ZARDOZ
Every alphabetical index needs a movie that starts
with "Z". What most of you don't know is that, in your average video store,
movies that start with "Z" are ridiculously hard to find.
They aren't that good ether.
But don't get me wrong, Zardoz wasn't all
that bad. Director John (The Emerald Forest) Boorman simply was on a little to
much LSD before, after, and during shooting, that's all. It was made during the
"shagadelic" 70's after all.
Zardoz has all these things, showing it might be the perfect example
of 1970's sci-fi. In the future (2293) a band or repressed people called
"Brutals" roam the country side living in fear of the exterminators. The
exterminators are the "chosen ones" of the "god" that calls itself
Zardoz. Zardoz looks a hell of a lot like Charlatan Heston and, like Mosses, Zardoz
to has a passion for guns Occasionally he/it floats down, delivers the big speech about
how guns are good and the penis is bad (see?! I knew it! Zardoz is a Republican,
just like Charlatan Heston!). Once this speech is completed Zardoz spits out guns to the
exterminators and tells them to go exterminate.
And all this before the opening credits. Cool.
Then, one day, an exterminator named Zed (Sean
Connery) climbs aboard the Big Giant Head and finds that Zardoz is in fact a big, giant,
fancy shaped airplane. After Zed kills the only pilot Zardoz crash lands in the Vortex.
The Vortex is a sanctuary of democracy and technology populated by some weird people
called the Eternals (not immortals, that's another Connery movie), who, of course, live
forever. They don't age (aging is, in fact, a punishment) and can't die because they are
kept alive by a super computer called the Tabernacle. Unfortunatly these people are
really, really bored with their lives.
Zed wonders around until he manages to fall in with a certain segment of
the eternal population that favors destroying the Tabernacle. So the women of this group
give Zed the sum of all they're knowledge, by having sex with him. Learning through sex,
every high schoolers dream come true. Zed, you lucky dog.
I've got nothing really against this movie. It
manages to be nicely entertaining and I don't remember yawning during the movie. At least,
not of the top of my head. But man, is this movie strange. They're lots of weird directing
techniques, sometimes time flows backwards, slow motion kicks in for no apparent reason,
strange colors and images whiz by like they're pants are on fire, etc., etc. I know that
this movie is suppose to be some commentary on the how class system are baaaad,
but the psychedelic images and weird stuff (Zed suddenly develops the power to stop time
for example) manages to bury most of the subtext. Sorry, Boorman, maybe you should learn
some moderation next time, yes?
But despite all that this is still a pretty good movie. It gets is
point across. . .barely. This is a good example of what not to do with surrealism in
movies. Take a movie like Natural Born Killers for instance. That movie had lots
of strange, "what the hell was that?" type of images, but they helped the story
instead of getting in the way of the story. Though Killers was border line. It almost
became incoherent. Same here. In both cases the directors slammed on the breaks just in
time.
Acting here is fine, but not outstanding. No one is bad, but no one
is memorable ether. Sean Connery is. . .Sean Connery. He kind of plays the part of Zed
like watered down James Bond. The rest of the cast is made up of forgettable British
actors and actresses who you probably wont recognize right off the bat (I sure didn't).
The most entertainment I got out of this movie most defiantly came from seeing Connery's
40 something bod packed into a red dipper. And a wedding dress too.
In the final analyzes this is the kind of movie that will entertain
you just enough so you wont fall asleep, but it wont do much else while it keeps you
awake.
RATING (OUT OF A
POSSIBLE FIVE)
BLAH.
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