Zardoz

SawiZardoz, the Sean Connery-in-a-bikini film. It was interesting. The film takes place 200 years in the future, when some kind of apocalypse has rendered human civilization ruins, kept barely in check by squadrons of men with guns (and who wear bikinis) who worship a giant floating head. Sean hitches a ride in the head and winds up in some idyllic garden-of-eden where effeminate, sexless and deathless people prance about being apparently in charge and apparently totally decadent.

The film is certainly interesting. It's aggressively alien and unusual, but it definitely has something to say about man embracing his brutal inner nature. It's very 70s-ish, what with its lone, beautiful-beast hero and its perverse connection of sex and death (there is a fairly frank lecture where they explain that an erection can only be achieved if there is a small amount of fear. As a fearless erection-producer, I can tell you that this is bullshit.) To say very much about its philosophical arguments is to kind of give away to punchlines of the film, so I'll stop now, but as an example of the film's uncompromising nature, consider this scene:

Sean and his wife are seated side-by-side, his wife nursing their child. As classical music plays, we fade into the characters arranged in the same way, but now the child is a boy, seated between them. Another fade and the boy has become a young man, and then a full-grown man. He looks to his father (Sean) and walks away. The mother reaches out to hold him back but without breaking stride he walks on. Sean catches her hand as it falls and they fade-transition into old people and then clearly plastic skeletons, still holding hands. The skeletons too fade away and the camera zooms into two hand prints left on the wall, like cave paintings. This is how the film ends.

The sequence is interesting and poetic but also oppressively weird and aggressive. How are skeletons holding hands? Is this supposed to be poignant or celebratory or, I dunno, condemnatory? Why include things like the mother holding him back, but not the father interacting with him in any way? I feel like whatever the point was, it could have been conveyed more directly and more simply. This sort of stirring but confusing imagery plagues this whole film. It also involves other very strange symbols for simple ideas. For example: without death, there is a contingent of folks who want to die. They turn themselves into old people and dance eternally in a run-down old-folk's home. One character joins them, his left half becoming old suddenly. Again: why only half? Also, this idea of wanting to die is treated as really edgy and exciting by the film, when everyone in this modern, post-Kevorkian time is familiar with euthanasia. It's very tedious sometimes.

So, bottom line: the film is interesting and worthy of serious discussion, but its uncompromising imagery and frequent poor production values ensure that that will never happen. (On the poor production values: there's a scene where Sean enters some five-dimensional magical laboratory. It apparently sucks him in or something because he does this hands-over-the-head pirouette into it. Also, there's a "How did it get burned!?"-style scene where Sean jumps around a mirrored room shouting "Kill the tabernacle! Kill the tabernacle!" It's just way too goofy to take as seriously as it obviously takes itself.)