The Voice of the Turtle: Reflections on John Boorman's Zardoz
It is 1973 and you are young hotshot director John Boorman, with Hell in the Pacific, Point Blank, and Deliverance under your belt. You've managed to persuade Sean Connery to appear in your next movie for very little money - he's still worried about being known only for playing James Bond, and he's a nice enough fellow - and you've found the perfect set of locations, just outside your house in the rugged countryside of Ireland. You've got a year or so to make a film, slated for release in 1974, enough money to film it in widescreen, and bags of cheap extras - Irish people.

But what story to tell?

"Beyond 1984... Beyond 2001... Beyond love... Beyond death..."
Zardoz is a film by John Boorman, a singular director who was part of a hip 60s generation of British talent which included Terence Young, Ken Russell and Richard Lester (Lester was America-born, although his most famous films were produced in the UK and featured British actors, or Liverpudlian actors in the case of Help!). Like them, his career built up through the late 1960s and had peaked by the turn of the 1980s, after which a newer generation - the Alan Parkers and Ridley Scotts of this world - had grasped the baton. Although Boorman's time in the spotlight has passed, he has a number of great films under his belt - Point Blank, Excalibur, Hope and Glory - and one sure-fire all-time top-of-CV classic, Deliverance.

Zardoz was the film Boorman made after Deliverance and is not a classic. It was followed by Exorcist II: The Heritic which is one of the worst films of the 1970s. Whilst Exorcist II is deadly dull, Zardoz is however camp, overambitious, pretentious, good-looking, terrible, poorly-written, a complete failure, intriguing, curiously moving and deeply of its time. It's a relic from the post-2001, pre-Star Wars generation of intelligent sci-fi films, a by-product of the New Wave which had swept through science fiction writing a few years before, the visual equivalent of progressive rock.

The Plot
It is the future. Most of the Earth is a wasteland, with the exception of a small community of immortal people who live in a rural idyll of the kind evangelised by Led Zeppelin and countless post-rock bands, protected from the outside world by an impenetrable force-field. When society collapsed the immortals entrusted themselves to guard and maintain the sum total of human knowledge, but over the centuries since their lives have grown stale and unfulfilling. A complex social structure forbids dissent, innovation, new ideas or unhappiness, on penalty of 'ageing'. The immortals cannot die, but they can be made to grow older and more senile. Many of the immortals have given up entirely and just stand silently, apathetic, and all of them have lost interest in sex. Secretly, they want to die, and get things over with, but they can't. If they are shot or stabbed, they are regenerated by the central computer which controls their world, a computer which will not allow them to turn it off. Imagine playing Combat on the Atari 2600, only there's only you, and you can't press the reset button or insert River Raid, for example,.you just drive around, doing nothing.

Meanwhile, the world outside is ruled by bands of horsemen, who roam around the land killing and raping what remains of the civilian population. The horsemen worship a giant, flying stone head - 'Zardoz' - which is controlled by one of the immortals, as his secret project to control the mortals. Zardoz delivers grain and weapons to the horsemen, whilst indoctrinating them in a curious philosophy, to whit:

"The gun is good! The penis is evil! The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was! But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!"

One of the horsemen is smarter than the others. His name is 'Zed' and he is played by Sean Connery. He stows away on board the flying head as it flies home, and infiltrates the immortal's lair. And then he blows up the computer and the immortals all get shot by Zed's band of barbarians but some escape and Zed runs off into the wilderness with Charlotte Rampling and they have a child the end.

Zardoz is therefore conceptual sci-fi, a genre which flourished after 2001 showed that the public had an appetite for that kind of thing, but before Star Wars showing that people much preferred spectacle. It is also very similar to 'The Mark of Gideon', an episode of the original Star Trek television series in which an overpopulated planet tricks Kirk & Co into supplying them with a lethal disease. That episode was unusually bleak for Star Trek; the inevitable extermination of most of the planet's population was presented as a positive development and was not averted by a last-minute twist.

The idea of society splitting into two widely-separated classes, an effete intellectual elite and violent, ignorant brutes, and the former trying to control the latter with religion or some other system, is an old one, famously espoused in H. G. Well's The Time Machine and also in real life. Population control is one of the trickiest problems facing humanking, and some countries have based their entire society around Zardoz, either openly, or clandestinely, the central tension coming from the fact that the intellectual elite are both better and worse than the savages but outnumbered, whilst the savages are scum, but have a certain heady vitality and nobility - like horses or salmon - and are better at fighting.

The film's third theme, that society could one day break down so much that white Europeans would revert to savagery, is also old-fashioned, and has several precedents in real life, such as for example Jackass and the London Underground.

~

Until recently Zardoz was an obscure cult, almost the definition of bizarre 70s wiggishness, rather like The Wicker Man or El Topo. On release to the cinema it bombed and vanished, too early for home video, and for a long time the only way to see it was late at night on BBC2 once or twice a decade. Unlike The Wicker Man, Zardoz didn't attract much of a cult following - the film didn't have an interesting story behind it, and it hadn't been buried under the M3 - although all those who saw it would have been unable to forget the flying head, "the penis is evil", and a later scene where the Immortals attempt to study Sean Connery's ability to, er, 'get it up' by showing him films of naked women wrestling in mud. It is, incidentally, a measure of Sean Connery's professionalism that the latter scene isn't sillier than it is, although its deeply embarrassing to watch if you're ten and you've just persuaded your parents to watch what the Radio Times describes as a 'post-apocalyptic sci-fi film', thinking that it might be like Mad Max 2. Having said that, the copious female nudity - in 1973, this was avant-garde - ensured that the film made a big impression on me.

Nonetheless we rake over the past, and long after Get Carter, The Long Good Friday and the Bee Gees were dug up from their graves - hard as it is to believe, there was a long period in the 1980s when none of the aforementioned were particularly revered - Zardoz achieved a certain post-mortal fame in the late-1990s as a staple of 'cult film' review sites (such as Stomp Tokyo). A DVD was released in 2002, and very good it was too; with extras, as good a transfer as could be hoped, and a French language audio track, the latter transforming Zardoz into an art film. According to Boorman's commentary, the film cost one million dollars, of which $200,000 went to Sean Connery.

~

Sean Connery is James Bond, always will be, no matter how hard he tries to get away from it. In 1974 Connery had been out of the role for three years, his last outing, Diamonds are Forever, being a crashing bore, despite a pair of memorable hit-men and one of the better theme songs. In the same year as Zardoz, Roger Moore was starring in The Man with the Golden Gun, a disappointing effort widely regarded as Moore's joint-worst, with A View to a Kill.

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Zardoz is filmed largely on location in Wicklow, Ireland, within a few miles of John Boorman's home there, and the scenery is suitably rugged and bleak, complete with a lake which resembles that in the final shot of Deliverance. Much of the same scenery popped up in Boorman's later film Excalibur, so it's a good job that Boorman didn't live in a place where the scenery was rubbish, otherwise Excalibur wouldn't have seemed as epic. If Boorman had lived in, say, a semi-detached house in Reading, and chosen to film there, Excalibur would have been ludicrous, with all those knights tramping around the city streets. It would have been like Monty Python!

Apart from the look, Zardoz has a charmingly 70s atmosphere to it. Although human evolution can't have moved on much since 1974, the people in the film look very 70s - the men have long hair and the women look like folk singers. There are lots of tinkly bell noises as sound effects, and it's all set in the countryside, something which, in 1974, was briefly fashionable. Lots of bands had recorded albums in the countryside - Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells came out that year, for example - and folk music occupied the same position in the musical spectrum as Warp Records' stable of electronica artists nowadays. The soundtrack of Zardoz is by the late David Munrow, a historian of medieval plainsong. There isn't much music - a lot of it consists of sound effects - with the main theme being a version of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, arranged for organ and choir.

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Zardoz is post-apocalyptic, a popular topic in the mid-70s which was a staple of 'Astounding Science Fiction' back in the 1930s, although the second world war had made apocalyptic fiction seem too close to the bone. Nonetheless, the nuclear cold war scared the willies out of a lot of people, and Planet of the Apes has a lot to answer for. Post-apocalyptic sci-fi films didn't really go out of fashion, although the ones in the 70s tended to be more downbeat than their 80s cousins, and to focus more on the apocalypse itself, rather than using it as a backdrop. Mad Max, The Terminator, et al were essentially action films with an exotic background, and the Reagan-era wave of apocalyptic downers - Threads, The Day After, Trinity, Edge of Darkness et al - weren't really abstract enough to be sci-fi. During the late 1990s a number of films were based around asteroid impacts or alien invasions or the end of the world, but they were either soap operas or action films, again. There is very little filmed conceptual science fiction any more, films about ideas. There are plenty of books, but no films. Gattaca, AI and Minority Report are all exceptions, although AI is a bad example - it just is - and Minority Report was closer to Bladerunner in its fetishistic fascination with future style, rather than future society. Fight Club is perhaps the best, most recent science fiction film, although most people would not really qualify it as sci-fi. It was 'speculative fiction', an earlier term that seems more appropriate ('scientifiction' was also popular for a while).

Perhaps real cutting-edge science has long outstripped the ability of the average movie audience to understand. Perhaps people don't grow up with images of spacecraft and rockets, as I did. I can't see kids today being inspired into a love of science by the international space station. No offence to NASA, but it just sits there, going round and round. Where's the glory?

As a kid the bit of Zardoz that struck me most was a short exchance between Sean Connery and an Immortal. Connery is unable to understand how the Immortals could be unhappy with their lot - they live forever, after all, and there is so much in the universe to discover. "What about the stars?", he asks. The Immortal waves his hand. "We've been there... a dead end." The notion that space travel was not the be all and end all, and that it might not save us, was jarring at the time to a pre-teen Arthur C Clarke fan.

Right now, the next fronter is Mars, but we aren't going to get there, not in my lifetime. When I first wrote this page Bill Clinton was president of the US, and had no love for such an elitist, quasi-military bastion of discrimination as NASA. Subsequent events have ushered in the exact opposite, a warrior-president who has no use for space other than as a battlefield. The western economy is in a state, and neither China nor the European Union have managed to launch a man into space yet. Of the other continents, South America is wracked with civil war and South Africa is dying of plague and thirst. Russia sits silently. Australasia is too sensible to go into space. And space no longer seems like the cure-all it once was. All those plans for asteroid mining and orbital microwave power stations came to nothing. All those NASA paintings of space habitats crashed down to earth with the realisation that the future will not be clean and bright, it will hurt.

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Zed, Sean Connery's character, is armed throughout the film with a Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, an unusual pistol which also appeared in Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon. Most modern revolvers are 'double action', in that they use the pull of the trigger to rotate the cylinder, cock the hammer, and fire the gun. Older revolvers from the Wild West were 'single action', in that the hammer had to be pulled back manually for each shot.
The drawback of double action revolvers is that the trigger pull is quite heavy. Like a camera with a stiff shutter release, this can cause all but the most skilled of shooters to wobble their hands whilst firing the gun, something which degrades accuracy. Single action revolvers have lighter trigger pulls and are thus easier to shoot with, but are fiddlier to fire quickly (Clint Eastwood, in Fistful of Dollars, has a trick shot whereby he keeps the trigger held down, and whacks the hammer repeatedly, which would be impressive to see but impossible to aim).
Thus, the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, which used the recoil of each bullet to turn the cylinder and cock the hammer, thus unencumbering the trigger and, as a bonus, allowing the gun to fire much faster - six bullseye shots in seven seconds, according to period accounts. Unfortunately, whilst the Webley Mk IV became the standard side-arm of the British Army up until World War Two, the Webley-Fosbery was a flop - it was too complex and unreliable for the trenches of World War One, and lacked a compelling raison d'être at a time when automatic pistols were becoming increasingly more reliable and accurate.

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The DVD of Zardoz is worth a special mention. Decent picture and sound quality is a given for modern films, but older movies often have scratchy negatives, or the DVD is struck from an inferior print. Not so Zardoz, which is pristine and, given that it's an esoteric cult film, it must have been a labour of love. The transfer is in proper 2.35:1 scope ratio (i.e. it's very wide), whilst the picture quality captures Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography perfectly - considerably more so than the DVD versions of 2001, which is galling given that 2001 is... well, it's 2001.
The extras are again as good as could be expected, consisting of some publicity photographs, a couple of conceptual sketches, some radio adverts and a bizarre trailer. The trailer goes on for three minutes and is perfect, in that your tolerance for it indicates your tolerance for the film itself.
There's also a French language option. The dubbers do not attempt to give Sean Connery's French dialogue a Scottish accent, so presumably French people cannot do impersonations of Sean Connery because they don't know what he sounds like. As an arty film Zardoz works quite well in French; if it had Jean-Luc Goddard's name in the credits instead of John Boorman's, but was otherwise identical, people would probably have called it a work of genius.
Best of all is a commentary track by John Boorman, who is clearly fond of the film but recognises its flaws. He's never boring and you'd want to have dinner with him.

On Watching Zardoz

At one point Zed discovers a painting which, with a series of moving images, relates the history of the motor car. It stops with a Mark I Ford Capri, the ultimate evolution of personal transport.
~
"So," says John Boorman on the commentary track, "you could say that there were too many ideas in this picture."
Boorman's commentary is gently amusing, as he realises now, with distance and time, how silly the film is at times. Mental duels and telepathy have never really worked on screen, even when they have lots of flashy special effects (such as the end of Dark City or Roger Corman's The Raven, or even Scanners) - it's too hard to work out what's going on, and actors look silly when they're grimacing. Sean Connery throws the film slightly out of whack, too. Although Boorman has nothing but praise for the actor, and his performance has nothing wrong with it, it's impossible to reconcile the esoteric, new age sci-fi of the film with the presence of the once and future Bond.

Another failing with the film is that, without Boorman's commentary, bits of it simply don't make any sense. At one point our hero is given a leaf to chew on in times of danger, something presented in an important way - but immediately afterwards he eats the leaf, with absolutely no effect. And the action-packed finale, in which our hero demolishes the computer which keeps the unfortunate immortals alive, involves Sean Connery shooting randomly at some mirrors. Also, the film is set in 2293, which doesn't seem far enough in the future for the society of immortals to have fallen into miserable apathy. And the ending is much more downbeat than Boorman presumably hoped; he's trying to argue that death, birth, and free will are linked, and that the upper classes need the lower classes, but it seems inevitable that Zed's actions will doom the entire human race to extinction.

~

Harlan Ellison's A Boy and his Dog, from the following year, had a similar plot - man from brutal wasteland infiltrates decadent society, gets girl, impregnates other girls, escapes - although with a decidedly different ending, and Don Johnson. It's odd to think that, in a parallel universe, Don Johnson could have gone on to be as famous as Charlie Sheen or Tom Cruise, instead of being one of the people from Miami Vice. He's still famous, yes, but it's not the same.

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Taken as a John Boorman film, no television advertisement campaigns have been based on it (unlike Excalibur), people do not quote lines from it (unlike Deliverance), it wasn't nominated for any Academy Awards (unlike Hope and Glory) and Mel Gibson has not remade it (unlike Point Blank); furthermore, red nappies failed to take off as fashion items, and it isn't famous for being extremely bad and a terrible flop (unlike Exorcist 2: The Heretic). I'm trying to think if The Emerald Forest had anything interesting about it, apart from probably being a huge influence on The Shamen and the ambient end of the dance music spectrum in the early-90s. I'll leave out Hell in the Pacific and the others.

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"You can fast-forward this bit, if you want to", says John Boorman at one point. Imagine James Cameron saying that about the middle section of True Lies - you can't.

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The DVD includes some publicity photographs and posters. The posters have quotes that all mention 2001, which goes some way to showing just how much of a stir the Kubrick film caused, given that it was six years old by the time Zardoz was released. The only films in recent memory to have had such a long-lasting influence that I can think of are Star Wars, Die Hard and Reservoir Dogs.

Some of the publicity photos give the impression that the film is a romance, which is as far from the truth as possible - our hero gets the girl, but the 'romance' consists of our hero telling Charlotte Rampling's character, completely out of the blue, that they are to become man and wife. After that they run off into the woods.