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A giant, floating, stone head descends from the sky in front of a bunch of guys in weird outfits (like, red bandoliers, diapers, and thigh high boots weird).  It pontificates at length about the evils of the penis and life, and about the goods of guns and death.  Then it spits a bunch of guns at the weirdly dressed guys.  Those guys, in turn, fill up the head with a large quantity of grain, after which the head takes off again.  Hidden within that grain is one of their number, played by a visibly embarrassed Sean Connery.  He pokes around inside the head for a bit, discovering that it has a pilot.  He quickly shoots the pilot and tosses him out the open mouth.  The pilot shouts something about how "I could have told you!"  Eventually, the head lands in what appears to be a village from the late middle ages or early Renaissance.  Sean pokes around for a bit and is eventually captured by the village's occupants: a race of severely bored immortals!

And then, director John Boorman had one dab too many, because Zardoz goes so far off the rails it may as well never have been on them in the first place.

Long (and baffling) story short: the immortal people got so bored, they raised up a new race of men - Sean Connery and his friends - who would one day, hopefully, become powerful enough to finally kill them.  That day is at hand.

The main theme here is men becoming powerful enough to destroy God ... and it turns out that's what God wanted all along.  You could make a hell of a movie on that premise.  Unfortunately, John Boorman made, well, Zardoz.  Everything starts out well.  Hell, the first bit with Sean stowing away in the head and killing its pilot could have been a pretty good short film all by itself.  Then, for some reason, the movie gets bogged down with abusing Sean Connery.  Boorman puts him through all sorts of humiliating scenarios (including being dressed in an ill-fitting bridal gown) for no particular reason.  At long last, Sean's friends come gunning for the immortals and the movie gets mostly back on track.  Pity there's only about ten minutes left to go, by then.

This movie gives me a headache.

This is one of those movies that seems like it wants to be deep and thought provoking, but just doesn't work. 

Normally, those type of things end up being somewhat pretentious, but the sheer weirdness of this and a Sean's natural charm manage to make it ... well, not "work" but make it worth seeing. 

Even if you only see it to be able to say "oh, god, what was that?"

Also, it has really strange thoughts and a focus on sex. 

There is a huge gollywhomper of a thread on here somewhere about that movie.  One of the people associated with making it got into a fight with Andrew about it being mentioned on a bad movie forum when it was obviously a deep and thoughtful allegory of cosmic significance . . . hilarious! Almost as good as the Scarlett Fry thread, but REAL!!

Fascinating movie, especially the ending.

That's on the Zardoz review thread: started by one John Richardson.  :teddyr:

Me too...

I get the feeling that Sean Connery didn't want to get typecast as James Bond and was willing to do a movie with such an outrageous (unmanly) outfit.


The only significance to the movie is knowing that Sean Connery was James Bond and he looks like he's playing Barbarella with a beard. (mustache) [shows how long ago I saw this movie] I wish I remember the message fight...


cool I'll have to check out the tread :)

I saw this one relatively recently, to find out what the fuss is all about;

This is one epic mess of a movie. Sean Connery must have thought that the escape from being typecast as Bond would be to star in a deep and artsy movie.

There is a huge gap between the ambition of the movie to say something profound about serious questions, and the actual execution of it.

For one thing, the production values are straight out of the Dr Who at the time. Here we have an incredibly advanced civilization, which looks just like some hippies squatting in an abandoned farmhouse, with some plastic bags added for a futuristic touch. All the props either seem to come from a theatrical troupe of surplus WW2 equipment. One half expects the Fourth Doctor to turn up at any time.

Very much worth seeing, if only as a document of 70s views on the apocalypse.

A film under the heading 'do not watch without chemical stimulants and a gift for sarchasim.'

Like many other movies of the 60's and 70's, I first learned of Zardoz from a book called 'Sci-Fi Now' by Alan Frank.  Published in 1978, and riding on the popularity of Star Wars and Close Encounters, the book is great snapshot of science fiction in film of that era.  Zardoz was mentioned, along with pictures of Sean Connery in that awesome red mankini, and a girl holding a crystal which 'holds the source of all knowledge'.

It wasn't until the late 90's that I saw Zardoz, or maybe even later.  It was... weird, to say the least.  A flying stone head, spewing guns, and a booming voice proclaiming that the gun is good and the penis is evil, well...  I don't see it as a 'bad' movie per se, nor do I see it as a towering masterpiece of allegory.  I just see it as a fever dream of the director and writer that was indicative of its time.

As an aside, one concept in the movie has come to fruition.  Sean Connery finds a special ring used by Arthur Frayne, which is a link to a vast mainframe of knowledge.  Anything he wants to know, he can ask the ring, and it tells him.  When I saw that ring, I thought how great it would be to have something like that.  And now, we do.  It's a smartphone.

I think ZARDOZ is one of Menard's love to hate movies...  it is dumb and embarrassing, yet, kind of strangely fascinating...

I miss old Menard.  Wish he would come around again . . .  :bluesad:

i loved ZARDOZ the first time I saw it (I think it was in the 1980s on Showtime or Cinemax or one of those channels). Years later I bought the DVD and didn't love it as much.