Following the success of Deliverance<\/em>, Boorman had planned to adapt The Lord of the Rings<\/em>. After spending years working on a script that included a threeway kiss between Boromir, Aragorn and a teenage Arwen, sinister puppet shows, and a Sauron who looks like Mick Jagger, the funding fell through. Eager to use many of the Arthurian and New Age ideas he\u2019d plundered for his Tolkien reimagining, Boorman managed to procure $1 million for his next project, even though nobody at 20th<\/sup> Century Fox had a clue what the film was about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To give Zardoz<\/em> the speediest of summaries, it depicts the future of 2293 where humanity is divided between the elite Eternals and low-class Brutals. The former live cloistered in a Vortex where they do not age but have grown bored with immortality, while the Brutals are murderous rapists either forced to grow food for their overlords or terrorize one another into servitude. One Brutal exterminator named Zed (Sean Connery) finds his way into the Eternals’ world via the talking stone head of Zardoz and works to find a way to destroy his oppressors. Sort of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the behest of the studio, Boorman added a preface to the movie where the basics of the plot are detailed, but it doesn\u2019t demystify the grandeur or proud impenetrability of Zardoz<\/em>. Indeed, Boorman wanted to create a mystery that both embraced the metaphysical while satirizing its own overblown splendor (contrary to popular belief, you are supposed to laugh at this movie.) Boorman\u2019s ability (and troubles with) stretching a comparatively small budget to its limits gives Zardoz<\/em> its unique look: part psychedelic rock band album cover, part medieval tapestry (echoed in the monastery-like score), part abandoned set painting from that unmade Lord of the Rings<\/em> adaptation. For every moment that dazzles, there is one that feels like lo-fi British sci-fi straight out of early Doctor Who<\/em>. Zed\u2019s gaining of all of human knowledge is shot like a Bond movie opening, while the Eternals\u2019 communication methods echo bad acting school exercises. The oft-derided Brutal costume is a parody of toxic masculinity, blatantly oversexed and crotch-centered. Connery, for his part, is committed to the macho dominance of this ridiculous man, bred to be a rapey savior to the Eternals. It\u2019s the flipside to Bond: what if his sexuality really was a superpower?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nudity is, of course, frequent but totally joyless as the Eternals have become both sterile and impotent over the centuries. The only way one can be punished in this system is to be forcibly aged and left to putter around an endless party of mentally unsound elderly prisoners, and even they seem to be having more fun than the ones in charge. All the Eternals seem to do is legislate over minor errors made across the centuries, “every little sin and misdemeanor raked over.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a rare dystopian story in which the hellish future has been dictated not exclusively by political or scientific folly but by the arts. The carnage of the Brutals and their eventual worship of a giant head that spews guns is essentially the pet project of a bored artist with too much time on his hands. His influences are not technology but The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, and his goals aren\u2019t rooted in self-interest or progressiveness but pure apathy with his alternatives. The \u201cperfection\u201d of the Eternals has given way to nihilism, sexlessness, and total sensory starvation, so birthing an alternative defined by callousness that is inspired by bastardized readings of children\u2019s stories is a damning inevitability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than help their fellow man, they have committed to exacerbating the scourge of the class divide, even though it has brought misery to both sides of the equation. They deliberately ignore the pain of the enslaved who provide for them, declaring, “You can’t equate their feelings with ours.” This utopian alternative to the basic tenets of human existence \u2013 love, sex, death \u2013 is empty, and all of the philosophizing it hoped to inspire is nothing but a dead end. When the giant head of Zardoz infamously proclaims, \u201cThe gun is good, the penis is evil,\u201d you get his point. By the end, when the Brutals invade, the Eternals welcome with open arms the only experience they\u2019ve yet to have, the one thing their former slaves can provide for them: death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of Zardoz<\/em> is plodding and incoherent. Boorman would admit to being inebriated during much of its creation and that he\u2019d cut out a lot in hindsight. He would bring more clarity to his fantastical aesthetic with the superior Excalibur<\/em>, while the Wachowskis would make a lot of his ideas more accessible in The Matrix<\/em>. Yet Zardoz<\/em> as it stands is a unique endeavor, the kind of film that could only have existed in 1974, when this sort of ambitious and undiluted vanity project was conceivable under the studio system. Amid its muddle of ideas is a scathing message for the future: we are forever bound by sex, by art, and by violence, and whatever you do with that combination will make or doom us. In Boorman’s eyes, the latter seems inevitable. \u201cIs God in show business?\u201d asks Zardoz<\/em>. Well, that or he has an especially sick sense of humor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Zardoz” is available for digital rental or purchase.<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/zardiz2-1024x575.jpg\")
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