Critics reviews

It's a head trip all right, and the mental terrain it traverses and transforms certainly isn't without the frustrations and jarring transitions to accompany the beauteous revelation of a true journey. But when the whole thing is over there's no mistaking the fact that you've come back from an allegorical somewhere which surely has inquisitive intellectual precedent, yet at the same time feels like uncharted, idiosyncratic territory as far as the movies are concerned.

There's no doubting that if Boorman had set out to make a film that would dazzle and provoke some and strike others as bewildering and absurd, he could not have done better than what he managed with Zardoz... From its very first moments, Zardoz announces its strangeness, its odd humour, and its sly understanding of itself as a postmodern trip through the idea of myth-making.

in 2015, Zardoz remains for me in many ways the most magnificent of Boorman's grand follies, at least until it drowns in its own metaphysics, which happens around the same time it shifts its literary references from L. Frank Baum to T.S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Song of Solomon. But even after it slides off the cliff, it does a fine job of hijacking the multiple-mirror shootout from The Lady from Shanghai.

The film's initial radical message, much like its titular god, proves hollow, instead favoring a reinforcement of heteronormative ideals. It does however speak volumes that John Boorman would follow up his hyper-masculine DELIVERANCE (1972) with a film that at least at the outset questions male cultural dominance. That the film is also a highly entertaining fantasy should be noted as well.