Zardoz (1974) Much more than James Bond in a Red Nappy (Review)

There aren’t many measures by which Sean Connery’s career could be considered a failure, but he has his Achilles heels, chiefly his self-admitted failure to understand science fiction and fantasy. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a project which persuaded him after nearly half a century of success that this acting business wasn’t worth the hassle any more, was also a project which he only signed up to because he’d turned down the chance to appear in Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. He didn’t understand the script to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but then he didn’t understand the scripts Peter Jackson and the Wachowskis sent him either, and they were very popular, weren’t they?

Connery now claims he didn’t understand the script to John Boorman’s Zardoz either, placing him firmly alongside the majority of the 1974 film’s audience. On the extras for the new Arrow Blu-Ray, Boorman and several other interviewees contest this, saying he was hugely enthusiastic about the film during pre-production. Boorman, of course, may have ulterior motives for giving his version of events, but then so might Connery. Zardoz has a new, unflattering life online, one which must cause Sir Sean some embarrassment. The film has become a meme involving giant stone heads yelling about evil penises, and that ubiquitous still of the first James Bond in a bright red nappy.

It’s remarkable and regrettable that, even after seeing that picture so many times, it was still almost impossible to acclimatise to Connery’s distinctive costume choice for the first twenty minutes of the film. Boorman plays the scenes following the opening credits as a low-key mystery, showing Connery’s Zed creeping around strange mansions uncovering clues to the meaning of the society he lives in. For the whole of this sequence, there is only one question the audience wants answering; what is he wearing? How on earth did they persuade him to wear it?

Boorman acts as if the audience will accept the weirdest elements of his film straight away. Even the opening voiceover, added to clarify the plot after test audiences found the whole affair utterly perplexing, soon devolves into an arch meditation on reality, Gnosticism and other philosophical conceits threaded through the film. This lack of hand-holding can be beguiling and frustrating. Unlike the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which Zardoz does often recall, Boorman rarely lets the audience in on the joke, or reassures them that it’s okay to laugh and have fun with his film.

At other times, though, Boorman’s complete insulation from the audience within his self-created world becomes an asset. Zardoz is a fine piece of world-building, complete with luxurious cinematography from Geoffrey Unsworth, fresh from his Oscar for Cabaret. If you can hang onto the narrative and get into the film’s second half, Zardoz’s apparent eccentricities coalesce into an ingeniously thought-through society, a utopia of eternal life that has become a tedious, decadent dystopia. There are wonderful little innovations – this society of immortals uses ageing as a punishment for criminals, resulting in prisons that resemble old people’s homes. And without the need to procreate, the immortals have forgotten what sex is, a state of affairs explained by Charlotte Rampling in full-on ice-queen mode.

There is plenty to giggle at in Zardoz but plenty that is fascinating, and Boorman builds the whole teetering, bizarre edifice on a solid foundation of provocative, interesting ideas about faith, death and civilisation. As a spectacle, it’s nothing short of a triumph, with its Welles-referencing hall of mirrors, psychedelic dream sequences and grand pre-CGI effects. Much of Boorman’s commentary is taken up with explaining the simple, Méliès-era techniques he used for these still-impressive effects. The job of defending the film as a whole falls to the rich selection of interviews, both with cast and crew and with Ben Wheatley, who gives a passionate, sweet and incredibly personal account of his Zardoz fandom.

I can’t go as far as Wheatley does in defending the film. It is flawed, and Connery is miscast and uncomfortable-looking in a role that neither effectively subverts nor provides a satisfying example of his screen persona. Yet it is laudably ambitious, and Boorman’s script provides plenty of evidence of genuine intelligence and originality under the absurdity. The day may never come when this is remembered as a classic, but Arrow’s release does provide a strong argument that it’s time to stop simply laughing at Zardoz and engage with it. It is time to meditate upon this film – at the second level.

Thanks for reading our review of Zardoz

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