Zardoz (1974) 6/10
In a post-apocalyptic future, “brutals” are hunted by trained “exterminators,” while immortals live in protected Vortexes and contemplate beauty. The exterminator Zed (Sean Connery) breaks into a Vortex and begins stirring things up. Directed by John Boorman.
This week, cheese with nipples!
If there was ever a movie impossible to define, that movie is Zardoz. Is it cheesy camp fun? (“The gun is good! The penis is evil!”) Is it a fascinating vision of a dystopic future? Is it pretentious? Creative? Interesting? Dull? Satiric? Over-influenced by a quantity and quality of hallucinogenic drugs not seen since 1978? To all of the above, yes.
You will from time to time hear people talk about Zardoz as if it’s the worst movie ever made, which it really isn’t. It is full of clever ideas and powerful visuals. There are scary partying old people. There’s Sean Connery and his cohorts in red bikinis and thigh-high boots. There are the “apathetics”—immortals so bored of life they have stopped responding to stimuli at all, and just stand there and stare. There are tribunals to punish negative thinking.
The brutals and exterminators have been manipulated and managed by an immortal called Arthur, who pretends to be the god Zardoz. Zardoz creates miracles for the exterminators and demands they kill brutals in exchange. As the movie begins, Zed has stowed away in Zardoz’s giant idol/ship, killed Arthur, and come seeking answers in the Vortex. Zed is easily captured, but some immortals, want him kept alive to study him, while others want him killed as a potential negative influence.
That utopia is boring is not as interesting a theme as Boorman imagines, but here it is layered with the tyranny of peacefulness, the tedium of democratic committee meetings, and the idea that sex is a hostile force which has to be eliminated for peace to exist (no wonder they’re bored!). These are fun things to satirize, and long stretches of Zardoz are genuinely fun to watch. Unfortunately, as with his later, and more popular, Excalibur, Boorman doesn’t seem to know what will make the story fun. He knows it’s a good story, but he basically flounders around with the fun components and the suckful components all jumbled together.
The biggest mistake the movie makes is to try to explain itself too much. By the end, we have been given a complete history of how mankind got where it is, step-by-step. That’s a lot of exposition, particularly considering that the immortals use mental powers and invisible forcefields to fight—things that aren’t very visual. They stare, they hold up their hands, there’s a sound effect. Thus, long sections are static. And static is somehow harder to tolerate in a weird future with Connery in a pigtail and, as I said, nipples.
Connery is terrific. Charlotte Rampling is, as usual, dull. Except, not as usual, in a weird futuristic hairstyle. Some of the science fiction is excellent, and some of the social satire is sharp, so that when things get dull or pretentious, you want to say “Hey! You! This was a good movie a minute ago!” But the TiVo is not listening.
This is one movie that really should be remade, because a lot of its potential is squandered. Like Westworld, I think it would benefit from 21st Century special effects and a re-examination of a rather cool concept.
