A day late the Sunday Night Movie feature has returned. I was in an experiment mood Sunday night and decided to watch an SF film that I had heard much about but never had seen myself, ZARDOZ. This was certainly something different and in many way is a pretty decent example of the trajectory that SF films were on until the assault on our senses that is Star Wars. (Don’t misunderstand me I like Star Wars, I own a copy of the original trilogy, granted the mucked up version, but far better that than the prequels.)
Sf film by the 70s had begun to be seen as vehicle where important subject, where challenging subject, could be raised and tackled in an adult manner. While there was still monster and adventure flicks, a lot of SF in the 70s was about something and written with thinking adults in mind, Zardoz, for all its flaws, it just such a movie.
Zardoz is set in a far distant future with radically different cultures than the one of the filmmakers and the audience. Instead of presenting Wester Civilization, usually American, as the sole culture of the Future, Zardoz presents us with two very startlingly different culture.
There are the Eternals, a small isolated population of people forever young and undying. Even murder and accident cannot keep an Eternal dead at the nearly magical technology housed in the Tabernacle grows a new body and implants for all effective purposes a backup personality and memory into the new, also Eternal, person. Outside the Vortex where the eternals live life is savage, brutal and short, the people there are called Brutals and, they have no technology at all save what is delivered to them by their god, Zardoz, and what Zardoz delivers is weaponry, instructing his followers to murder and to always remember that ‘The Penis is evil and the Gun is good.”
Sean Connery is a Brutal named Zed who by cunning and daring penetrates the forcefield surrounding the vortex, invading the world of the Eternals. There his presence is disruptive. A world that has known nothing new in literally centuries is thrown into turmoil by murder and questions about the Brutals and what they might mean for the etrnals own future.
There is a lot to make fun in this Film, mocking comes easy when someone tries to talk seriously in such a manner, but I would advise you to look closer. This film is very much a product of its time, the use of psi powers is very much a 70s trope, the very limited special effect due to budget and capability detract from the attempt, but the attempt was a worthy one. This is a film about what it means to be human, what do we owe each other, and the terrible price of lifeboat ethics.
If you have not seen it and you like SF films that have more bite than fluff, then see Zardoz, but try to avoid spoilers if you can.
