Zardoz

"Is God in show business, too?" From the onset a sense of Dalínian funnery, The Great Train Robbery plus A Corner in Wheat in rapid succession for the pistol out of the grain pile inside the floating stone head that might be Orson Welles'. Weapons for the barbarians in post-apocalyptic Irish hills, Zed the Exterminator (Sean Connery) seeks to slay a god and, like Walker in Point Blank, finds a jester at the top of the chain. The loinclothed brute who pokes his finger through a Van Gogh lands in the Vortex amid Eternals, who long for death as a sweet release from boredom. The power of seed is the topic of analysis, pornography fails to get a rise out of the visitor yet a glimpse of the hostile lass (Charlotte Rampling) does the trick, thus the grand psychedelic evolution, "just entertainment." John Boorman on time and being and art, unutterably barmy and marvelous. Effete aristos in the bubble, the troglodyte mind deflowered at the library, H.G. Wells' Eloi and Morlocks in a full-scale farrago of British science fiction. (Allusions range from Things to Come to Devil Girl From Mars.) Forced aging as punishment in the land of immortals, purgatory as a perpetual retirement home ball, Apathetics who regain vitality by licking a single drop of sweat from Connery's mighty cheek. Mirrors and light shows within the Tabernacle computer ("Everything... and nothing"), where Boorman invents Jarman and Greenaway. Borges on Siddhartha, the L. Frank Baum strain segues into Exorcist II: The Heretic. "We've all been used!" "And reused!" "And abused!" "And amused!" The continuous imagistic flow was derided as impenetrable, but what is truly affecting is the sublime directness of a man struggling to sort out faith from fakery and expiring by his beloved's side, serenaded by Beethoven. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth. With Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Niall Buggy, and Sally Anne Newton.