Hacker Cinema
Zardoz
1974 · Film · 106 min
Directed by John Boorman
FantasyActionThrillerScience Fiction
In the far future, a savage trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity's achievements.
7 positive5 mixed13 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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28 comments on Hacker News
> Have you seen Zardoz?
Oh, yes! Just once, but Connery, in just underpants and boots, battling some surreal head-shaped apparitions, is something I won't ever forget. I have no idea what the plot was about - but that's OK, because I had no idea about that either during or just after watching :D
A movie so bad it's kind of good - though second-hand embarrassment (at the performances, effects, plot, characters) was a bit hard to bear at points.
But there's a whole Zardoz episode!
I've seen the movie several times. In Italian, the title was translated simply as Mato Grosso, which makes it oddly geographically specific. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Connery definitely starred in even weirder movies. Have you seen Zardoz?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmI2NjI2OWYtMzU5NS00MDg5LWE0MTctOTAyYjE4YmEzYmU2XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_.jpg
There is also the film Zardoz.
Yesterday, I showed my kids the original Planet of the Apes. It literally ends with the main character going "oh no humanity you killed yourself may you be cursed for eternity".
It's a fantastic movie, and it's as literal as it can be, so I'm not sure this complaints about movies being literal now makes much sense.
We always had more literal and more abstract movies. To stick to classic SF: Barbarella, Quintet, Zardoz, 2001, They Live.. they all exist on the same "literal-abstract" continuum, they are just placed at different points.
Have you seen the film Zardoz?
Looking back on it, I think it could be weirdly precient.
Two classes of society; one living a life of leisure, the other fighting on the plains.
(.. maybe minus Connery in a mankini)
Zardoz is a great film for weeding out the posers from those who are truly into the weird. I've known more than one person to nope out as soon as Sean Connery shows up wearing the neon orange plastic banana hammock/bandolier and getting the long rambley speech about evil penises.
Some great movies on this list, I own most of them on physical media. Rollerball was just released in 4k and it looks glorious. I disagree with the commentary though, I think Rollerball still stands up and is quite prophetic in some ways esp with the sports celebrity worship and the AI. Yes, by modern standards it’s fairly slow but all of these films are.
Zardoz is gloriously weird and desperately needs a 4k restoration as well.
Someone should sent Sam Altman a copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project before too long.
Maybe I’m just getting old but I find I far prefer to sit down and enjoy a well restored classic movie from decades ago than the great majority of movies made in the last twenty years.
Until you hit Zardoz or A Boy and His Dog, these are relatively tame. If you want the deeply weird, you should head for Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death or Invasion of the Bee Girls. For some reason, once the films got a little smutty, they also got rather experimental. I'm not saying they are good but they are unusual and you may find yourself mulling over what you saw more than you might expect. It's not dissimilar to a slightly earlier deal where some of the porn people were trying to move toward horror and some of the horror people were trying to have more of an exploitative feel (arguably the former group had less success than the latter). Again, the results weren't really good but they were sometimes interesting.
Zardoz is definitely worth watching once if you like strange films.
But I will not go to second level.
Not sure all of these are underrated, films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers are (rightfully) well-known and respected.
Big fan of THX 1138, I believe it would’ve been much better known and respected if it wasn’t overshadowed by Star Wars. I actually prefer THX 1138, but I haven’t seen it in a long time as I don’t think there’s a high-quality transfer - without the CGI retouchings - widely available.
And Zardoz is a punchline for good reason, but I still find it an interesting film. It’s got bizarre, creative worldbuilding, and I love that final shot.
All this discussion of lost jobs. The intangible are lost to AI; the tangible are lost to robots. I'm starting to think that Zardoz is a documentary from the future.
Some tests (I think blood) can detect that a body is about to die. As far as why, the human body just can't go on forever.
With my grandfather, who was 101, someone did a blood test and told us he was going to die very soon. A few hours later, when I visited, he was pushing his wheelchair around and pestering the social worker about all of his funeral plans. It honestly reminds me of the end of the movie Zardoz. (He had his funeral planned for years.)
He died four days later.
I have a decent size library and accessing Jellyfin via DLNA from a PS4 was unworkable for me. There is no search, and I couldn't find any way to select specific movies other than scrolling through the entire library by title name, or finnicky categories like genre or release year. Plex's DLNA implementation provides a "By First Letter" listing so you can find it via "By First Letter > M > (scroll down past a dozen entries to 'The Matrix')" instead of "By Title > (scroll down past a few hundred entries to 'The Matrix')". I don't think I'd be able to stomach that amount of scrolling to watch "Zardoz" on Jellyfin.
I guess the ring displayed in the movie Zardoz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4EESnKyRIY
the commentary track for Zardoz is epic. Apparently, Connery was able to pocket some per diem because he lived close to the film set.
I would rate Zardoz to be the best movie that Connery was in.
It's widely panned as schlocky B-grade scifi, but it's actually pretty interesting and more profound than most A-grade films that garner much higher critical acclaim.
Sure, there's plenty of cheese in that film, but it doesn't make it any less great... more great, in my view.
I was about to say nobody mentioned Zardoz. One of the weirdest movies I've ever seen, and I say that as a compliment.
Zardoz! One of my favorite movies, oddly enough.
Whenever someone of this stature goes, I tend to gather together their films, what I have of them, and work through them. So here I am looking at Outland (which isn't as terrible as Harlan Ellison said but goodness it isn't great), Zardoz, In the Name of the Rose, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (it's fun, I will grant it that), Time Bandits and was left wondering: what films had his iconic performances? What's a good sample to understand the range he had?
I grew up with the Bond films so they're very much background to me, almost hard to notice in a way. Any recommendations?
RIP
Also loved his performances in The Name Of The Rose, and 70's weirdo films Robin And Marian and Zardoz.
Not a fan of newer Bond films after Roger Moore's which I thought took it too seriously and lacked comedy.
> I could point to a host of 70s and 80s film that had classical music scores, Star Wars, Indiana Jones etc, etc.
Let's not forget Zardoz (1974)!
Weird sci-fi, Sean Connery, and Beethoven's Seventh; what's not to like?
As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would not have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.
We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.
For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect - Roger Williams
As someone who seems themselves as a technologist (all this stuff we're working on will eventually work out for the best, warts be damned), this story was an existential-crisis-inducing wake-up call.
Basically, what happens if tech progresses to the point that humanity becomes a species of bored gods?
This is a trope that I've grown to really enjoy, and one that doesn't get played with near as much as it should. The next closest thing I can think of is the movie Zardoz, but that one is so abstruse that it turns people off unless they really think about it.
If you go check it out, keep in mind the story gets rather grotesque in places. Imagine what depravity people would get into if death were impossible, and you're on the right track.
Logan’s Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451
Lovely films. Something about the pacing or the cinematography of the films from that era appeals to me.
Ah… Zardoz… Nothing beats Sean Connery running around in weird sci-fi shorts. Also, Beethoven.
So many agree with that. See the movie 'Zardoz' for a dystopian future taken from that premise.
This is the basis for the film Zardoz.
Yeah this is quite clever and funny. Plus Zardoz?!? Wow, nice crazy old movie reference, that's awesome.