I helped my then girlfriend, now wife do a paper on the movie when it was newly out, I think 1970.  I had to see it about 3 times to get all the varied plot lines running through it and I have to say, each time I saw it something else occurred to me.  Some interesting notes: 30 years or more ago this movie touched on a variety of hotly debated issues and technological improvements most had not even come close to thinking about at the time.  How about genetic engineering for starters or the fact that we are now using CD-RW drives that create optical storage and I think we are getting close to the type of "crystalline" storage technology that was used in the movie (remember the ring or at the end the crystal that he was supposedly inside of...that part was a bit strange). The concept of nearly infinite storage of data inside crystals was a huge leap in science fiction.

Pound for pound, Zardoz has more great ideas than a lot of other contemporary films of the 70s. Boorman did a lot of research on the movie's higher concepts and even went so far as to spend some time living in a commune to get ideas about how to flesh out his concepts of the Vortex and the Immortals.

The problems with this film lie mostly with Boorman's uneven execution. At times it seems like performance art or sketch comedy gone horribly awry. Part of this is just the way things were in the 70s, part of it was just Boorman's style, and the rest of it was probably drugs.

I really enjoyed this movie, but it is an elegant warning to those who choose to direct, produce and write movies

This movie could have been a great bad movie.  It had all the elements that would have made it an interesting scifi flick. Unfortunately, the final product was a disjointed and uninteresting film totally devoid of humor and that illusive element that draws you into the film and makes you want to care about the characters.  It had its brief moments, but overall it rates a thumbs down.

I remember seeing this movie when it came out under the influence of a small amount of herbal THC and having absolutely no idea what I was seeing, only that it was really, really DEEP.  It made a big splash at the time as having Sean Connery and a bunch of weird s**t, but it disappeared from the theatres after like a month because it was totally...um, indescribable.  Like, the Man From Uncle was really futuristic at this time.  So, seeing it again, I find pretty much the same thing: What the hell was this about?  My e-mail address was Xardox for 10 years because of my memories about this movie.  Well, now I've gone to some other obscure allusion.

Hmmmm. I finally saw this the other evening. I think it's both true that it was from the great era of stoner science-fiction films and that it at least attempted to be a film of ideas (unlike so many of today's SF films which are basically about space monsters and rayguns). In its surrealistic (Rene Magritte is referenced at one point, on a print in the Vortex room that Zed first explores) and even absurdist approach it was probably meant to reflect some of the New Wave of SF styles that were developed in the 1960s, such as Ballard and Dick. It is also true that cracks about the result resembling a Monty Python sketch or Rennaisance Fair are dead-on. In its own strange way, though, ZARDOZ remains more interesting a SF film than many of today's sterile big-budget spectaculars.

I love the music and wish a proper soundtrack would be released on CD.The ending with Sean Charlotte and the boy aging is one of the greatest movie-scenes ever.

The Classical score has a good feel just like Boarman's _Excalibur_.  Basically, this movie went a lot farther into the territory of an inevitably failed utopia than I can ever remember seeing on screen.  For that reason alone I give it credit.  The way I see it is if you feel the urge to watch _Logan's Run_ try this instead.

I like the freedom available to the director because of the time it was made in, I suppose.  This film is a failure of sorts I certainly don't mind pilfering through and exposing others to.