FANTASIA OBSCURA: Should John Boorman’s Cult Sci-Fi be Remembered for More Than Sean Connery’s Skimpy Red Outfit?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, what makes a film great is like wealth in an unequal society: You either have it, or you wish you did…
Zardoz (1974)
Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox
Directed by: John Boorman
Sometimes, we have to take a step back from our labors because what had been working, wasn’t any more.
Case in point: Sean Connery. Most of his career emerges from and is tied to his being the first screen actor to play James Bond (as opposed to the first actor ever, an honor belonging to Barry Nelson in NBC’s adaptation of Casino Royale from 1954); indeed, this role came to define Connery as an actor and personality.
And it also led him after his last spin as Bond, Diamonds are Forever, to take on a film that he hoped would allow people to forget Bond which wasn’t working for him at that point, and think of him in other ways.
Oh man, did it…
Normally, if we were going to discuss major plot points of a film you hadn’t seen yet, we’d warn about spoilers. However, the first scene right after the production logo card consists of Niall Buggy just throwing it out there in the prologue, so:
Right after he says his piece, we’re told it’s 2293, and Arthur/Zardoz is getting tribute from his Brutal Exterminators, genetically manipulated men among the Brutals (survivors amidst the ruins) who worship him in a death cult where they proclaim “The gun is good! The penis is evil!”
We soon meet one of the Exterminators, Zed (Connery), who sneaks aboard Zardoz’s flying head, whereon he meets Arthur, then shoots him and throws him overboard.
Talk about crisis of faith…
The flying head carries Zed to Arthur’s base, the Vortex, and after some wandering around and encountering bits of civilization beyond the gun, he finds the rest of Arthur’s people, the Eternals…
…so yes, Arthur does come back later…
…people with psychokinetic abilities who will live forever with all the world’s knowledge and luxury at their grasp. Being overly well off and privileged AF, some of the Eternals have developed grudges against each other to fill the empty spaces their paradise generated, which Zed’s entry among them have revved up.
The main antagonists are Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), who’s in favor of the status quo and wants to get rid of Zed, like yesterday, and May (Sarah Kestelman, in her first film role), who wants to study Zed to figure out what Arthur was up to out among the Brutals. May and her friend named, um, Friend (John Alderton), interact the most with Zed, studying him and putting him to work, with the occasional explanation here and there as to how the Vortex works and the Eternals came to be.
During the course of exploring the world and watching Eternals go after each other with petty politics and mind tricks that’d make a Jedi blink in surprise, we discover how this world came about: The Eternals, opting out of being responsible while Earth’s ecology went bonkers and the wealth gap widened obscenely, closed themselves off from the rest of the world and let it go to hell while they rode it out alone.
This is actually worth taking a second to consider here. There was much in this film that overwhelmed original audiences and made them unable to take it all in, let alone take it seriously. This conceit, however, involving the widening of the gap between the haves and have nots (the Eternals versus the Brutals), was a major underpinning of the film that gave it its structure and raison, and was certainly a point worth consideration back then.
Unfortunately, if anything, it’s even more so of a concern today. The most recent data concerning rising inequity is discomforting, and allows this film a chance to resonate more deeply today than it did then. How Zardoz discusses this may have been something of an oversimplification, considering Thomas Piketty needed 696 pages to explain the issue to everyone’s satisfaction, but the act of taking it on was certainly daring, considering how well that message tends to go over when it’s usually brought up.
In terms of being daring, the film doesn’t stop with its social inequity message. Boorman had gotten a foot in the door at Fox after giving them Deliverance, which allowed him to show up with a project from his own personal production company, and he gave the distributor the works. This included a script he wrote inspired by work he’d done on the script for Stanley Kubrick’s stillborn Lord of the Rings adaptation (yes, the one the Beatles almost starred in), which gives you a good sense as to where Boorman’s head was at that time.
It was also a project that allowed everyone tied to the film to just get into it and let go. Boorman’s wife, Christel Kruse Boorman, took on costuming for the film with designs that shock and leave viewers uneasy, including the Exterminators’ red bandolier diaper uniform. Connery, who as described above hoped that the role would help audiences forget Bond, swaggered forth in the uniform without a single ounce of self-consciousness.
It’s unclear if a little self-control or self-reflection would have helped keep this film from dissolving into a pool of its own excesses. The fact that Zed and the Exterminators are the product of a selective breeding program, one where rape is encouraged and depicted often in the film, is a story element that is difficult to be comfortable with as the years have gone by, and Christel’s costumes have not aged well the closer we get to 2293 (and may never).
With Boorman’s script and sets working against him, he makes a valiant effort to work with what’s left to him to turn in a project that can rise above these limits. His score makes a strong effort to employ Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony to great effect (which modern audiences may recognize as the piece that was put to much better use in 2010’s The King’s Speech), and his direction suggests a strong vision that does what it can in effective set-ups and pacing.
On the one hand, it’s a unique vision that film makers rarely get a chance to pursue unfettered and with abandon, but the results are why this is on the other hand too. With no filter or control rods, Zardoz turned into an ugly mess, a bum instead of a contender. It raises deep meaningful questions, but tries to answer them in ways that makes you tune out the messenger.
The reason Connery chose the role of Zed and what happened when he did pretty well sums up the film: He hoped that working with Boorman in an artsy message movie would show off sides of his talent that being Bond could not, but all anyone remembers is the damned red diaper. There was no way this was going to work, but Connery (and Boorman) went on from there to do better things to show that there was more to do, and better to come.
A wealth of better things that we can certainly all think about …
NEXT TIME: All ashore that’s going ashore; our last Fantasia Obscura can also be seen as the end of an era in more ways than one…
