Rob Dufour - Zardoz

At first I raised my hand to vote against Zardoz. I would have been fine with Minority Report or even K-Pax, and Zardoz seemed like a movie I wouldn’t enjoy. Although, while the class was further deliberating I began to think about how many times I had seen Minority Report and how I already knew the outcome of K-Pax, so I decided to take a chance with Zardoz. I wasn’t expecting anything great out of it, but I was expecting a new experience through a film I know that I would normally never watch. As Zardoz came on, I was watching the floating head guy and thinking that I could either watch this movie with the mentality that this is going to be the lamest movie I have ever seen, or that I was going to enjoy the movie for what it was. I decided to give the movie a chance and allowed myself to laugh at the ridiculousness of the movie. I thought that movie had a really cool concept with the idea of the Immortals, who never die, but often try to. And when they do attempt to kill their selves, their bodies are restored by the all-knowing computer mind that runs the Vortex. The additional idea of the Immortals continuing to age is a novel idea as well, especially with the twist that they are punished through aging if they break the rules. This is really interesting because I feel that many people yearn to live longer in their lives, yet fear getting older. We would assume that we fear aging because it seemingly brings us closer to death, but these Immortals will not die yet they fear aging still. Also, the idea of Immortals wishing for death is very interesting. It lets us mortals knows that we should be thankful for a looming sense of death, because without knowing that death could happen at anytime we would never cherish the gift of life as we would take it for granted.