Zardoz

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Zardoz

Theatrical release poster.
Directed by John Boorman
Produced by John Boorman
Written by John Boorman
Starring Sean Connery
Charlotte Rampling
Sara Kestelman
Music by David Munrow
Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth
Editing by John Merritt
Distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
Release date(s) Flag of the United States February 6, 1974
Running time 105 min.
Country Flag of the United Kingdom United Kingdom
Language English
Budget $1,000,000 (est.)
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman. It stars Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, and Sara Kestelman. Zardoz was Connery's second post-James Bond role (after The Offence). The film was shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth on a budget of US$1 million.


Contents

[edit] Plot

The film is set in the year 2293, a post-apocalypse Earth. The Earth is now inhabited mostly by the "Brutals", ruled over by a warrior class called "Exterminators" or "the Chosen". The Exterminators worship a huge flying stone head called Zardoz as their god, who teaches them:

The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth... and kill!

Zardoz supplies the Exterminators with weapons, while Exterminators also supply Zardoz with grain.

Zed (Connery), an Exterminator, enters Zardoz hidden in a load of grain and shoots (and apparently kills) its pilot, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy), whom the film's prologue had introduced as an immortal. Hidden in the giant head, Zed arrives in the Vortex. The Vortices are hidden bastions of civilization where the immortal "Eternals" lead a luxurious but aimless existence.

Arriving in the Vortex as a stowaway, Zed meets two female Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman). They possess psychic powers, easily overcoming Zed and making him a prisoner of the community of decadent effetes. While Consuella wants to see Zed destroyed immediately, others, led by May and a subversive jester called Friend (John Alderton), insist on keeping him for studies.

Over time Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by an artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. Through their vastly extended lifespan the Eternals have grown bored and corrupt. The needlessness of procreation has resulted in sexual impotence. Sleep has been substituted by meditation, and some others have fallen into catatonia through an odd mental illness, forming a new social strata the Eternals call the "Apathetics". The Eternals spend days stewarding the vast knowledge of humanity while doing little themselves besides participating in rituals, mass meditations and navel gazing. As they never die, the passage of time has become largely meaningless. A complex set of social rules is maintained, with violators punished by artificial aging, eventually condemning them to eternal old age, the status of a "Renegade".

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Zed is not quite the "brutal" the Eternals believe him to be. Genetic analysis reveals him to be the ultimate result of long-running experiment in creative eugenics devised by Frayn/Zardoz. Frayn had used the Exterminator class to control the outlands and coerce the Brutals into supplying the Vortices with grain, but he then aimed at breeding a superman, whom he hoped would infiltrate the Vortex and save humanity from its unending status quo. The backstory develops to reveal that Frayn had led Zed to an old book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the origin of the name Zardoz - Wizard of Oz), making him become aware of the fake nature of Zardoz.

As Zed divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, he starts to play an increasingly proactive role among the Eternals. The Eternals, led by Consuella, finally decide that Zed is to be destroyed, and "age" the resistant Friend. Zed manages to escape and, with the help of May and Friend, attains the Eternals' knowledge, learns of the Vortex's origin, and finally succeeds in destroying the Tabernacle. The Vortex is invaded by other Exterminators who bring death to the majority of Eternals, typically with their blessing, given the novelty of the events. A few Eternals escape to make a new life outside the Vortex among the Brutals, carrying the knowledge of civilization.

The allegorical ending shows Zed and Consuella producing a child, growing old and dying naturally, whilst the sound of the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major swells in the soundtrack.

Usher button advertisements read "I have seen the future and it does not work."

[edit] Reception

Sean Connery as Zed, wearing what the UK's Channel 4 described as "a red nappy, knee-high leather boots, pony tail and Zapata moustache."
Sean Connery as Zed, wearing what the UK's Channel 4 described as "a red nappy, knee-high leather boots, pony tail and Zapata moustache."[1]

Nora Sayre, in a February 7, 1974 review for The New York Times, called Zardoz a melodrama that is a "good deal less effective than its special visual effects"... a film "more confusing than exciting even with a frenetic, shoot-em-up climax."[2]

Jay Cocks of Time called the film "visually bounteous", with "bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material."[3]

Roger Ebert called it a "genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators....The movie is an exercise in self-indulgence (if often an interesting one) by Boorman, who more or less had carte blanche to do a personal project after his immensely successful Deliverance."[4]

Total Film magazine rated Connery's costume at number one of the dumbest decisions in movie history in 2004.[citation needed]

Decades later, Channel 4 called it "Boorman's finest film" and a "wonderfully eccentric and visually exciting sci-fi quest" that "deserves reappraisal."[1]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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