Zardoz

[Mickey_Rat15]

So, that end shot where they show Connery growing old... where the makeup was elaborate enough it took all day to do it in phases... and they screwed it up TWICE... why not on the third time just film them from the back? You can throw on the extra wigs to show the aging and time passing, and just let body language and acting do the rest. Or have them in silhouette in front of a sunset or something.

Three days of filming to get 10 seconds of footage, in which Connery isn't even recognizable in half of it anyway?

I mean, this is a solution I came up with within seconds of hearing about the problem, so.... why didn't they come up with something else when there were clearly issues?

I can imagine some rage doing something I had a phobia for for two extra days because somebody screwed up twice. And for what appears to be less than a couple minutes of screentime.

[RobbyB1982]

I can imagine some rage doing something I had a phobia for for two extra days because somebody screwed up twice. And for what appears to be less than a couple minutes of screentime.

It's literally less than 10 seconds of screen time for the entire transformation.

[BlackoutCreature2]

So I'm a bit late to the party on this one.

Zardoz, like Dark City, has always been one of those movies that I've always been curious about, but never really curious enough to actually sit down and watch. Unlike Dark City, where SFDebris' review made the movie look interesting enough to throw into my Netflix queue, Zardoz looks like a genuinely unpleasant movie to experience and I can be content in the life decision to not use up two hours of my existence to watch it.

[Robovski]

So I'm a bit late to the party on this one.

Zardoz, like Dark City, has always been one of those movies that I've always been curious about, but never really curious enough to actually sit down and watch. Unlike Dark City, where SFDebris' review made the movie look interesting enough to throw into my Netflix queue, Zardoz looks like a genuinely unpleasant movie to experience and I can be content in the life decision to not use up two hours of my existence to watch it.

Having watched it many years ago censored for TV (yes, it has been on TV late at night and then later cable), unless there is something compelling for you here or you seek alternate entertainment from it (eg mocking it with friends) I'd say skipping is the smart move. Unlike back in the day, we live in s veritable sea of entertainment options in out out of Sci-Fi and this movie is often plain boring or weird in a not entertaining way.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

This is the perfect review to watch while drunk.

NO YOU'RE DRUNK!

[Beastro]

I am surprised that Chuck did miss one element in the fact that this is an arthouse movie about the problems of living forever. Specifically, that this is a Space Whale Aesop. It's examining critically an idea that....doesn't exist because immortality isn't real (outside of religious beliefs and transhumanism that doesn't yet exist).

So it's pondering the ideas deeply of a problem that doesn't yet exist.

So? All the best hard science fiction ponders problems that do not yet exist.

I strongly disagree and think the best science fiction analyzes problems of the current world through the veneer of the future.

It can be both, though to focus on problems that do not yet exist gets into the snobbish territory of those that say, with regard to something like alien intelligence, only the works of those like Stanislaw Lem should apply and exclude those like Star Trek which use aliens as stand-ins for human cultures (in the way Westerns directly handled such issues in the decade before TOS launched I'll add).

I think Yukie got referenced indirectly about the first bit about rape~

Yeah, I couldn't help but laugh at that along with feeling a bit sad that he felt he actually felt he had to say that. It's kind of been a worry of mine that some of these busybodies complaining about some lack of virtue signalling on his part would end up effecting his reviews for a while now.

There seems to be this idea nowadays that if you don't spell out in fifty point high ''THIS IS WRONG GUYS DO NOT DO THIS'' then somehow you are endorsing it. Its a big risk too because these kind of people can really attract negative attention to you - and bear in mind this site is the thing keeping the roof over his head so its understandable. His Profit and Lace review was derailed for this reason and he has my sympathies.

We live in a time when increasing amounts of people don't seem to understand that a writer can create a character and not agree with much, if any, of their views assuming that whatever anyone in a story says must be the writers opinion unless clearly inferred or outright stated to be otherwise.

I find it amusing because it's producing a shallow, ham-fistedness in fiction that is usually reserved to scorn 50s TV drama with, and yet, I find a lot of that 50s TV to possess a nuance over issues completely lacking in modern TV that makes it refreshing even if it holds closer to TV conventions than shows today do.

Zardoz looks like a genuinely unpleasant movie to experience and I can be content in the life decision to not use up two hours of my existence to watch it.

It's not unpleasant so much as it's blase.

Take the nudity. You'd think the teenager I was when I first watched it would be titillated by all of it, but after the initial shock of so much overt nudity it became rather off-putting and I actually wished it would've stopped being a reoccurring thing.

In it's own way I can now see that being part of the movies themes around immortality and brutality, that all has become banal, not simply for the Immortals, but the Exterminators deal out so much brutality that violence has become mundane as well.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

So, what the sam hill did this have to do with the Wizard of Oz? Why was that the book that broke him?

[Zoinksberg]

So, what the sam hill did this have to do with the Wizard of Oz? Why was that the book that broke him?

All-powerful deity in the form of a large talking head turning out to be just a guy who has a few tricks up his sleeves to convince the masses of his all-powerful nature.

Arthur Frayn is the man behind the curtain. There are a few allusions to this when Zed is exploring the room before he first meets the Immortals.

[clearspira]

So, what the sam hill did this have to do with the Wizard of Oz? Why was that the book that broke him?

I never got the WiZARD of OZ bit until recently. Now I cannot stop facepalming.

[rickgriffin]

I like how the film screened poorly so the answer was apparently "Ah, we'll just have a floating head at the beginning explain the plot" like lack of understanding the plot was the issue here. So far as I can tell from this review, it's not that the plot is impenetrable, it's that the way it's told is so bizarre.

And I guess that makes some people get mixed feeling about the movie as a whole. After all, I'm weird, shouldn't I LIKE bizarre and experimental? Why then have such a negative reaction to this film? Is it the onscreen rape? Alternatively, is it the rape? Or could it be, as some have posited, the rape?

Although besides the rape, there's also that weird 60s/70s futurism that I never really understood, that was also integral to Logan's Run. This really isn't all that different from Logan's Run, it's just about the banality of living only for youth vs the banality of eternal youth. It tries to inject a sense of spirituality into the subject, but ends up feeling hollow. "Banality is boring and bad" seems to be the message. Like of course banality is boring. If you reduce your society until you only have a small handful of options of things to do, they're gonna get dull and repetitive.

I guess the question then is, is that an inevitable outcome of post-scarcity? Or is it just a boogeyman we tell ourselves in the vein of sour grapes?