In my opinion, the opening decades of the 21st century are gradually revealing the prescience of John Boorman's movie Zardoz. Terrorism, globalism, the haves vs the have-nots, the adored and deplored, the rip tide of science, the prospects of machine intelligence and the internet of things, the crisis of evolution both of our species and our collective cultures, the contradictions and imperatives of freedom, the twinning of immortality and death / oppression and liberation... these are some of the themes that spill out of this movie. In the science fiction that I like, technology in the future will seem like magic to our generation. Was it Arthur Clark who first expressed this idea? Considered a flop as it opened in 1974, ridiculed in a multitude of reviews ever since, Zardoz has achieved a protected status in cult movie followings. It is my wish to enshrine it a little within this blog.
I recently stumbled into a fan video by Jonathan Meese, a Berlin based artist who shares my fascination with Boorman's creation. He was able to interview Boorman in his home in the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, also famously the set for Zardoz.
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