Zardoz: Hard To Say Whether 70s Science Fiction Was Daring Or Just Plain Weird...

Probably both.  Yes, that is Sir Sean Connery in a red Speedo.  I avoided this film for a number of years, because...c'mon, Sean Connery in a red Speedo.  Could the movie really be worth that?  Well...then I saw who directed, John Boorman, who brought us the amazing Excalibur, a great take on the Arthurian legend.  So...yeah.  Alright.  For the sake of 70s cinematic science fiction literacy...sure. 

So...opening up, I see this...

Yep.  A floating stone head.  This is after a prologue with some guy ranting on and wondering if God is the ultimate showman or something along those lines.  Could be brilliant or pretentious, hard to tell at this point.  So anyway, the stone head lands, gives a lecture about evil penises and good guns and tosses out a bunch of guns.  The primitives worshiping the stone head pick them up and rejoice.  Then we see our first look at Zed (Connery), one of these Brutals.  These are Exterminators, who do the bid of Zardoz (the stone head), mostly involving culling the Brutal populations and keeping them from overrunning the now fragile world with their out of control babymaking.

Later, we see Zed suddenly emerging out of a pile of sand inside the stone head, which is again airborne and headed for a "Vortex".  A Vortex is a protected area ruled by Eternals, a society of near immortal scientists and intellectuals who seemingly have become totally about calculation and data.  Their passion, emotion and more abstract or primitive elements of the human soul atrophied.  They look at the world and the other humans who live there with a detatchment.  Only a few of them seem to give a damn about anything, and those tend to be regarded as outsiders and heretics, kept separated from the rest of the group.

They find Zed in their midst and find him a wonder, this primitive in their midst.  Little do they know that there is more to this man-ape than they think and that plans are underfoot to break this sociological cul-de-sac the Eternals have found themselves in.

This thing is weird.  And not the most optimistic film.  However, it is strong in ideas and imagery, about how too much emphasis on one culture, one way of doing things, how a lack of variety can ultimately doom a society.  Sometimes, you just have to shake things up a bit.  That when you get too insular and complacent, you weaken yourself.

Sometimes you need a "primitive" ape-man to come in and remind you of the essentials of life.

Zardoz, a strange one but a good one.

Fury: Male Bonding Has It's Costs...

It is 1945 and the Allied Army is rolling up Germany.  Staff Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Brad Pitt) is the tank commander (TC) of the stalwart crew of the Sherman tank "Fury".  They've been through the hellfire of war together, starting in North Africa.  They are now an elite armor crew, knowing how to move and fight their machine with lethal efficiency.  They can be put in odds stacked far against them and make the enemy, a fearsome foe, pay in blood and steel many times over.  But the war has taken its toll on this team of American soldiers. 

When the film opens, Fury has apparently just been through a vicious engagement and we see Wardaddy take out a German officer in a hand to hand ambush.  They seem to be the lone survivor on a carnage laden battlefield.  They also just lost their assistant driver and will need a new troop.  They get one, PVT Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a rear echelon soldier trained as a staff clerk, with the lethal skill of typing "sixty words a minute".  He has the privilege of taking the assistant driver position.  Initially, the tight knit crew, not surprisingly, is not that welcoming to the new soldier.  In the first engagement Ellison participates in, the horror of what is asked of him overwhelms him, and Wardaddy takes some drastic measures to try to cure him of it, as his reticence is a liability to Fury and its crew.

Later, we see scenes of the crew of Fury taking some RnR in a German village, and we get more of a look at where the minds and souls of Fury's crew are at in this stage of the game.  This war and what they have had to do to play their part has had its cost.  However, it is made plain that they aren't entirely unaware of this.

And when it is all said and done, even with the Germans, it is plain that for the most part, we aren't talking about monsters here.  We are talking about men trained to do a deadly serious job.  Prosecuting that job costs.  War costs.  Not just in money in blood, but in damage on the inside that haunts one long after the shooting is done.

And that is what Fury depicts, despite on the surface appearing to take on the trappings of a traditional Hollywood war movie.

 

 

 

War is indeed hell, a place where demons dwell.  And they will have their payment in humanity, one way or another.

 

 

Good flick, for both that and some awesome tank on tank action.