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The film opens in England 400 years earlier, with Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) and her court astrologer and alchemist, John Dee (Richard O'Brien, creator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show), summoning forth the angel Ariel (David Haughton) to show them the future of their great nation. These opening scenes are shot with lush serenity—all green foliage and candlelight—suggesting that Elizabethan England was a golden age, a time of beauty and peacefulness.

This calm past is then violently juxtaposed with Jarman’s vision of the chaotic near future, in which England has deteriorated into a state of near-anarchy. In Jarman's England, there is utter chaos in the streets. Policemen do little to maintain law and order and, in fact, sometimes kill people simply for sport. In retaliation, civilians kill them right back. Anarchy and flagrant sexuality are pandemic, and even Westminster Cathedral has been transformed into a nightclub for orgy-fests. Dorset, for its part, has been transformed into a communist state where "gay, homosexuals, and Jews are banned." The rest of England is rampant with cross-dressing punk transvestites, homoerotic encounters, and street gangs. Sadomasochism abounds, involving everything from bondage to menages a trois to orgies among apostles and bishops.

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