Zardoz: Hard To Say Whether 70s Science Fiction Was Daring Or Just Plain Weird...

Probably both.  Yes, that is Sir Sean Connery in a red Speedo.  I avoided this film for a number of years, because...c'mon, Sean Connery in a red Speedo.  Could the movie really be worth that?  Well...then I saw who directed, John Boorman, who brought us the amazing Excalibur, a great take on the Arthurian legend.  So...yeah.  Alright.  For the sake of 70s cinematic science fiction literacy...sure. 

So...opening up, I see this...

Yep.  A floating stone head.  This is after a prologue with some guy ranting on and wondering if God is the ultimate showman or something along those lines.  Could be brilliant or pretentious, hard to tell at this point.  So anyway, the stone head lands, gives a lecture about evil penises and good guns and tosses out a bunch of guns.  The primitives worshiping the stone head pick them up and rejoice.  Then we see our first look at Zed (Connery), one of these Brutals.  These are Exterminators, who do the bid of Zardoz (the stone head), mostly involving culling the Brutal populations and keeping them from overrunning the now fragile world with their out of control babymaking.

Later, we see Zed suddenly emerging out of a pile of sand inside the stone head, which is again airborne and headed for a "Vortex".  A Vortex is a protected area ruled by Eternals, a society of near immortal scientists and intellectuals who seemingly have become totally about calculation and data.  Their passion, emotion and more abstract or primitive elements of the human soul atrophied.  They look at the world and the other humans who live there with a detatchment.  Only a few of them seem to give a damn about anything, and those tend to be regarded as outsiders and heretics, kept separated from the rest of the group.

They find Zed in their midst and find him a wonder, this primitive in their midst.  Little do they know that there is more to this man-ape than they think and that plans are underfoot to break this sociological cul-de-sac the Eternals have found themselves in.

This thing is weird.  And not the most optimistic film.  However, it is strong in ideas and imagery, about how too much emphasis on one culture, one way of doing things, how a lack of variety can ultimately doom a society.  Sometimes, you just have to shake things up a bit.  That when you get too insular and complacent, you weaken yourself.

Sometimes you need a "primitive" ape-man to come in and remind you of the essentials of life.

Zardoz, a strange one but a good one.