Zardoz

The film is a mass of inoperative whimsies and conceits; they're imperative even on the dumbest sci-fi level, because Boorman isn't enough of a writer to make them work together.

[Zardoz] demonstrates how one can make a cheap sci-fi flick look like a cheap sci-fi flick by using mirrors and prisms as substitutes for imagination.

You have to hand it to John Boorman. When he's brilliant, he's brilliant (Point Blank, Deliverance) but when he's terrible, he's really terrible.

Probably John Boorman's most underrated film-an impossibly ambitious and pretentious but also highly inventive, provocative, and visually striking SF adventure.

Such a wildly ambitious misfire that you can't help but root for it, or at least feel some twisted sense of affection for it.

Zardoz is a futuristic, metaphysical and anthropological drama testing John Boorman in three creative areas. The results: direction, good; script, a brilliant premise which unfortunately washes out in climactic sound and fury; and production, outstanding.

This shallow utopia needs our hairy hero’s dose of he-manliness...

…it’s lofty, ambitious, and has sparky moments of clarity that make it a noble failure…

This deserves to be watched more than once for the Tree of Knowledge osmosis, jacking into their matrix insight...

A lot of good ideas have gone into the complex social order Boorman, who directed Deliverance, has created; but they've all been sacrificed to the necessity of developing a plot around them.