Based on Boorman's own original screenplay, "Zardoz" moves the caIendar ahead 300 years to a world that has been divided into two parts. One is made up of an elite group who are guaranteed an inescapabIe immortality in their scientific oasis while the other, Outlanders, are wretched survivors of pollution and war.

A violently explosive clash occurs when one of the Outlanders, a savage brute trained to kill, manages to invade the society of sheltered immortals. Sean Connery as Zed the invader, is the virile, aggressive cataIyst who disrupts a society grown decadent through its technology and im-mortality. His co-stars are Charlotte Rampling, the British beauty who has been seen in "Georgy Girl" and recently "The Damned," Sara Kestelman of the Royal Shakespeare Company who makes her film debut and John Alderton, one of Britain's leading TV stars .

The world that John Boorman presents in "Zardoz" is one in which everything is different. And yet nothing has changed.

The writer-director elaborates- "My attitude toward organized society has always been colored very strongly by the force and power that I feel is behind Nature.

"In 'Zardoz' there is an elite community that has completely cut itself off, for self-preservation and other laudable objectives. But it also leads to apathy and sterility. And the new society becomes an offense against the natural order. It is Nature that forces itself back in its own way. It is She who destroys the experiment."

Science fiction, if you want to call it that, is the genre that allows Boorman the scope he needs to explore mythical stories in the way he works.

"I've always found myths a more interesting way of dealing with the past. Now I've found that also true of the future," he says. "There is, however, a relevance in 'Zardoz' to contemporary society. I suppose the real genesis of this picture was in America about 18 months ago. I did some research into the Alternative Society, visiting communes in the States to see how they functioned. Some of them are now seven years old. What it amounts to is a rejection of our-machine-society, it embraces mysticism but still uses technology."

Boorman's final version of the Vortex is an amalgam of several seemingly unrelated ingredients including the California communes, the Monastery communities of the Middle Ages and a quote from T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

Would it have been worthwhile,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the Universe into a ball
To roll it towards some over-whelming question
To say I am Lazarus, come from the dead
Come back to tell you all . . .

He also was affected by a fragmented but disturbing statement on The Bomb by a nimble-witted and acerbic British pundit, Malcolm Muggeridge-who professed himself "not sure that the destruction of the human race is necessarily a bad thing."

As for the Vortex people, al-though apparently well equipped to find ultimate answers they become victims of their single-minded vision. What destroys them is something their sophisti-cation was never programmed to foresee, something nevertheless very simple.

"If there is a moral in all this it's one for the futurologists themselves," says Boorman. "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.

"Science and logic are not infallibles. Paradox has a poetry of its own. For example, my Vortex people have forgotten what death is like and, as a result, life has lost its vital savor. It is a psalm to paradox, a knee bent to the cruel majesty of nature "

"Zardoz," a 20th Century-Fox release premieres ..... at the ..... Theatre.