Before watching the movie:
I’ve been a little intimidated by this movie for a while because trying to read a small amount of what it is doesn’t seem to actually provide any useful information. I’ve been interested because it’s by the writing team that made Airplane!, so it seems like something that would be fun, but with a 70s R rating, I don’t know how much it will keep to my sense of what’s appropriate for my blog.
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Before watching the movie:
I know very little about this movie but I saw that it’s a series of interacting vignettes and a mix of drama and comedy, so I’ll give it a try. It seems to have something to do with the interactions between passengers on a train so it should be interesting.
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Before watching the movie:
I first learned that there was a movie based on The Twilight Zone when I read that the first meeting between John Lithgow’s character and William Shatner’s guest character on “Third Rock From the Sun” had them comment that they had similar terrifying experiences on an airplane, and that was a reference to the fact that Shatner had starred in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, and Lithgow had played the same role in the Twilight Zone: The Movie remake of that story. I thought it was odd that of all the iconic stories told on The Twilight Zone, they chose that one to make a movie out of, but simply titled it “Twilight Zone”, as if the one story summed up the entire show. I much more recently looked it up and discovered that multiple stories are told in the movie, which really makes a lot more sense.
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Before watching the movie:
I’ve heard very little of this beyond that it exists and apparently isn’t just a concert film or a set of music videos. There was a video game tie-in that was only based on one of the segments, which is about half of what I ever heard about this.
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Before watching the movie:
This month is for anthology movies, so here’s one that’s been kicking around the back catalogs of my streaming service recommendations for a while. Each room is a separate short film by a different filmmaker, and the main throughline between them is the bellhop having to deal with all the guests.
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Before watching the movie:
This is another one of those movies where the title gets mentioned in passing but nobody really feels the need to talk about what it’s about. Eventually I got curious enough to track down a synopsis that satisfied me that it’s about an uncontacted tribesman coming into contact with the modernized world and finding “civilization” to be a confusing mess.
It also seems to have the kind of reputation you’d expect a movie made in the late 70s by white people about native Africans to have in terms of stereotyping.
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Before watching the movie:
I remember this movie as something widely loved when I was in college, even though it came out a little before I began. There was also some kind of controversy about the real people in the movie being upset at being fooled into looking ridiculous.
A few years ago there was a streaming movie comedy where the scripted plot was written around setting up hidden camera pranks on bystanders called Bad Trip, and I thought it was the first scripted fiction/prank hybrid movie, but it seems that at the time I forgot about Borat. However, the mockumentary format of this movie makes it a bit closer to reality even if the plot is pre-written at least in the broad strokes, so it’s more conventional.
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Before watching the movie:
I don’t know how well-known this movie is. The only reason I’ve heard about it is because The Simpsons referenced it in an episode title that I only knew because it was the only time I ever heard a TV station announce the episode title as part of saying the show was on next, and it only stuck in my head because it was confusing without knowing the reference. I think at some point I got around to looking up what the reference was and got just enough answer to satisfy me and then I forgot about it until I was looking for mockumentaries and realized I’d already heard of this.
What little discussion I’ve seen around the movie recently is about how the satire has evolved into reality. I hope there’s still a little satire that seems like satire.
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Before watching the movie:
It’s always surreal to me to be reviewing movies I was aware of and wanted to watch around the time I started doing this. As I limit the regular reviews to “10+ years old” and “first watch”, obviously not much I had a lot of interest in at the time makes it a decade before I get to it.
I’ve heard this is an apartheid story in the guise of an aliens on Earth story. It’s not exactly the most attractive idea to watch a dystopia story where the opressors are humans and the opressed are not. That’s probably why after the hype died down I didn’t make an effort to get back to it.
Anyway, I decided I should do some mockumentaries, and I was surprised to see this come up on a list of them, so I’m taking the opportunity.
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Before watching the movie:
The discourse around Zardoz typically begins and ends with Sean Connery’s outfit. Nobody has anything to say about Zardoz other than how bad it is, and at this point I wonder how many people saying that have actually seen it. On paper, there are a lot of cringeworthy elements, but I have to wonder how it manages as a cohesive whole. I have to know for myself what Zardoz is like.
After watching the movie:
In 2293, most humans live in a brutal, uncivilized state. A chosen few are selected by their god Zardoz, a flying stone head, to use weapons to exterminate the rest, in the belief that humans only destroy nature in their existence. Zed, one of the Brutals, hides inside the stone head to gain entrance into a Vortex, a utopic village of the elite Eternals who control the Brutals and force some of them to grow crops for them. Almost immediately, Zed shoots Arthur Frayn, the Eternal in control of the stone head and Zardoz identity, and Frayn falls to a death below. However, Eternals have developed a life without natural aging, where those who manage to die are immediately reconstructed in new, identical bodies. The scientist Consuella and her assistant May capture and pacify Zed with telepathy in order to study him and subject him to menial labor within the community. Another Eternal, Friend, plans to use Zed to overthrow the social order the Eternals have been imprisoned in for hundreds of years. But none of the Eternals suspect that Zed is not as mindless and savage as he seems.
At least in the British Isles, there was often a dreamy, new-age aspect to science fiction in the 70s. I feel like, by watching this movie, I’ve seen several episodes of “The Prisoner”. And I think I would have rather watched The Prisoner. This movie is full of trippy visuals that don’t make much sense, trying for something more artful and psychedelic than representative. Everything hinges on crystals, video projection is used to paint walls and people, and everything in the world of the Eternals that isn’t straight out of an 1800s Irish countryside feels so technologically advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.
The other aspect that came to dominate 70s movies was an overindulgence in the evolution of social mores caused by the sexual revolution. This movie sets up a society of haves and have-nots where the haves are as repressed and oppressed by their lifestyle as the have-nots they distantly rule over, but rather than explore that very much, it would rather exult in explicit assault and meditate on the collision of raw sexual power with a world that has bred reproduction and desire out of itself. I don’t think there’s a single woman in the movie that doesn’t spend at least a third of her screen time topless. The result is both deeply uncomfortable to watch and dramatically disappointing.
There is also an incredibly frustrating mix of over-explanation and drawing out mysteries so long the viewer decides they aren’t important. I finally found something really interesting to watch in the third act, when Zed begins to really develop into his full potential and explain his intentions, but the mysteries and tensions that set that up are so buried by exploring the Vortex and the pretenses for nudity that it affords that I had thought that Zed’s origins were just unimportant.
There’s an interesting spin on the kind of social commentary that’s been a part of science fiction since The Time Machine here, but unfortunately, it’s held back by the extravagances and limitations of the 70s. Maybe a modern remake could salvage this, but I’m sure it would be so different that it would be rejected as a remake. I’ve seen Zardoz, and in that knowlege, in this form, I can’t recommend others do so.
Yesterday's Movies 