The Unloved, Part 126: Zardoz

On the 7th of June, I’ll be 35 years old. If we’re being very optimistic, this isn’t exactly the start of middle age, but I don’t know what else to call it. I’ve been paying attention to the news and the weather lately, and they haven’t been putting me in a great mood. So with mortality’s creeping occupation of my waking life, I decided to finally tackle a film that is the ultimate in creativity in the face of futility: John Boorman’s radical, beautiful, pretentious, astonishing, blasphemous “Zardoz,” one of the best films of the 1970s and the platonic ideal of the kind of movie no one’s interested in making anymore, where the acid-trip visuals have a genuine philosophical, confessional underpinning. I think we’re poorer as a culture due to the lack of big swings like this that stare the human condition dead in the eye. By now, it’s not news that I like movies that attempt to find a new visual language, and, on some days, it feels like we just don’t get them anymore, and we’ll always be chasing the past as we grope blindly towards the future. So here at long last, is my love letter to “Zardoz”.