the archetype of Uranus. However, it is because the main message of film—that to perfect nature, to transcend instincts, and to defy mortality comes with unforeseen and dangerous consequences—is such an important caveat against the unbounded creativity of our age that idealizes much of Uranus's magic that makes this film so importantly "Uranian."
Zardoz focuses on a futuristic society not unlike a hybrid of Huxley's Brave New World and Plato's Republic. These beings are a master race—the "eternals"—who have harnessed and display Uranus's wizardy in all its potent manifestations: psychism, uptopian democratic procedures, immortality, scientific detachment and curiousity, and androgyny. On paper, the society of eternals is perfect and unblemished, however, the faultlessness and flawlessness that has been established is more of trap and prison than the hoped-for paradise. The more conscious and outspoken of this perfect race acknowledge the tremendous pain and suffering that this "perfect" condition has brought. Perfection, androgyny, and immortality brings with it an existential malaise and ennui that is incurable, a pain that cannot be heard in the pristine silence of this technocratic Eden.
It takes a mortal, bestial, and instinctual man—a "brutal" played by Sean Connery—to break the spell of perfection that has been cast onto the eternals. Connery's presence is a disruption thought to be easily controlled and mastered by the more powerfully developed and conscious members of the utopia. However, his gifts of eroticism, mortality, and "humanness" (qualities more associated with the astrological Pluto and Saturn) prove to be too seductive and alluring for the eternals to resist.
John Boorman scripted and filmed Zardoz when transiting Uranus was squaring his natal Sun.(see chart; solar only) In astrological terms, Zardoz is a story of a Uranian society done in by something Uranian—an unpredictable, unforeseeable perturbation that disrupts and changes the society forever. John Boorman says of the film, "If there is a moral in all this it's one for the futurologists themselves. Too often, it seems to me, they ignore the power of evolution itself to upset the equation. Some new mutation, something we encounter on the way, some unimagined factor can change the course ahead."(10) According to Boorman's wisdom, a society built entirely upon defeating nature—a society that is overly Uranian—cannot be sustainable. The filmmaker states, "We live these very comfortable kinds of lives where we're cut off from nature to a large extent. I think it's the cause of neurosis if you're not in touch with nature. There's a danger that you become disassociated, and I believe it causes a lot of our problems." (11)
It's hard to believe that a movie that begins with a cheap effect of a floating, detached head is actually so potent, powerful and complex in its main theme and message. However, if one is able to dismiss some of the anachronistic special effects and costuming, Zardoz holds a moral that is too quickly forgotten in our society: that the attempt to transcend nature can never happen if it is out of balance with nature itself.
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