A Real “Killer” B Movie (one of 237!)
5
By D. Scott Apel
This review is an excerpt from my book “Killer B’s: The 237 Best Movies On Video You’ve (Probably) Never Seen,” which is available as an ebook on iBooks. If you enjoy this review, there are 236 more like it in the book (plus a whole lot more). Check it out!
ZARDOZ: The year is 2293. A giant, scowling stone head floats over a ravaged landscape. It spews guns and a philosophy of death to its faithful followers, the Exterminators of Zardoz, who genuflect in obeisance. One among them, however, sneaks inside the head and hides. When it lands, Zed (Connery) finds himself in an idyllic community full of magical hi-tech—no place for a Webley-wielding barbarian. He’s captured, disarmed and held for study by the eternally youthful, immortal inhabitants of this “Vortex”—the decadent “Eternals,” who live in Eden-like luxury, cloistered away from Brutals like Zed.
While the placid population of this utopian commune debates the meaning of “the monster” in their midst, Zed keeps his eyes open and his mouth shut. He soon discovers that there is trouble in paradise: dissent and dissatisfaction, deadly boredom and virtually terminal apathy. The mysterious “Tabernacle” which connects and protects them all also imprisons them all. Can the genetically bred Zed fulfill his destiny as an Agent of Evolution and destroy the evolutionary dead end that is The Vortex? And if he succeeds in destroying Eternity...what then?
Discussion: “What *has* Arthur been doing out there all these years?” one immortal wonders idly. Arthur Frayn, in charge of the post-apocalyptic Outlands, has patiently spent generations secretly breeding the perfect killing machine, is what: genetically engineering a brilliant Brutal who is smart enough, strong enough, and viciously bitter enough to kill the deathlessness that holds the Eternals in evolutionary and emotional bondage.
Immortality, it seems, has backfired on these “improved” humans. Sleep is obsolete and sex is history; they have become eternal children, sexless and androgynous; antecedents of the Eloi, just as the Brutals could easily be the missing link between Man and Morlock—and both types are well along Wells’ “Time Machine” trajectory. Worse, even with unlimited time, the Eternals’ ape’s brains still can’t answer the timeless Big Questions. Their mandatory immortality has turned the Vortex into, not a dystopia, but an anti-utopia, where ennui is their worst enemy and many among them crave the gift of sweet release from their incarcerated incarnation.
Give Boorman credit for creating a unique, well thought-out utopia, complete with its own culture and problems. It’s a difficult film; to appreciate its satirical philosophy requires a reversal of our most primal and most deeply-held beliefs, that Life is sacred and survival is the first imperative. But if you can suspend your disbelief and accept the premise of the problem, the whole idea of Utopia becomes questionable and turned topsy-turvy.
Philosophical themes are scarce in cinematic sci-fi, but “Zardoz” flaunts them in abundance, and with tongue-in-cheek twists. The hero, Zed, is Death incarnate; his mission, to kill God. Heavy, heady stuff: high camp at its loftiest. It’s Freudian science fiction, where eternal children rebel against their cosmic parents, attempting to kill the ultimate Father figure of the Tabernacle and sleep the sleep of oblivion in the womb of Mother Earth—who has been so subdued that the only expression left for Her is violent Evolution: the Death and Rebirth of an entire society, an entire species. It’s Jungian science fiction, where any trait pushed far enough becomes its own opposite. It’s Nietzschean science fiction, in which humans dare to seek God (and to look behind the masks of God) in order to destroy It and end Its oppression and enslavement. It’s mythological science fiction, full of dialog and imagery as psychologically primal, archetypal and raw as Beowulf, Camelot or Ulysses. It’s science fiction as religious metaphor: a story of revenge against a god’s betrayal—and of a nature god’s revenge against the hubris of Humankind for creating the “offense against nature” that is The Vortex.
“Zardoz” is also a visually brilliant film, full of hallucinatory and hallucinogenic imagery, which peaks in the mind-bending “touch-teaching” sequence, a multi-media swirl of compressed art and information. And it’s an aural experience as well, quoting Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot in the dialog, and using both the mournful and somber Second Movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (in a haunting vocal performance) and its bright, ecstatic Third Movement in appropriate portions.
As if all this wasn’t enough, “Zardoz” is also a deeply facetious film; a silly satire bursting with mock portentousness (“All that I was is gone,” Connery mumbles through a porridge-thick burr), parodied pretentiousness (“In hunting you, I have become you”), pithy dialog (“It was all a joke!”) and the damnedest cleverest title of any movie ever made. The secret behind the mock-god Zardoz is simultaneously obvious, unguessably brilliant and enormously amusingly—proof that self-proclaimed charlatan Arthur Frayn really is a wizard of gods. Even though he, like all the rest of them (and all of us!) was “bred and led” by the Evolutionary Imperative (in a cynical sense, humans might very well be merely genes’ way of manufacturing more genes) he can still claim authorship of this “shaggy god story.”
