Zardoz megaupload

A surprising thing is how Charlotte Rampling's character dresses; with that stern face of hers, that outfit looks a bit out of place! But overall, I liked the movie and how it forces us to reconsider the significance of our environs. I should also note that there are a few shocking scenes for this sort of movie. OK, if not a masterpiece. 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. Of course, it was inevitable that this would be a cult film.

Sean Connery in a weird outfit somewhere in the future where the s 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.

I had seen the images of this movie, with the lead actor wearing nothing but red underpants and belts across his chest, with a massive moustache and very long hair, I had a feeling it was going to be silly, but it also has a cult following, directed by John Boorman Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur.

Basically, in a future post-apocalyptic Earth in the year , the human population is divided into the immortal "Eternals" and mortal "Brutals. The two groups are connected through Brutal Exterminators, at the orders of a huge flying stone head called Zardoz, who also supplied weapons, they kill and terrorise other "Brutals", in exchange for food.

They make him a prisoner and menial worker within their community. Consuella wants Zed destroyed immediately, but others, led by May and a subversive Eternal named Friend John Alderton , insist on keeping him alive for further study. Over time, Zed learns of the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are immortal due to the artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. But the Eternals have become bored and corrupt due to their limitless lifespan. The Eternals spend their days stewarding mankind's knowledge, baking special bread and participate in meditation rituals, and those who violate the rules are punished with artificial aging, to give them time and meaning.

The most extreme offenders are condemned to permanent old age and the status of "Renegades. Zed is less brutal and far more intelligent than the Eternals think he is. He is the result of long-running experiments devised by Arthur Frayn, who is Zardoz. The aim of Zardoz was to create a superhuman to penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its stagnant state. Zed finally understands the origin of the name Zardoz, from the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, making him realise that Zardoz is a skilful manipulator rather than an actual deity.

As Zed tries to solve the mystery of the Vortex and uncover its problems, the Eternals have decide that they must kill him, and age Friend. But he absorbs all the Eternals' knowledge, including that of the Vortex's origin, to destroy the Tabernacle, he also impregnates May and a few of her followers. While Eternals are finally released from the power of immortality, they welcome the Exterminators invading the Vortex, and allow themselves to be killed by them.

May and several of her followers escape the Vortex's destruction, heading out to bear their offspring as enlightened but merely mortal beings among the Brutals.

It ends with Zed and Consuella, having fallen in love, entering the ruins of the giant stone head, and there are no words spoken, all you heard is the sombre second movement allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. During this, time passes, Consuella gives birth to a baby boy, many dissolves show how the son grows and matures, while his parents age.

They grow very old, eventually decomposing into skeletons and finally vanishing, and all that remains is Zed's revolver and their painted handprints. Burt Reynols apparently refused this movie, so poor Connery, he is reasonable as the rebel, and Rampling is okay, the acting is not the problem, except for Buggy, who is so cheesy as the title character.

The problem is that the story is overcomplicated, it is unintentionally funny a few times, apart from scenery it looks ridiculous, it feels like a silly pantomime, and it gets rather boring, a pointless and dumb science-fiction adventure.

John Boorman, had he never directed anything other than "Point Blank" and "Deliverance", would still deserve a place in movie history. But notice how different these three films are: a stylistic gem of a gangster movie, a naturalistic story of nature versus culture, and a home-movie story of a family in war time.

Boorman has never settled into anything resembling a comfortable genre. And "Zardoz" is as different from those three as they are from one another. Sadly, I don't think it's quite as successful. Boorman, who wrote as well as directed, certainly must have had a coherent vision when he got this story down on paper and then visualized it, but much of it slipped past my appercetive apparatus.

Sean Connery is a hairy, bare-chested male sent to the future on some kind of mission or by accident or something. It's the distant future and all sorts of magical things are possible.

Something to do with a society in the far distant future in which dissidents are assigned to a hell in which only the elderly and decrepit dwell.

In this future society, reproduction is no longer necessary and the men who pulse with testosterone, the desire to kill, and the ability to achieve erections are banished. The women lay down all the rules and run the place. Right away I began to squirm because it was beginning to remind me of my marriage. But I rather liked the pace of the film -- moving from one episode logically to the next, even if the internal logic of some episodes eluded me.

I liked, too, the fact that we weren't bombarded with monstrous CGIs. There are special effects and they ARE effective.

But the moderato tempo and the perfectly reasonable photographic tricks don't rush at you and send you hurrying towards the medicine cabinet for a dose of Xanax. Charlotte Rampling, an actress of no discernible range, is fascinating to watch. Her eyes. They're like the eyes in the writing of Ancient Egypt, one of the images turned upside down. I don't mean the whole semi-mathematical Eye of Horus but a simplification of it, shorn of its excess lines and with the pupil half hidden by the upper eyelid.

It's not part of hieroglyphic writing but some less demanding system. I wish I could draw a picture of it here. This is maddening. Anyway, if you let your imagination take its own trip you should find this film enthralling. A lot of others have. I loved Rampling's lower canthus but, by God, I couldn't understand the movie. Tweekums 11 March In a distant future, after the end of society as we know it, humanity is divided. A small number, the Eternals who are now immortal, live within the Vortex while outside the Brutals live.

Those in the Vortex still need food and the Brutals provide it; giving food to the floating stone head, which they believe is Zardoz, their god, which takes it to the Vortex. Zed is one such brutal but he learns the truth about Zardoz and sets about getting into the Vortex. Once there he learns that life for the Eternals is far from idyllic; they are bored and many yearn for death.

Others see Zed as a threat to their existence and want him killed. This is very much a film of the early seventies with its trippy visuals and general feel. The story itself is solid enough with its suggestion that eternal life would be more of a curse than a blessing.

This depiction of immortality is well thought out with those who transgress being aged further but never dying and others being so apathetic that they barely move. Outside we see that the Brutals are far more 'alive' despite the violent way they are forced to live. I liked the way the invention of Zardoz is explained and how Zed learns the truth. On the downside the costumes are a bit of a distraction with Sean Connery's Zed wearing little more than a pair of red swimming trunks for most of the film and a distinctly hippyish look for the Eternals.

The acting was okay although leads Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling have both done better. Overall I wouldn't say this is a must see unless you are a Connery completist or are a fan of somewhat camp sci-fi. Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling star in this cold, meandering, often howlingly silly science-fiction melodrama which has futuristic savage Sean led into a world of decadent youths who mean to exploit and kill him.

Convoluted premise is cluttered up with pseudo-intellectual dialogue, uninteresting characters and set-pieces, and one embarrassed-looking male lead.

John Boorman, who wrote and directed perhaps on acid , doesn't look as though he gained the trust or confidence of his cast; they stumble about with question marks on their faces.

Pretentious in all respects, the film looks bad and has no soul, and the secret behind the title astounds one with its obviousness. The worst funny line among many occurs when a male voice, transmitting from a crystal, says to Connery, "You have penetrated me! So, that's what we're going to be like in years!? TxMike 13 September I was anxious to see "Zardoz" for a glimpse of what Sean Connery was doing besides "" back in the s.

An unexpected pleasure was seeing what a young Charlotte Rampling was doing. I so enjoyed her at 58 in "Swimming Pool" as a veteran writer in the south of France, taking her clothes off, it was refreshing to see her in her 20s, also taking her clothes off.

She is still a very attracting woman, but she was a real knock-out back then. There is a "god" named Zardoz that travels in a large flying stone head to various outposts, to pick up that season's harvest of grain. Sort of like the grasshoppers in "A Bug's Life. What is this movie about? Well, that's hard to say. Maybe it is about the folly of thinking that living forever is a worthy goal. I didn't see it for any deep metaphysical significance, just for the entertainment.

I found it very entertaining. Not told chronologically, but we find that Zed was actually a creation of Zardoz, a super man with the intelligence to figure out what the "vortex" was and how to free all the immortals from their prison of eternal life. Zed happens upon a library and has a knack for teaching himself to read, and learn. Then, when he finds a copy of the Wizard of Oz, and reads about the Wizard amplifying his voice behind a curtain, realizes that Zardoz wi-ZARDOZ is the same, a man amplifying his voice.

So he sneaks aboard the flying stone head and is carried to the vortex where he encounters Consuella Rampling and the others living a life of immortal luxury, the product of the best scientific minds of the 20th century, now perpetually old. Zed figures out what is powering the vortex, they all break out, most get shot and killed by the exterminators, but they have smiles, happy to break out of boring lives.

Zed and Consuella escape to a cave where they have a child, which is the start again of civilization, as the parents sit in the cave and age into skeletons. Quinoa 2 June Zardoz is, quite frankly, one of the all-time champion 'train-wreck' type films I've seen from the 70's, or for that matter any decade.

Which means, in short, it's the kind of unbridled cinematic mess that only someone coming right off of the success of Deliverance would even dare of doing. Part of me was thinking while watching this film "what is this director thinking, or trying to even pass off as connecting with the themes? NONE of this makes sense! In a way it is actually watchable in that very campy, bad-movie sense.

There are few bad movies, with the exceptions of Plan 9 and Manos, that contain so many laughs in just the first twenty minutes or so unintentionally of course, as it's all played very seriously and self-importantly. I mean, even before the opening credits roll we get a a giant floating mask-head, b random lines referring to the powers of guns and dangers of male genitals, and c Connery just shooting at the screen. It only gets better or worse depending on your point of view from there.

Also co-starring is Charlotte Rampling and boy has she had better days as one of the members of the 'vortex' who ends up becoming rather close with the main beast-of-burden, so to speak and yes, it's rather stupefyingly amazing that his name is 'Zed'.

Zardoz is one of those very pure, and of course then intrinsically doomed, cult-of-the-moment pictures, where a filmmaker given carte Blanche by a studio pours out something that is so personal, so strange, and so corrupted by self-indulgence, it's either big hit or dangerous miss. While I would consider this film to be apart of the latter, I didn't necessarily have a bad time watching the film. I knew what I was getting into, for example, just by the theatrical trailer.

It's got some of that of-the-times psychedelia working in there, and sequences that utilize slow-motion, instant replay, Zed inside a big, uh, crystal thing, and other outrageous feats of sci-fi cinema. Those who might rate it rather high are likely bigger buffs than I, or maybe can take not only the story seriously but take the style with a grain of salt. BandSAboutMovies 14 March 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 , 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.

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. To this end, Zardoz your God gave you the gift of the Gun. The Gun is good! Zardoz : The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals.

Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken. Sign In. Play trailer Adventure Fantasy Sci-Fi. Director John Boorman. John Boorman. Top credits Director John Boorman.

See more at IMDbPro. Trailer Photos Top cast Edit. Sean Connery Zed as Zed. Charlotte Rampling Consuella as Consuella. Sara Kestelman May as May. John Alderton Friend as Friend. Sally Anne Newton Avalow as Avalow. Jessica Swift Apathetic as Apathetic.

Bairbre Dowling Star as Star. Reginald Jarman Death as Death voice. David de Keyser Tabernacle as Tabernacle voice uncredited. More like this. Watch options. In the Eternals' access to Zed, they may learn if he making it to the Vortex was indeed an accident. In addition, their so-called Utopian society may be exposed for what it truly is.

In the distant future, Earth is divided into two camps, the barely civilized group and the overly civilized one with mental powers. A plague is attacking the second group, after which its members cease to have any interest in life and become nearly catatonic. When Zed, one of the barbarians, crosses over, the tenuous balance in their world is threatened. Brutals are told that when they die they will go to the vortex, where the Eternals live immortally. Zed, an Exterminator-class brutal who worships the stone head Zardoz, comes upon an old library where a mysterious stranger teaches him how to read.

When he finds a copy of a well-known book, he sets out to learn the secret of the god he worships, and disrupts life in the vortex. Zed is a exterminator, a savage warrior living in a post-apocalyptic future world.

Like all exterminators, Zed worships a stone head called Zardoz as a god. Zardoz promises all those who worship that when they die, they will go to the Vortex, a community inhabited by immortal men and women. Zed finds himself in Zardoz's mouth and Zardoz arrives in the Vortex.

Zed's arrival in the Vortex begins to cause disruption, as Zed sets out to discover the secrets of Zardoz. Where Zed encounters a stranger named Arthur Frayn in a library and Arthur teaches Zed to read and reveals Zardoz's secrets, which could bring about the fall of all life in The Vortex and lead Zed to giving the immortals, the gift of death.