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STARS...
Sean Connery,
Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, Niall Buggy, and John Alderton.
PLOT SUMMARY...
In the far future, a brutal savage enters an isolated, immortal
community, with destructive results.
QUICK SCAN...
This film could be compared to "The Wizard of Oz". ZARDOZ
features action and FX. Sean Connery (Outland) looks fit and virile
as the savage. A "mystery" tied to the title of the movie,
revealed near the end of the film, is a bit underwhelming.
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The Review:
Producer/Writer/Director John Boorman's ZARDOZ is a muddled, bungled,
Sci-Fi effort.
John Boorman is one of those directors who can either be very good ("Point
Blank", "Deliverance", "Excalibur") or very
bad (Exorcist Two: The Heretic). Unfortunately, "Zardoz" falls
into the latter category.
Boorman gets things off on the wrong foot right from the start. A floating,
disembodied head, wearing Egyptian headgear, gives a long speech. He
explains that he is Zardoz, a false god in the film to come. This scene
is boring and talky.
Director of Photography Geoffrey Unsworth's screen images are sometimes
brilliant. At one point, we see a huge stone head floating overhead,
as warriors on horseback shout ZARDOZ at it. This is an impressive mythic/mythological
image, and my favorite scene in the film.
Boorman's dialogue is frequently heavy handed. At one point, early on,
the floating stone head declares, "The gun is good, the penis is
bad."
ZARDOZ is basically the story of a dystopia, or anti-utopia, in the
far future. The members of an elite, force field enclosed community,
are immortal, but want to die 'cause they're so damn bored. Into this
sealed society arrives nobel savage Sean Connery, a warrior from the
primitive world outside the force field.
Sean Connery ("Outland"), looking remarkably fit, manages
to keep a straight face throughout this silly mess. I can only imagine
he was roaring with laughter between takes.
Writer/Director Boorman does not play fair with his audience. Early
in the film, we see Connery stowed away in the flying stone head, but
don't see how he got in there. Later, into a "memory flashback",
we do see how Connery stowed away in the head, but the circumstances
are now very different. In the first scene the stone head is spewing
out rifles.
When this scene is shown to us later, slaves are loading wheat into
the head, and Connery hides in the wheat. The first scene had no slaves
or wheat loading. The fact that we are supposed to accept these two
different scenes as being the same shows that "puppet master"
Boorman either presumed that viewers wouldn't be paying attention, or
else didn't want something like story continuity get ting in the way
of his filmmaking.
The Music, by David Munrow, leans toward pipe organ and classical Compositions.
Ultimately, it is as ponderous and pretentious as the rest of the movie.
There is a "mystery" in the film, related to the title of
the film, a famous children's book, and what's really going on in the
savage land that Connery's character comes from. It's not much of a
mystery, however, and it's ultimate revelation is a bit underwhelming.
ZARDOZ will not be very watchable for most Sci-Fi viewers. Sean Connery
fans MAY be entertained. ZARDOZ is a filmic mystery better left unsolved.
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