Zardoz

#10 in my ranking of John Boorman’s films.

The drugs have kicked in.

Zardoz seems to be something of a poster-child for the hedonistic, drug-fueled, portentous, and overstuffed version of pre-Star Wars 70s science fiction, and I don’t hate it. After the success of Deliverance, that went so far as to get a Best Picture nomination from the Oscars, Boorman took his cache to Fox where he all but forced the studio to pay for this trippy, difficult to watch film. Making it around his house in Ireland, he brought in the former James Bond Sean Connery to wander around in a red diaper and a handful of respected British actors to talk seriously about silly things and sex. However, for all its silliness and intentional opaqueness, I think there’s something going on here that’s worth digging out.

Three hundred years into the future, the world has changed. There are small enclaves, communes, called Vortexes that preserve humanity’s achievements, populated by a group of people who have discovered immortality called the Eternals. One of these is named Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy) who has also taken control of the outlands, taking on the persona of the god Zardoz in the form of a giant, floating, stone head that preaches the holiness of the gun to its Exterminators, a group of men whose only job is to kill the Brutals of the lands outside the Vortex, those unlucky enough to live out in the wilds. Chief of these Exterminators is Zed (Connery) who, one day, sneaks into the stone head to go past the border between the outlands and the Vortex, killing Frayne in the process.

Zed gets picked up and captured by the Eternals within, chiefly May (Sara Kestelman), a scientist, and Consuella (Charlotte Rampling). Using their system of democratic governance through rings they wear attached to a central computer intelligence, the Vortex votes to keep Zed alive for three weeks for study, much to the delight of Friend (John Alderton), the confidant of Frayn who looks upon the system of the Vortex as unnatural, treating his role within it like a troll who only votes the wrong way to help needle the people around him. It’s after Friend introduces Zed to the Apathetics, a group of Eternals that have stopped caring about anything, requiring them to be fed as they stand in a barn placidly, and to the Renegades, those punished in the society by being forced into old age and senility (since they cannot die) that the film loses some of the interesting early narrative force and becomes more purely psychobabble and portentous.

One thing I really admire about the film is how it uses its set design, almost none of which actually looks futuristic in any way aside from the use of some crystals, mirrors, and plastic bags and make them feel futuristic in alignment with the largely natural look of everything else around them. It’s this implication that technology has gotten so far that its mostly hidden, and it ends up working surprisingly well. However, the discussions on sexuality, immortality, and the intersection of humanity and technology, well-worn ideas that Boorman had been touching on for a while but now come to the forefront more than in anything else he had made, and the packaging of the ideas ends up being debates. Sure, the debates are done by attractive people in interesting clothes in interesting settings, but they’re still debates. It’s evident that Boorman had so many ideas that he wanted to put into this movie that explained everything (recalling some of the major issues with Leo the Last) that he couldn’t pull some of it back, especially in trying to bring it up to the forefront, that he overloads the film in the middle, especially when you consider this is also where the film begins to embrace even weirder ideas.

In trying to embrace non-traditional forms of storytelling, Boorman brings in more extravagant visual ideas, especially when the Vortex tries to delve into Zed’s mind, him being more resistant to their methods than expected. They take him into mirrored places without entrances or exits, falling into new dimensions as May tries to figure out what happened to Frayn and how Zed got into the stone head. I really think that if Boorman had shaved down the explicit debates about stuff like sex and some of the more mundane explanations of things (there’s a fair amount of ADR that seems to be a sop to executives who had literally no idea what was going on, which I don’t blame them for, this film is hard to get into), it might be more in line with what its reappraisal fans say it is: some kind of misunderstood masterpiece. It’s not, though. The narrative is just too overstuffed and unfocused, especially in this middle section, and Boorman tries to drag out both the mystery of how Zed got there and the exploration of this weird little world he created.

The final third is where the film embraces its weirdness most while also shedding most of its stilted explanations of things for a more straightforward tearing through of the mystery as Zed reveals what he knows while Consuella leads a violent uprising against the whole Vortex because they won’t kill Zed, ending his negative influence on the place, which is an irony that, of course, Consuella must speak about explicitly.

There’s something about this movie that attracts me and brings me in. It’s a combination of everything, really. The physical production that feels both natural and futuristic at the same time, the exploration of ideas (even if they get too on the nose and debate-like in sections), the odd performances, the weird visuals, and the use of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, all actually packaged in a story that, once you get past its intentional opaqueness, is surprisingly straightforward. A society is bored and wants excitement, so it invites its own destruction.

I don’t think it actually works, though. It’s too leaden in its middle section and the actual resolution of everything feels more random and in service of an idea of renewal that the film never bothered to explore up until the moment two characters escape a holocaust and start a new life. However, I’m kind of surprised it works as well as it does, but it can’t quite come together completely. Maybe if Boorman had set aside the cocaine for a few days during scripting, he could have ironed this stuff out.

Rating: 2.5/4