Powerful

Good movie but grossly overrated

Good concept, poorly executed.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Mark is bored with the continuing student strike on campus. His friends get arrested and he goes to bail them out of jail. Instead, he is arrested. He is released and buys guns with his friend. During a campus protest, a policeman is shot. Mark flees the scene and steals a small plane. He's flying over the desert and Daria driving her car. He lands and joins her.It's a little too free form and amateurish especially considering Michelangelo Antonioni as its director. It could trim some of the first half. Sometimes, it looks like a student film. It's almost halfway before Mark and Daria get together. The leads do more or less student level acting. They are hippie-rama and the embodiment of that newfound free-spirit. It's fine to have a road trip through the desert and suddenly, there is a hippie sex orgy in the dusty landscape. As a narrative film, it is a meandering slow jog. It's not surreal enough to be a hippie psychedelic fantasy. I wouldn't say it's beautifully filmed but the desert setting is compelling. At least, that's better than the real estate office. The explosions montage as a finale only serves to punctuate how lackluster most of the movie is. The box office was an unmitigated financial disaster. It's a little better than that.

Being a teenager back when this film came out, I guess I would have a different opinion if I had watched back then. Unfortunately, it stayed on my 'I've got to see this movie some day' list until I was long past part of the intended audience.Today it feels like it's a joke about American society. The student revolutionaries could spend all their time arguing about whether their school is bad or if it is bad and mean. The scary thing is a lot of those students now can only find jobs in those schools or some other government entity where productivity is unimportant.But as much as I have enjoyed watching Blow-Up over the years, it at least had a point to the story. I've had a lot of balloons that have had better points. Antonioni must think he was the first to discover there is a generation gap and the young are just free and easy with life and love. The photography and the music are the best things about ZP - it sure isn't the acting. Antonioni intentionally hired amateurs for the leads and it shows. Even the stereotypes he hired had trouble playing the stereotypes they actually were. Evidently from their minuscule list of credits no one else saw any acting ability in them either.I could have used more Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead and all other music. There could have been an extended version of Dark Star over all the shots of Daria driving in the desert and it would have made the tedious parts bearable.If you have a couple hours with nothing absolutely nothing to do take the time to watch what Antonioni saw happening in America at the end of the '60s. But know you have been warned.

For understanding Antionioni's Zabriskie Point', you need insight in the ways of the alternative-thinking American youngsters from the late 19-Sixties. In connection with student-riots at Berkely, their protests were aimed against the behavior of their parent's generation.Only on this condition you'll be able to appreciate 'Zabriskie Point' to the full. Admiring the excellent capturing of its spirit, supported by its magnificent picturing -- another famous Antonioni- trademark. From these points of view, 'Zabriskie Point' nowadays almost shows as a historical documentary.For those who were not around at the time, I guess 'Zabriskie Point' turns out somewhat disappointing. This film surely bears all Antonioni high-quality marks, yes, but its plot makes little sense. Might even be considered as dull. Its only moments of good tense are provided in the scene where the boy meets the girl. Involving his low-flying airplane over the car driven by her.

And are the modern consumerism and capitalistic society pushing us to similar explosion of counterculture like they did back in the late 1960s. And have we learned the lessons of extroverted freedom. Why should all the young people watch "Zabriskie point"…As a fan of cinema I have always anticipated an interesting point of view from Michelangelo Antonioni. And "Zabriskie point" does deliver that. Although in its own time it did not receive positive reviews, it became a classical movie and a symbolic representation of a whole cultural and historic era of struggle against the imposed artificial values of society.Every decade has its own significant symbols. And the years of the 1960s were a major turning point in our modern view of life.The scenes from the bubbling city and the still Zabriskie point at the Death Valley (which in fact was represented as an alive place where the feeling of seclusion is transformed into a "fertile" place where love peace and happiness prevail.The powerful imagery soaked into this film convinces the viewer that there is something wrong with the human nature of constant exploitation of every possible resource. And the most important resource which are we still expropriating is the human empathy. Exactly empathy is what is missing in the city where Mark revolts against the authorities and status quo. On the other hand Daria is a free loving wayward character who is traveling through the desert. And when the two meet we can see a storm of playful emotions arising. The political context and the cultural clashes of various social movements are colorfully represented in the conversations between the main characters.The paths of the two strangers are different, but they intersect to show us that everything happens for a reason. And the two main characters part their ways because the real life also works in such impossible patterns.And at the end when the disillusioned Daria blows up mansions and consumerist products with her mind we can see the real energy of counterculture. The youth subculture seems potent as ever even from our point of view. And now we have to ask ourselves why do we have the same dissatisfied feeling as they did back there? And is it a bit different? My feeling is that we haven't renounced the problems at all. We just changed the way we perceive them and postponed the decisions we have to take. Decisions which have to solve inequality and more importantly transform our egotism into something more transcendent as a quality. Death and Life should not be the main measures which we take into account when we treat our fellow humans and more importantly – our home, the Earth.