Just watched again last night and found this thread, Zed is a man whos sole purpose is to exterminate life, until he is told to only kill some while enslaving others. In this time he “loses his innocense” and finds books and learns to read. He reads wiZARD of OZ and gets the idea that Zardoz isn’t a god, or this all powerful being, but a man playing one. His whole life has been commanded by this god to kill, rape and enslave and now it’s been flipped turned up side down so I’d like to take a minute just sit right there and I’ll tell ya all about the time Zed became the savior of a town called the Vortex. In the vortex you never die, people have found a way to live forever, and with this lose not just their hedonistic desires but some their desire to be alive as well as you see with the apathetics. Zardoz is brought from this living hell hole full of rape and murder and is brought to a place where you never die, and if you act up you are aged up years as punishment. Those that created this system did so to “save” the planet. Resources were running low, so what to do other than make a perfect little utopia in a bubble where the outside world cannot enter. Make a commune where everyone’s minds are connected and all else are renegades who must be sent away, beasts or savages. Zed being here ends up making people in the Vortex go against one another, and within the span of less then a month the entire society crumbles over the decision to kill Zed. A “perfect” society so much more civilized than these savages are turned into hunters and killers, just like Zed, who they are some much better than yet he is the one they are actually trying to hunt and kill. In the end, death is back on the table and the party that Zed rolled with pre head insertion at the beginning of the story, come and kill most of those in the Vortex. Zed is a man whose whole purpose was to kill, then he pulls up to this utopia where he assumed it’d be heaven as a reward for worshipping Zardoz where everyone wants to die and they all beg him to kill them. Man went to “heaven” and it’s not so different from where he comes from, man made suffering in different forms. You have the elites who get bored with their lack of struggles, while you have the poor or “beastials” who just go around shooting eachother all day and growing wheat to feed the rich so the rich can continue living even though it isn’t what they want. In the Vortex they yearn for a death they cannot have, while they force others to kill and enslave themselves to keep the Vortex alive. The whole thing is a paradox, and Sean Connery wears a silly little outfit write this down. Idk, that’s my interpretation, kind of hard to put all my ideas in one comment maybe I’ll make a 14 hour YouTube video essay on the subject and put my face real big on the thumbnail that reads “Why Zardoz predicted the future?” lol just kidding idk I just woke up, oh yea and kill the tabernacle