Zardoz: Boorman's Folly and the Case for Watching It Anyway

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0000

The image that has followed Zardoz around for fifty years is Sean Connery in a red loincloth and thigh-high leather boots, a bandolier across his bare chest and a ponytail down his back, glowering out from beneath a Zapata moustache. It is a genuinely funny costume, and it has done the film a lasting disservice, because the still gets shared and the film goes unwatched. John Boorman made Zardoz in 1974, one film after Deliverance had turned him into a director studios would hand money to, and he spent that credit on the strangest, most self-serious science-fiction picture a major had bankrolled that decade. It flopped, it was mocked, and it has spent half a century as a punchline. I want to argue for it as a real film — imperfect, overreaching, sometimes ridiculous, and far more alive than most of the tidy dystopias that get respectful retrospectives.

John Boorman - vo.rs

Zardoz: Boorman's Folly and the Case for Watching It Anyway