ZARDOZ Speaks To You! How a Classic Movie was Created, Died, and was Born Again by Roger Mitchell

(BearManor Media 1, 2024)

Reviewed by Dev Agarwal

Roger Mitchell's history of the making of the film, Zardoz Speaks To You! should appeal to many fans. It is packed with information and answers every question the fan may have, short of showing the film itself. Afficionados will learn much about Boorman, Connery and the rest of the cast, and the interrelationships and rivalries on set. Haters will also learn much and either temper their views or have them confirmed by the amount of drugs consumed by the production team, the mishaps in the storytelling, and the battle of egos between director, writers and stars.

Zardoz is a 1974 film by John Boorman, set in the year 2293 AD. Human civilisation has collapsed due to economic and ecological turmoil and the world is divided between a polluted wasteland called the outlands, and idyllic Vortexes that house psychic immortals. The immortals, the Eternals, retain all human history and culture. The film charts the conflict between these two peoples and explores immortality as a curse rather than a benefit to the human experience. Zardoz as a film will elicit a variety of responses. Few familiar with Zardoz are indifferent to it and are more commonly divided into lovers and haters.

I came to Mitchell’s book with a clear recollection of my first late night viewing of the film on television and having my mind blown by the ideas in it while also being frustrated by much of it. Zardoz has a very distinct visual style. The horse-riding Exterminators control the outlands, wearing crimson and hiding behind masks in the shape of Zardoz, their god. And their god appears as a floating giant stone-carving of a menacing grinning head, wandering those outlands.

Then there are ideas that resonate with the human condition: immortality as a curse, the stark divide between poverty and excessive wealth, psychic powers, eugenics, religious fervour, and AI (before AI was commonly discussed).

The film manages to annoy as much as it entertains, to meander through its own mashup of ideas. If the Eternals are immortals due to normal scientific breakthroughs, how are they psychic? If they're as powerful as gods, and hate each other, why do they remain incestuously confined within their Vortex rather than escape to establish kingdoms across the earth?

Mitchell explores all of these ideas—and frustrations—and more. His book serves as both companion and guidebook to a film that is part-polemic, part-action, and part-reflection of 1970s’ gender politics, told as an unfolding mystery for its protagonist, played by Sean Connery.

And that does not even begin to discuss the exhaustion that set in on set, the drug taking and the fact that the film may not hold together at all.

The strengths of Mitchell’s book is that his enthusiasm for the film as an experience comes through clearly. The book is a celebration of Zardoz, as a book of 456 pages should be. But crucially, Mitchell does not gloss over the egos, the in-fighting, the setbacks and failures in the production, and the artistic and financial compromises that were inevitable.

Zardoz is and was either a flawed masterpiece or a grand failure. For cognoscenti genre viewers it remains both visually arresting and complex. Its key theme is that immortality is not desirable, it is a curse. However, I find its flaws do not detract from the story itself. Nor do they detract from Mitchell’s book. It’s a labour of love and contains something for everyone.

Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.