Zardoz

Infobox Film
name = Zardoz


image_size =
caption = Theatrical release poster.
director = John Boorman
producer = John Boorman
writer = John Boorman
narrator =
starring = Sean Connery
Charlotte Rampling
Sara Kestelman
music = David Munrow
cinematography = Geoffrey Unsworth
editing = John Merritt
distributor = Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
released = flagicon|USA February 6, 1974
runtime = 105 min.
country = UK
language = English
budget = $1,000,000 (est.)
gross =
amg_id = 1:56115
imdb_id = 0070948

"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.

Plot

In the year AD 2293, a post-apocalypse Earth is inhabited mostly by the "Brutals", who are ruled by the "Exterminators", "the Chosen" warrior class. The Exterminators worship the god Zardoz, a huge, flying, hollow stone head. Zardoz teaches:

: "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!"

The Zardoz god head supplies the Exterminators with weapons, while the Exterminators supply it with grain. Meanwhile, Zed (Connery), an Exterminator, enters Zardoz, hidden in a load of grain, and shoots (and apparently kills) its pilot, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy) (identified as an Eternal in the story's prologue), and travels to the Vortex. The Vortices are hidden communities of civilization where the immortal "Eternals" lead a luxurious but aimless existence.

Arriving in the Vortex, Zed meets two women Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman) — with psychic powers; mentally overcoming him, they make him prisoner of their community. Consuella wants Zed destroyed immediately; others, led by May and a subversive Eternal named Friend (John Alderton), insist on keeping him for study.

In time, Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by the Tabernacle, an artificial intelligence machine. Given their perpetual life-span, the Eternals have grown bored and become corrupt: the needlessness of procreation has rendered the men impotent; meditation has replaced sleep; others fell to catatonia, forming the social stratum the Eternals name the "Apathetics". The Eternals spend their days stewarding mankind's vast knowledge, while doing little other than participating in communal navel gazing rituals. As they are immortal, time's passage is meaningless; however, to give time and life some meaning, the Vortex developed complex social rules, whose violators are punished with artificial aging — condemning them to eternal old age, and the status of "Renegade".

Moreover, Zed is less brutal than the Eternals think him. Genetic analysis reveals Zed is the ultimate result of long-running eugenics experiments devised by Arthur Frayn — the Zardoz god — who controlled the outlands with the Exterminators, thus coercing the Brutals to supply the Vortices with grain; yet Zardoz's aim was breeding a superman who would penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its perpetual status quo. Earlier, the women's analysis of Zed's mind reveals that in the ruins of the old world, Arthur Frayn led Zed to the book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", from which Zed understands the origin of the name "Zardoz" — Wizard of Oz — bringing him to a true awareness of Zardoz as a skilfull manipulation rather than an actual entity.

As Zed divines the nature of the Vortex and its problems, the Eternals use him to fight their internecine quarrels. Led by Consuella, the Eternals decide to kill Zed and age Friend. Zed escapes, and aided by May and Friend, learns the Eternals' knowledge and the Vortex's origin in order to destroy the Tabernacle. Zed helps the Exterminators invade the Vortex and kill most of the Eternals — who welcome death because they are sick and tired of their eternal but boring existence. Some Eternals escape the Vortex's destruction, heading out to a new life among the Brutals.

"Zardoz" ends allegorically in a wordless sequence of images accompanied by Beethovens's Seventh Symphony. Zed and Consuella, dressed in matching green suits, sit next to each other in a cave and silently age in time lapse. A child appears and ages as well; at adolescence he stands and leaves his parents, looking back over his shoulder with a smirk. The two continue aging, eventually wasting into dry skeletons. Above them is seen the outlines in pigment of two open hands in the style of early cave paintings. To the left of the hand paintings hangs Zed's gun, now rusted and useless.

Reception

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." [ [http://movies2.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C05E6DC153DE73ABC4F53DFB466838F669EDE Review of the film] from "The New York Times"]

Jay Cocks of "Time" called the film "visually bounteous", with "bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material." [ [http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,942780,00.html Celtic Twilight] , a February 18, 1974 review from "Time" magazine]

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"." [ [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19740101/REVIEWS/401010325/1023 Review of the film] from Roger Ebert]

Total Film magazine rated Connery's costume at number one of the dumbest decisions in movie history in 2004.Fact|date=August 2007

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

References

External links

*imdb title|0070948