'Zardoz' was a 1974 science fiction movie that spectacularly divides audiences. About 3/4th s of viewers feel it is complete garbage while the remainder see it as a visionary masterpiece. I fall into the later category. I saw it as a teenager, gobbling up as much fantasy and science fiction as I could, and found the movie thought provoking. Over forty years later, my opinion hasn't changed, but my thoughts on the movie have.
Looking on-line, one can't help but be struck by the number of people who rank 'Zardoz' among the worse films ever made, or at the very least the most startling inane pieces of celluloid ever put together. It was made in that brief period between '2001 A Space Odyssey' and 'Star Wars', when many similarly provocative films were made. Typically, they were big on ideas but a little short on budget. The 21st century opinion of 'Zardoz' as a cinematic travesty says more about the dumbing down of our modern world than it does about the actual quality of the film.
Director John Boorman had managed a couple of big hits as well as a few flops, but hadn't done anything in a similar genre. He had hoped to launch a version of 'Lord of the Rings' but couldn't find financing, so instead he turned to a science fiction concept of his own devising. Instead of going galactic, like 'Silent Running', he went speculative. But it wasn't a dystopian future, like 'Soylant Green' and so many others, but a world where, for at least some, it seemed a paradise.
The movie starts out on a strange note and just gets stranger; a floating head with a theatrically fake beard hovers int he air, spouting plot points that will make no sense for the first half of the movie. Then we get to the famous 'The gun is good - the penis is bad' scene, with a giant floating head barfing out automatic weapons to some rough looking guys. Sean Connery shows up in his notorious red diaper, and fires a gun right at the audience. Right away the film announces that it is going to assault the audience and its expectations.
So far we have seen a nightmare future, and the guy with the fake beard soon shows up with Connery inside the floating head. Connery shots him and he slowly floats away. By now, it should be apparent that reality is not a major concern of this story. Connery floats down to a beautiful community full of rather unisex people,running around, contacting fellow marauders before being captured by some vague mind power.
If you thought things were challenging before, with the introduction of the hippie community things do get a little bonkers. Lots of backstory is fed into our cortex in strange ways, often by the two female protagonists using mysterious 'science'. We find out about the exterminators, eternals and brutals in images that are a mix between 'No Blade of Grass' and 'A Clockwork Orange'. Weird rituals that do seem a little laughable happen and we tour the Utopian community, only to find both old people and some residents devoid of emotion.
Sean seems to be upsetting the balance in a major way, and it is obvious that he has a plan to try and get his fellow outsiders access for a little rape, pillage, and plunder. Meanwhile, we are treated to increasingly bizarre visuals, all done in camera, some of which work and some of which don't. And should I mention the rampart nudity?
By an hour into the movie, we are in unique territory. Amongst the most famous scenes are the interrogation of Zed, the Sean Connery character. Charlotte Rampling, looking unbelievably cold and beautiful here, tries to force an erection but Zed is able to resist, the first hint that perhaps he has intelligence and power greater than they think. Done in such a blunt way, it is still shocking.
The plot moves at a very fast gallop, throwing everything as well as a couple of kitchen sinks your way, not waiting for you to catch up. For a first time viewer it can be overwhelming, but it is a movie that is worth repeating to get the subtleties. There are crazy graphics, odd images, an orgy, and it all ends on an apocalyptic note. In other words, it hits all the right places for a science fiction movie of its time.
That many in the modern world see it as baffling only demonstrates how audiences seem to only view movies in a spoon-fed way. You need to make sense of 'Zardoz' yourself; it doesn't bother to do so. There is so much casual weirdness on display in nearly every scene that your defenses can easily get the better of you. But what is there is a sincere attempt to do something profound.
Exactly what is being said remains the greatest mystery. I have spent decades trying to unravel it and have gotten no closer. I found the paperback, straight from John Boorman's notes, and I don't recall any great revelations. Buying the DVD, it had a director's commentary that seem to sidestep the entire issue of meaning. Was there a pattern here?
Perhaps the entire meaning of the movie is misunderstood. Take Sean Connery, forever mocked for wearing what is nearly universally described as a 'red diaper'. In truth, Connery was doing something similar, if a little less extreme, than what John Lennon had done; trying to kill the 60's image of himself and be re-invented for the new decade. His hairy body, on display in nearly every frame of the movie, is the exact opposite of the other hairless and sexless people, either in the commune or the wretched brutals slogging through the mud. Sean shows a complete disregard for his image as a sex symbol, and if there is a point, that was his.
Director Boorman had never done anything fantastic before, and his plot has less to do with the future and more to do with the recent past. The film seems to have more to do with hippie and New Age culture, communes and retreating from society. The highly involved people try and wall them selves off from the troubles outside, creating what is essentially a matriarchy, but dissension and most especially boredom creates their destruction. The hippies were more complicated than the Time-Life images of dancing, Altamont and Charles Manson. They were rejecting a society that had hardened into a killing machine, but they never did find a way to stop it, only hide.
By the end, 'Zardoz' is an apocalyptic movie that wrestles, not entirely successfully, with huge ideas. You could still do that back in 1974, before 'Star Wars' dumbed down science fiction to cheap thrills and quasi-mystic mumbo jumbo. In fact, the message behind 'Zardoz' is no more obscure than '2001' or 'Star Wars', both films with notoriously vague messages. The problem is in the confrontational and direct way in which these issues are handled, in the use of gender and sex, still taboo subjects today. 'Zardoz' was designed to make you feel uneasy, and it succeeds.
Any film should be evaluated at three levels; the text, the context, and the subtext. The text was a mid-budget science fiction movie filmed in Ireland, full of nudity and violence. The context was the aftermath of the counter-culture, the free fall of the 1970s before the Reagan years clamped down on all that nonsense. It is the subtext of 'Zardoz' that makes it so special, an open-ended, up-for-interpretation gender bender with enough trippy visuals to suck in an intelligent viewer.
'Zardoz' is a great film to re-interpret. In today's cultural environment, it is hard not to see the Eternals as the one percent, building a wall around all that they have inherited, with Zardoz as our esteemed Great Orange Oz. Of course, like the movie, I could be taking the entire thing entirely too seriously. Perhaps the best thing that I ever heard related to this movie is that some genius actually went to a 'Burning Man' type event and constructed a Zardoz head in the desert. I doubt that any of the new millennium hippies realized the monster that they had allowed in their midst.
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