Zardoz is a 1974 science fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling.

It depicts a post-apocalyptic world where barbarians (the Brutals) worship the stone idol Zardoz while growing food for a hidden elite, the Eternals.

Consuella wants Zed destroyed so that the resistance cannot use him to start a revolution; others, led by May and the subversive Eternal Friend, insist on keeping him alive for further study, while secretly planning to overthrow the government and end humanity's suffering.

The Eternals spend their days stewarding humankind's vast knowledge, baking special bread from the grain deliveries and participating in communal meditation rituals.

To give life more meaning and in a failed attempt to stop humanity from becoming permanently catatonic, the Vortex developed complex social rules whose violators are punished with artificial aging.

Genetic analysis reveals he is the ultimate result of long-running eugenics experiments devised by Arthur Frayn, who controlled the outlands with the Exterminators.

"[8] The original draft was set five years in the future and was about a university lecturer who became obsessed with a young girl whose disappearance prompted him to seek her out in the communes where she had lived.

His then-agent David Begelman knew the head of 20th Century Fox wanted to make a film with the director, and offered the executive the script to read, but insisted on a decision within two hours.

The costumes were designed by Boorman's first wife, Christel Kruse (the credits say they were made by La Tabard Boutique in Dublin), and were creations based on "pure intuition".

[In] thigh-high leather boots, crossed bandoliers and ... shorts that can be described as 'skimpy', the Brutals, and Connery in particular, exude raw masculinity, particularly as they ride their steeds and fire their guns.

[Note 1] Locations at the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation, Hollybrook Hall (now Brennanstown Riding School) in Kilmacanogue, and Luggala mountain for the dramatic wasteland sequences.

[22][23][24] In the audio commentary, Boorman related how political and cultural conditions in Ireland at the time affected the production, saying that it was "very difficult to get women to bare their breasts" as nudity was a prominent feature in several sequences.

While the film is set in the distant future (the 23rd century approximately), Boorman believed futuristic music would contain a variety of old-world instruments.

Along with David Munrow's medieval ensemble, the Zardoz soundtrack features Beethoven's "Symphony No.7" in A, 2nd movement, played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Conducted by Eugen Jochum.

According to a Starlog Magazine article on the film, "these reviewers (and the general public) failed to understand many of Boorman's analogies and philosophical statements".

[15] Zardoz barely made back its budget, and ultimately earned $1.8 million in box office rentals in the United States and Canada.

[28] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it two-and-a-half stars out of four and called it a "genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators...

[30] Variety reported the "direction, good; script, a brilliant premise which unfortunately washes out in climactic sound and fury; and production, outstanding, particularly special visual effects which are among the best in recent years and belie the film's modest cost".

[31] Jay Cocks of Time magazine called the film "visually bounteous", with "bright intervals of self-deprecatory humor that lighten the occasional pomposity of the material".

[32] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times was generally positive and wrote that its $1.5 million budget was "an unbelievably low price for the dazzle on the screen and a tribute to creative ingenuity and personal dedication.

[33] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that the script "lacks the human dimensions that would make us care about the big visual sequences" and burdened the actors with "unspeakable dialogue", and also remarked that Connery "acts like a man who agreed to do something before he grasped what it was".

[37] Jonathan Rosenbaum, reviewing in the Chicago Reader, called it "John Boorman's most underrated film – an impossibly ambitious and pretentious but also highly inventive, provocative, and visually striking SF adventure with metaphysical trimmings".

[5] Channel 4 called it "Boorman's finest film" and a "wonderfully eccentric and visually exciting sci-fi quest" that "deserves reappraisal".

Its consensus reads, "Zardoz is ambitious and epic in scope, but its philosophical musings are rendered ineffective by its supreme weirdness and rickety execution".