Welcome to the year 2293. Savages known as the Brutals live in a wasteland and worship a giant stone head named Zardoz, who comes out of the sky, tells them to shoot guns and not have sex, and then dumps hundreds of firearms on them. One Brutal, Zed (Sean Connery, wearing what appears to be a big red diaper) jumps into Zardoz’s mouth and discovers that Zardoz is actually a spaceship that is piloted by Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy). Zed shoots Arthur and then flies with Zardoz to the Vortex, where a bunch of overdressed and overaffected Immortals are having a perpetual garden party.
The Immortals, who can live forever because they’ve mentally learned how to slow the aging process, take an immediate interest in Zed. They want to know where Arthur is. Zed wants to explore the Vortex and learn what’s going on. The Immortals assign Zed to do menial tasks. Consuela (Charlotte Rampling) falls in love with Zed but keeps trying to kill him. If you could live forever, the film asks, wouldn’t you eventually want to die? I would not.
John Boorman, you nut! Boorman is one of the greatest directors ever, responsible for Point Blank, Deliverance, and Excalibur. Zardoz shows what happens when a great filmmaker falls so in love with his vision that no one can tell him that it’s not working. Zardoz is pure Boorman, obsessed with nature, curious about paganism, and cynical about religion. Boorman had something that he wanted to say about nature and humanity and he deserves a lot of credit for that. He had just directed Deliverance and could have had his pick of projects in 1974. He could have directed an action spectacular or he could have just gone home to Europe and counted his money. Instead, Boorman decided to go with a dream project that he had been trying to put together for years.
Did it work? No, it did not. A few stunning images (that stone head!) aside, the movie itself is slow and talky and Sean Connery, with his deep brogue, is miscast as Zed. (As Lisa said last night, “I’m glad to see Scotland survived the apocalypse.”) With his pony tail and his handle-bar mustache, Connery seemed like he was doing a dry run for his Highlander character. Charlotte Rampling is beautiful as Consuela and some viewers — mostly men — will appreciate her costumes, but the society of the Immortals is never as interesting as Boorman seems to think it is.
Zardoz is bad but still compelling because Boorman was so dedicated to whatever it was he thought the message of the movie was. Watch it with a bud and try to figure it out,
Through the Shattered Lens 