Lawrence Person's Futuramen

Zardoz
Directed by: John Boorman
Written by: John Boorman
Starring: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, John Alderton, Sally Anne Newton, Niall Buggy, and a whole bunch of people who would really prefer you not bring it up.

Sometimes, through no fault of their own, certain science fiction films garner undeserved reputations as horrible failures, despite many sterling qualities.

Zardoz is not one of those films.

Given that John Boorman wrote, produced and directed this fiasco, you have to wonder what the pitch session was like:

Boorman: It has a giant floating stone head!

Studio head: (dead silence)

Boorman: It has an immortal society where everyone bakes bread and no one has sex!

Studio head: (dead silence)

Boorman: There’s a group of Apathetics who just stand around, and another group called the Renegades who are old people who wear formal clothing and have dance parties!

Studio head: (dead silence)

Boorman: Uh, there are also a lot of half-naked hippie chicks standing around.

Studio head: OK, here’s some money.

Today, Zardoz is most remembered (if it’s remembered at all) for Sean Connery running around in a loincloth, as well as the immortal line “The gun is good, the penis is evil.” But in truth that only scratches the surface of a film that’s by turns portentous, bizarre, badly dated and incoherent.

Perhaps the most risible of all the film’s elements are the overall production design, and especially the costumes. The hippie dippy utopia Connery’s character visits looks like it was outfitted in costumes left over after a community college production of Hair or Godspell, complete with billowy peasant halters (the film’s high naked breast count is one of its few non-camp virtues).

Believe it or not, this is one of the most coherent scenes in the movie.

Outside the Utopian bubble, the “outlanders” all wear tattered wool suits that make them look like extras from Oliver!, despite it being some 200 years since the (ill-defined) collapse of civilization. The furnishings inside the bubble are heavy on reflecting mirrors and bead curtains. English manor houses are rendered “futuristic” by attaching plastic bags to them.

The scene where Connery is “sucked” into the vortex is almost as bad as people pulling the ravenous carpet samples up over them in The Creeping Terror.

Every now and then an interesting idea floats to the surface (immortals can’t be killed, but they can be aged as punishment, bringing up shades of the struldbrugs from Gulliver’s Travels), only to sink again beneath another wave of improbable schlock.

There’s plenty of low humor to be had, such as the scene where the women quiz Connery to find out what this thing called “an erection” is, since they’ve done away with sex entirely. (Evidently this Utopia was founded by Andrea Dworkin.) And the film is so bad it’s the perfect target for a viewing party to make fun of. And it’s so oddly wrong-headed that it’s seldom boring.

Indeed, Zardoz is so bad, and so emblematic of a particular type of cinematic excess and incoherence that was only on display in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that it actually gives you a new appreciation for other early 1970s science fiction films. Silent Running and Logan’s Run had their problems but, lord, at least their directors had some idea of how to tell a story.

Boorman’s film is so oblique, so deeply personal and relentlessly anti-commercial, with such a thoroughly unpleasant protagonist (it’s hard to get an exact count on just how many women Connery’s character rapes in the film, since there are some flashbacks repeated, sometimes he starts to rape someone, only to have her resistance turn to sudden ardor, and sometimes he only gets started raping before changing his mind…), that you wonder how it got made in the first place.

We watched this at A.T. Campbell’s video party, and it was so bad we had to follow it up with The Incredibles, which is looking more and more like not just one of the greatest films of the last ten years, but one of the greatest films ever, period. You’ll enjoy watching it for the ninth time much better than you’ll enjoy watching Zardoz once.