Zardoz
| Zardoz | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster |
|
| Directed by | John Boorman |
| Produced by | John Boorman |
| Written by | John Boorman |
| Starring | Sean Connery Charlotte Rampling Sara Kestelman |
| Music by | David Munrow |
| Cinematography | Geoffrey Unsworth |
| Editing by | John Merritt |
| Studio | John Boorman Productions |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | 6 February, 1974 |
| Running time | 105 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English Italian Swedish Latin German French Irish Gaelic |
| Budget | $1,570,000[1] |
| Box office | $1.8 million (US/ Canada)[2] |
Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction/fantasy 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$1.57 million. [1]
Plot
In the year AD 2293, a post-apocalyptic Earth is inhabited mostly by the Brutals, who are ruled by the Eternals. Eternals use other Brutals, called Exterminators, as 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. Zed (Sean Connery), an Exterminator, hides himself within Zardoz for an initially unknown purpose. He shoots and apparently kills its pilot, Arthur Frayn (Niall Buggy), who has already identified himself as an Eternal in the story's prologue. The stone head containing Zed returns to the Vortex, a secluded community of civilized beings, protected all around by an invisible force-field, where the immortal Eternals lead a pleasant but ultimately stifling existence.
Arriving in the Vortex, Zed meets two young, attractive female Eternals — Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) and May (Sara Kestelman). Overcoming him with psychic powers, they make him a prisoner and menial worker within their community. Consuella wants Zed destroyed immediately; others, led by May and a subversive Eternal named Friend (John Alderton), insist on keeping him alive for further study.
In time, Zed learns the nature of the Vortex. The Eternals are overseen and protected from death by the Tabernacle, an artificial intelligence. Given their limitless lifespan, the Eternals have grown bored and corrupt. The needlessness of procreation has rendered the men impotent and meditation has replaced sleep. Others fall into catatonia, forming the social stratum the Eternals have named the "Apathetics". The Eternals spend their days stewarding mankind's vast knowledge, baking special bread for themselves from the grain deliveries and participating in communal navel gazing rituals. To give time and life more meaning the Vortex developed complex social rules whose violators are punished with artificial aging. The most extreme offenders are condemned to permanent old age and the status of "Renegades". But any Eternals who somehow manage to die, usually through some fatal accident, are almost immediately reborn into another healthy, synthetically reproduced body that is identical to the one they just lost.
Zed is less brutal and far more intelligent than the Eternals think he is. Genetic analysis reveals he 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. Zardoz's aim was to breed a superman who would penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its hopelessly stagnant status quo. The women's analysis of Zed's mental images earlier had revealed that in the ruins of the old world Arthur Frayn first encouraged Zed to learn to read, then leading him to the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Zed finally understands the origin of the name Zardoz — Wizard of Oz — bringing him to a true awareness of Zardoz as a skillful manipulator rather than an actual deity. He becomes infuriated with this realization and decides to plumb the deepest depths of this enormous mystery.
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 to age Friend. Zed escapes and, aided by May and Friend, absorbs all the Eternals' knowledge, including that of 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 as a release from their eternal but boring existence. Some few Eternals do escape the Vortex's destruction, heading out to radically new lives as fellow mortal beings among the Brutals.
Zardoz ends in a wordless sequence of images accompanied by the sombre second movement (allegretto) of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Zed and Consuella, dressed in matching green suits and having fallen in love, then sit next to each other in the cave-like stone head and age in time-lapse. A baby boy appears, matures and leaves his parents. The couple eventually decompose into skeletons and finally nothing remains in the space but painted hand-prints on the wall and Zed's Webley-Fosbery revolver.
Cast
- Sean Connery as Zed
- Charlotte Rampling as Consuella
- Sara Kestelman as May
- John Alderton as Friend
- Sally Anne Newton as Avalow
- Niall Buggy as Arthur Frayn / Zardoz
- Bosco Hogan as George Saden
- Jessica Swift as Apathetic
- Reginald Jarman as voice of Death
Reception
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."[4]
Jay Cocks of Time called the film "visually bounteous", with "bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material."[5]
Nora Sayre, in a 7 February, 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."[6]
Decades later, Channel 4 called it "Boorman's finest film" and a "wonderfully eccentric and visually exciting sci-fi quest" that "deserves reappraisal."[3]
As of May 2012, Zardoz has a rating of 44% on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.[7]
Despite being a commercial failure and mostly panned by critics, Zardoz has since developed a large cult following and found success on the home video market.
The film suffered from negative "word-of-mouth" publicity. The chief example of this is on the second weekend of release, those who had seen the first showing told the people waiting for the next showing their unpleasant reactions. As a result, the potential second-showing viewers vacated the lines and went home. This was related in a 1981 issue of Starlog magazine detailing the making of Zardoz.
References
- ^ a b Solomon, Aubrey. Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-8108-4244-1. p257
- ^ Solomon p 232. Please note figures are rentals.
- ^ a b Review of Zardoz from Channel 4
- ^ Review of the film from Roger Ebert
- ^ Celtic Twilight, a February 18, 1974 review from Time magazine
- ^ Review of the film from The New York Times
- ^ "Zardoz Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2010-02-06.
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Zardoz |
- Zardoz at the Internet Movie Database
- Zardoz at AllRovi
- Zardoz at Box Office Mojo
- Zardoz at Rotten Tomatoes
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