On the set of Time Bandits, Sean Connery was reportedly reluctant to be shown mounting a horse, as he had an experience on an earlier film in which he felt a director had him do this in some way that left him humiliated. And yet, he seems perfectly confident running around in 1974’s Zardoz wearing a red diaper.
This dystopian sci-fi is truly batshit. It was written, produced and directed by John Boorman, so it is clearly a realization of his intentions. The viewer, however, may be boggled as to what those intentions were.
In nothing else, much of the imagery is jaw-droppingly weird. You know this is going to be a strange experience when the picture opens with Naill Buggy’s head floating around the screen and addressing the audience directly, a blue dish towel on his head. He also has drawn-on facial hair, something I have never resorted to though I will never be able to grow a full beard. He tells us he is the puppetmaster. Really, he looks more like a puppet to me, maybe even a tool. He also claims to be immortal, so I like to think he’s stuck looking like that forever.
Though the events we’ll see take place in the year 2293, the first scenes after that opening appear to be set in a time much earlier. In a featureless wasteland, Connery and other apparent bandits ride on horseback in their inexplicable red diapers.
Some wear masks in the likeness of Zardoz, their god, which is a giant head which occasionally floats down from out of nowhere to vomit out a great many guns for them to use. I only noticed firearms and not bullets being provided, so I wondered if these were single-use-only guns. A voice from this apparent spacecraft delivers such mandates as “The penis is evil. The penis shoots seed to make new life. […] Go forth and kill.” I think it would have been more concise to say, “Go forth and unmultiply.”
I was very curious why Connery and his peers hadn’t pondered how they themselves came into existence if Zardoz has condemned procreation. My confusion was compounded by a later scene where we see some of his memories, in which he has trapped a woman in a net and then raped her. Later still, this is cleared up by the revelation he and the others chosen by Zardoz are the only ones allowed to reproduce. The commoners these men have made as their slaves are denied this right. I can’t help but see a parallel to those who are for billionaires receiving massive tax cuts while the same encourage rolling back food and medical assistance for the world’s most vulnerable.
We will see Connery’s memories because the manipulators of these primitive peoples are superior beings with psychic powers. Sara Kestelman is Connery’s chief inquisitor, and she displays the excavated memories for viewing by all in their community, a collective dubbed The Vortex. These recalled acts of violence provide much amusement for them.
These people are eternal beings and they long for anything to break up the monotony. Their time is apparently spent only in leisure, except for turning into bread the grain they accept as an offering from the primitives, via the floating head of Zardoz. It was in that grain Connery had concealed himself and hitched a ride into The Vortex.
At first, Connery was going to be killed, but a vote saves his life for a brief period while he can be studied. John Alderton, as one of the eternals, is relieved: “Let’s keep it! Anything to relieve the boredom…” Alderton has been analyzing, identifying and cataloging items from the past and uses Connery as his assistant in that endeavor.
The person most opposed to keeping the intruder there for any amount of time is Charlotte Rampling. She is extremely concerned about maintaining the balance of the community. Since none of them can die, it is necessary the community be kept in an equilibrium. It is even critical that a physic balance be maintained through the society, with acts of “psychic violence” punishable by aging the offender by a number of years. When somebody is aged enough to die, or otherwise experiences a fatal event, they are reborn.
The oldest people are isolated in what appears to be a perpetual New Year’s Eve party, which looks to be me to be a fresh form of hell. They’re even worse off than the “melancholies”, those who have completely disconnected from life and who appear to be lobotomized. Alderton encourages Connery to rape one such woman, and he starts to, until he finds he can’t bring himself to violate somebody who is unresponsive. A rapist with standards—huh. Then Connery goes into a rage and starts destroying everything in sight. This momentarily stirs the woman back into consciousness, and I wanted to tell her to just fake it for now. Best to not encourage the man, that he might renew his efforts.
I wasn’t checking my watch, but I would say the movie is only really interesting until somewhere between halfway and two-thirds to the end. I was genuinely intrigued to learn the full backstory of how humanity came to arrive at this point. I was especially surprised we will learn the origin and purpose of the seemingly nonsense name that is the title, and it is integral to the plot. But once we basically know everything, the film just wanders in circles of increasing pretentiousness. And this is a picture which reeks of unearned intellectual superiority from its first frame. But at least it was enjoyably so up to a point.
The imagery was more interesting up until that time my interest started waning. The floating head of Zardoz should be ridiculous, but it is surprisingly awesome, if only for Boorman making such a bold choice of visual design. Elsewhere in the film are mirrored pyramids that one somehow seemingly enters through the combination of their reflections in the sides.
There are few interesting electronic devices in the distant future portrayed here, though I find it interesting we don’t see much, because of how most of the technology is nearly invisible. The one seemingly most useful piece of tech is a ring each eternal has, the top of which is a rectangular crystal. This is their interface to their all-knowing computer, a sum of all human knowledge which is their internet, their Siri and even an Artificial Intelligence.
I wondered why the eternals had not made the leap to communicating with that telepathically, since they apparently can with each other. Even more odd, there is this nonsense language they have which I assume is some sort of hyper-condensed manner of communication. If this is their “native” speech, then why don’t they talk like that all the time, especially when they aren’t around Connery?
Lastly, there are some odd parallels in the film to Boorman’s other work, past and present. The sheer brutality recalls Deliverance, which was his picture immediately preceding this one. A scene here with Connery first seeing Kestleman as a double-image over the pond into which he’s gazing, making her a literal “lady of the lake”, which foretells his Excalibur in 1981. But Connery tries to shoot the image of her he sees in the water, so not exactly like King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake.
Zardoz is a deeply strange, pretentious, overly long and rather nasty piece of science fiction. Still, it has too many interesting visuals and ideas to dismiss it. I may not actually enjoy it, so much as I find it largely a curious puzzle to take apart and examine. The world would be a sadder place if such insane works didn’t exist and, for the most part, such highly original and individualistic art doesn’t seem to come about much anymore. It already felt like well of human creativity was going dry before the advent of A.I. Now I worry we will find ourselves like the eternals in this picture, our existences lacking wonder and truly new ideas. All we will have is further derivations and recombinations of old ones. It’s like one of the eternals says here: “Now we’re trapped by our own devices. There is no exit.”
Dir: John Boorman
Starring Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman
Watched on 20th Century Fox DVD