love your take on Zardoz and I do remember in the commentary the director stated that the human civlizaton before the dark age had a interstellar civilizaton and had space colonies but for some reason degraded to the point of a mostly primitive dark age. with pockets of high tech civlizaton.
There's one line in the movie that implies interstellar travel at some point. Unfortunately I didn't make a note of the scene or timecode and the only way to find it is to watch Zardoz again . . . Too soon.
@@feralhistorian remember the first time I watched Zardoz on cable TV back in 1980, I was really weirded out by it. but later watchings warmed me to the movie
Still, could've been worse! It's could've been Vance's Dying Earth or......Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun". How 'bout that for some distant future Dark Age Wackiness. ;)
The very strong rumor was that Boorman and everyone--including Connery, just to cope with having to wear a red diaper--was flying on weed during the entire production.
Zardoz deserves to be in the league of Ken Russell and Jodorowsky films! It's Sci fi, Surreal, Metaphysical, Political, Allegorical! It's an Art/Cult film to the hilt! No wonder critics didn't get it! It was never going to be a "mainstream hit"! It's as "underground" as it gets! 😮❤
Coming back to say the voice of Zardoz seemed familiar. After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that it might've been the same voice as Moloch in an episode of CHiPs (Rock Devil Rock, 1982). Niall Buggy did Zardoz, but he wasn't Moloch. Interesting twist: Niall Buggy was a dinner guest in "Hellraiser" (1987). Small world!
6:51 "Almost feels like a satirical critique of the whole movement" -- Boreman has those representing the movement literally shot in the end so yeah I'd say it was a critique of sorts. It was pointed out by someone in another review of the film that Zardoz is an inversion of the Jesus story. Zed comes to "save" the immortals by bringing them eternal death. Maybe Boreman was a fan of Nietzsche. The ridiculous costumes, the apparent absurdity of it all served as cover and shield against accusations of being fascist and "right-wing" -- Boreman could claim he was simply high when he made the film.
The Eternals confuse death as release in their detached humanity, with the actual state of human nature, that is Mortality. And Zed doesn't destroy the Eternals, his former brothers the Exterminators do. Zed destroys simply the tabernacle, which makes the Eternals mortal. The Exterminators simply act out their planned revenge, then cry out of Zed who by then is long gone. He decides to live as normal human, get kids, grow old and die with his wife.
I've watched this movie and ... it definitely a product of the pre Star Wars 70's. Apparently Sean Connery took this role to get out of being in another James Bond movie but later returned to that franchise when offered a major pay raise.
It's sci-fi Edel-kitsch, with it's campy garish condemnation of modernity and cheshire cat grinning obtuse mysticism. I love it. I always try to sell the movie to people as Austin Powers meets Brave New World with a hint of Mad Max. ....Realizing that I might make it sound cooler that it actually is. (But I'm a man who still cheers for the old Dr Smith in Lost in Space, so I have an unironic taste for these things.) I must admit there's an certain typical British effeteness and dandyish to the absurdity and with old British Sci-fi, that must not sit well with the American Puritan Spirit. That probably demands that Zed should've have been more stoic and "rational man" not "Thinking beast" in his defiance of the Eternals. The ending might even seem defeatist from the Yankee "pull yourself up by yer bootstraps" mindset. (And I mean that in a complimentary way. :) ) But the movie is very much intentionally parodic with it's ideas, though they are stuck in a more performative mode - and boy is it hammy, Yum - than actually being speculative. Everything flies by in rush of intentional hippy silliness, without settling into ideas the characters truly contemplate. However, the movie might be more palatable if you understand and can enjoy the British mindset of the 70s To this day Brits old enough to remember that era, have a self-mocking fondness of that kitschy era, a mixture of embarrassment, melancholy but with a wink and belly laugh. Perhaps you can compare it to a mindset of Gen-Xers in the 1990 with such things as "Sam and Max hit the road", "Earth Worm Jim" and Bill and Ted. (And just saying: At the End of Casino, where the 70s garish mob dandy world of Vegas collapses there is still a sense of loss for a big gone Era. And though the Western as a genre is gone, there's still this John Wayne-like spirit underneath the most Deconstructive Western.) Boorman is a very garish film maker often playing loosely with intriguing ideas, but he never strayed into pompous self-importance. (Heck, I even enjoy The Exorcist II) But Zardoz' message is intentional and wonderfully told, just bogged down with kitschy clutter...but that can be enjoyed in it's own terms. :)
The way that the way the technocratic society is described reminds me of the way the underground society was described in the bishop/lovecraft novella "the mound". Bored, apathetic, existing forever, and willfully ignorant of anything happening outside their borders.
Zardoz gave us two gifts: - Shawn Connery in whatever the hell that outfit was that my brain still refuses to accept as real; - "The 🔫 is good. The 🍆 is evil.". Those two... things might just be the entire point of the movie.
Yay, Sean Connery! Got some eye candy out of this very dark, unhappy story. Now to get the floating Zardoz head image out of my mind... | People are regrown when they die. No thanks, not there!
Could you do a video on the short-lived TV show "Jericho"? It got too melodramatic at times, but the overarching story of government bureaucrats colluding with big business to reshape America as they see fit was shockingly prescient for a show made in the mid aughts.
I would say it John B. Calhoun's behavior sink, meets John Milton's 'The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..'
Please allow a slight correction about the Eternal society being stagnant and not finding new challenges, I'll quote from Zed's Eternal friend (named Friend): "We tried to solve the mysteries of the universe, but even with infinite time and the help of the Tabernacle, our minds weren't up to it. We failed." In other words, humanity had reached its limit.
Great analysis. Its' a hilarious great watch for the uninitiated, but there are hints that it actually could have been a great film. It was almost prescient.
I enjoyed Zardoz thoroughly on many levels...the most pertinent is that nature prevailed and terminated the rule by the tyrannical Eternals. Life is too short...don't live in fear or angry...life is a temporary joke...and completely unfair!
Zed is a mutant, produced by Arthur Freyn's selective breeding program among the Brutals. But No Spoilers! At 7:29 in this fine video you can see Zed prowling through Arthur Freyn's cottage after the Stone Head brings him there. On the wall Arthur has drawn a parody of the familiar "human evolution" from monkey to human, and then satirically to the Eternal (who are actually normal human beings who have studied and trained for centuries). But after that is a big ? question mark. That is Arthur Freyn's secret project.
_Demolition Man_ is one of those dystopias where everybody thought it was charming in an over-the-top, _reductio ad absurdem_ sort of way when it was new. And more recently seen as prophecy, even if only _some_ restaurants are owned by Yum (and Yum largely keeps those brand identities distinct.)
I haven't seen Zardoz. Not sure if I'd want to, probably rather rewatch The Rock instead as you get both Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage in it. But I have seen Logan's Run and Rollerball. Wait, does the original Death Race 2000 count?
I just want to throw out there that there was a study done in 2021 that compared *Limits to Growth* with real-world data by a woman named Gaya Harrington. If you're interested you may want to look at it.
It's not parody, it's an accurate reflection of liberal valueless values. Parody isn't strictly necessary since humans are stuck in an inhuman future. It's a pessimistic movie, and a very serious one. As you yourself have said, it is prescient. Depicting a senseless future does not a senseless movie make.
To be honest, I don't think Zardoz is that hard to understand. It has a lot of weird imagery and just frankly dumbfounding lines, but once you get past all the memes the story is almost tripping over itself to spell out what its intentions are. At its core the setting is almost 1:1 copied from A Boy And His Dog, with a savage exterior that fights for scraps in the dirt and a "civilized" enclosed society that is clean and well-fed but has become deranged and decadent due to being run by nutcases and being isolated for so long. The main character of Zardoz is a savage who learns what civilization has to teach him and becomes a synthesis of both worlds, thus ascending beyond them at the end. Whether or not that story is told well, that's definitely up for debate. The movie has about a million problems. But this idea that its hard to understand I think has been really overblown.
It's also what Gerrold wanted for ST's The Cloud Minders, and it draws a lot from Gulliver's Travels, with parallels between the Eternals and the struldbruggs being pretty blatant.
Huh, I hadn't noticed this before, but 0:50 sounds an awful lot like Atlas Shrugged. It's basically a more grandiose version of the Strikers' plot. But that could easily be a coincidence.
If you do a Wikipedia seach for "world3" you'll get an article that describes the model and has links to a javascript version you can play with yourself. Remember, this is a computer model from 1972. What took a supercomputer to run back then is a toy you can run in a web browser today.
