To get a stronger grasp on this films ideas and intent one must first comprehend this piece of trivia: Michelangelo Antonioni's original ending was a shot of an airplane sky-writing the phrase "Fuck You, America". Venomous though it may be—and it doesn't need that last shot to drive its message home—it's a markedly seductive and inviting rendition of American socio-political structures through the lense of youthful/foreign cynicism, however patent. If the man's language is guns, you talk to him with a gun, so says a miscellaneous hippie. Antonioni's language isn't the type to end with lingering gun smoke, though watching credits roll by isn't far from it. "The audiences won't like it" MGM insisted, well, "That's the same old jive…

What Antonioni CAN'T do has always been as mind-blowing as what he can do. See Ingmar Bergman's infamous assessment that Antonioni is an amateur. In this film, Antonioni can't do anything; least of all, film two people talking to each other. Previously he never tried to film a conversation. He makes an honest attempt to do so here, and therein lies the problem: Antonioni doesn't have an honest bone in his body.

We have to have the courage to admit that in the past hundred years all art has been reduced to complaining. An artist is lesser or greater depending on how much he complains. They call it ‘denunciation’. The fact is that it’s complaining, because if it were protest…

Sure, yeah, the leads are terrible and the dialogue betrays the fact that seemingly everyone with a remote connection to the project got a say in it, but this may honestly be, barring some rewatches of Antonioni films I wasn't prepared for at the time, my second favorite of his films after RED DESERT. Alternately wistful and cynical outsider view of America, a place where a hippie can just take a plane and get away with it, until he tries to repent. The callously arranged female models of BLOWUP give way to outright mannequins animated by ad companies who see people only as clotheshorse to prop up their products. Its dream-vision of the States thus ironized, it's nevertheless the most…

"Michelangelo Antonioni's original ending was a shot of an airplane sky-writing the phrase "Fuck You, America," which was cut by MGM president Louis F. Polk along with numerous other scenes. Louis F. Polk was eventually replaced by James T. Aubrey, who had most of the cut footage restored, but without this final shot."
-IMDb Trivia

Antonioni's firstly theoretical and subsequently literal destruction of the "American" Dream and all possible derivative idealizations through an arthouse perspective that is necessarily foreign, ridiculizes the verbose intellectualism of the struggling student movement and shows the inefficiency of the power authorities in charge of society's "control". Zabriskie Point is most appropriately chosen as a deserted land where life is rarely seen, and the auteur's alienation…

Disenchanted youth in revolt. The counterculture. A revolution. Social and political upheaval. Racial tension. Corporate America. The banality of existence. Escape From the city. The open road. The endless sky. Freedom. Ephemeral love. Meaningless death. Mourning. Catharsis. Moving on.

This one is very divisive, some claim it to be Antonioni's biggest failure, others regard it as one of his best. If you allow the film to play out as an experience, a journey of sorts through a particular time and place in recent history rather than expecting too much of it then the reward is much greater.

Very few other filmmakers have been able to say so much with so little. The plot is little more than a few loose…

At the time of its release, it was a box office disaster, as well as a critical disaster. It was called by some people as one of the worst films ever made. Since it gained a more positive reputation, but nothing like The Thing, for example, which is now widely regarded as one of the best horror films ever made.

This film was written by five different people, and I'm sad to say it feels like it. In my mind, this film is made up of two parts: the first one (the good one) and the second one (the bad one). The first part succeeds because it has much more to offer and much more to say than the second…