suspenders beating people up, but I did.
