“Even more so than Greed, Zabriskie Point is the work of someone so moved by the space, silence and light of the desert that the neurotic self-importance of the cities of the West falls into place as a temporary fad or aberration. The greatest sense of age in America is in the West, where geology reminds man of his uncertain hold on history. Soon, the cities may be debris taking their place between the dunes and Dante's Point in Death Valley. And nearly fifty years after MGM had so drastically reduced von Stroheim's greed, along came Michelangelo Antonioni (hot and sexy after Blow Up) to make a picture so anti-idiomatic, so detached from identification or story, so uncommercial and so willfully, self-destructively beautiful that it sucked dry the liquidity at MGM.
“Zabriskie Point can be criticized; the story of rebellious students who retreat from Los Angeles to Death Valley is only a sketch. Or is it remote and infinitesimal, like the movements of insects on the ground as seen from a height? It is easier now to appreciate that Antonioni sought the sensibility of the desert for the soul of this movie, and that the film is a meditation not to be tied up by narrative. When the ultra-modern perfect house blows up, it is not just the intimation of student terrorism or dismay at materialism that has caused it. It is the response of the desert, and the pressure of desolation that wants to explode all those assembled things--ice-box, wardrobe, bookcase, stereo. Along with Greed, Zabriskie Point expresses an Ozymandian eternity in which human achievement is vain and momentary, while only the desert abides by truth.” David Thomson