Anyone seen Rollerball (1975)?

[Stevicus]

I just rewatched this movie over the weekend. Has anyone seen it or remember it when it came out?

It has an interesting premise, set in the future (2018, apparently), in which all nations have vanished, and the world is run by a giant corporate conglomerate. They've eliminated war and poverty, and everyone lives a life of relative comfort and ease. Old sports, such as the NFL or World Cup were done away with, and the entire world was focused on Rollerball as the main professional sport.

I found a relatively recent article which revisits the movie and puts it in a more contemporary perspective.

Rollerball imagined a completely different future of fame - The Verge

The future: Corporate nations and their supercomputers rule humanity, shaping digitized historical records to their liking. The masses are pacified by watching rollerball, a professional sport that’s like football played on a roller derby loop with motorcycles. Rollerball players have a glamorous existence: fans idolize them, executives envy them, and they’re provided lavish homes, beautiful wives or girlfriends, and fancy TVs with extra screens that show smaller, differently angled shots of whatever they’re watching. In return for all this, they let corporations control their lives.

Jonathan E. (played by James Caan) is the greatest rollerballer in history, but his corporate sponsors think his fame makes him too powerful. They ask him to retire, and when he refuses, they try to kill him by making rollerball increasingly dangerous. Naturally, since this is a science fiction dystopia, it turns out fans love the resulting bloodbaths.

The past: The ‘70s produced a glut of high-concept dystopian movies about consumerism and the dark side of mass culture; beyond Rollerball, it’s a category that includes Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, ZPG, and even the infamous Zardoz. They’re all loosely about futures where comfort and civilization come at the expense of individual freedom and the natural world, and Rollerball is no exception — in what is by far the film’s weirdest scene, a bunch of socialites drunkenly blow up trees with laser guns.

That was a weird scene of them at the party shooting out those trees. Even back in the 70s, nobody understood that scene.

Rollerball also draws on a long-running fascination with ultraviolent sci-fi sports. Based on a 1973 short story, it was released the same year as Roger Corman’s satirical Death Race 2000, which has a strikingly similar premise. And it would be followed by films like 1987’s The Running Man, where a police state maintains power through a game show. Incidentally, Rollerball’s terrible 2002 remake doesn’t include any of these themes — it’s about a small extreme sports league in present-day Eastern Europe.

The present: Rollerball was remarkably bad at predicting the future, and in some ways, that’s more interesting than a generically “timely” commentary on how violence and corporations are evil.

Rollerball imagines the ultimate capitalist society (which various sources suggest is set in 2018, although I haven’t found firm evidence of this) as a brand-free, almost communist monoculture where companies have bland names like “the Energy Corporation” and operate as a single, peaceful global conglomerate. Professional sports are designed to “demonstrate the futility of individual effort.” Rollerball teams have no mascots or monikers beyond their city’s name, and fans all dress in nearly identical T-shirts color-coded by city. In this world, individualism is such a threat that owning the greatest athlete in known history is a horrible liability.

It’s an oddly innocent, distinctly pre-cyberpunk vision that vastly underestimated how well companies could co-opt and repackage freedom and rebellion. In our real 21st century, the relationship between freedom, individualism, and capitalism has turned out to be incredibly complicated. Oppression is sold by glitzy superstar figureheads, while corporations earn good PR by fighting authoritarian laws, policing political leaders, and reining in renegade celebrities. Some real Jonathan E. analogs use their cults of personality to raise money and advocate social change; others turn their followers into vicious troll armies. Far from enforcing impersonal sameness, a real Energy Corporation would probably build a different brand for every hyper-niche subculture and run a snarky Twitter feed.

It’s also far less cynical than other future-bloodsport movies like The Running Man or The Hunger Games, where pop culture is nothing but staged, chaotic mind-numbing violence. Rollerball is surprisingly compelling for a fictional sport; it’s sort of convoluted and impractical, but at least designed with consistent and interesting rules.

New York Times critic Vincent Canby pointed out Rollerball’s crypto-utopian strain back in 1975, complaining that “it’s as if Mr. Jewison, and William Harrison, who wrote the screenplay, really believed that things like war, poverty and disease could be so easily wiped away” by authoritarianism:

All science fiction can be roughly divided into two types of nightmares. In the first the world has gone through a nuclear holocaust and civilization has reverted to a neo-Stone Age. In the second, of which “Rollerball” is an elaborate and very silly example, all of mankind’s problems have been solved but at the terrible price of individual freedom.

This is not wrong. Nearly 45 years later, though, Rollerball does seem like an unintentionally chilling commentary on our present. Because in 2020, we’ve avoided the dystopian future it warned us about — and simply discovered another type of nightmare.

Rollerball probably was bad as far as predictions go - although maybe not as bad as Back To The Future Part 2.

We don't live in a corporate controlled world, or do we?

And the sport itself was pretty brutal - comparable to a modern version of gladiatorial games. In the movie, the corporate executive (played by the great John Houseman) said that the game was invented to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. However, Jonathan E. was a superstar, whose popularity and fame made him world famous. Therefore, they wanted him out, as they saw him as some kind of threat.

Anyone see this movie? Just wondering what others thought of it.

 

[F1fan]

I love how they predicted the 70's style would come back in 2018.

I watched it a year ago and was so distracted looking at the fashion and styles that I missed some of the dialog and probably much of the symbolism. It seemed dystopian as a society, and that society really lacked meaning on a personal level so looked to celebrity and sport with blind devotion.

 

[TransmutingSoul]

Saw it at the Drive in Movies. Out of the back of my 'Sin Bin'.

Regards Tony

 

[Viker]

We don't live in a corporate controlled world, or do we?

Almost, think Black Rock.

I remember enjoying the movie at the drive-in.

 

[NArdas]

Yes, it was on the bill at the drive in I but don't remember much of it since it was shown on the "Midnight Madness" night but I do remember a little bit of Death Race 2000, especially this:

Frankenstein's "hand grenade" I thought it was hilarious.

Killer earthworms

Though I thought the second film "Scream Blacula Scream" a far better film (in that "genre") but I never understood how William Marshall, a Shakespearean actor from the U.K. ended up in the films like this.

 

[Stevicus]

I love how they predicted the 70's style would come back in 2018.

I watched it a year ago and was so distracted looking at the fashion and styles that I missed some of the dialog and probably much of the symbolism. It seemed dystopian as a society, and that society really lacked meaning on a personal level so looked to celebrity and sport with blind devotion.

I think what's interesting about this and other movies like it from that era is their conception of what they imagine computer technology to be like in the future. In Rollerball, we see a supercomputer which is really just a large tank of water that talks - but doesn't say very much.

It does seem dystopian and surreal in the overall tone and mood of the movie, and there isn't much explanation or backstory as to how this corporate society came into being in the first place. There were vague references to the "corporate wars" and nobody old enough to remember really talked about what existed prior to that.

I was thinking of a brief dialog between James Caan's character and his former wife (who was taken away by the corporation because an executive wanted her):


Jonathan E. : I've been thinking, Ella. Thinking a lot... and watching. It's like people had a choice a long time ago between having all them nice things or freedom. Of course, they chose comfort.

Ella : But comfort is freedom. It always has been. The whole history of civilization is a struggle against poverty and need.

Jonathan E. : No! No... that's not it. That's never been it! Them privileges just buy us off.

I can sort of see both viewpoints here. Have we chosen comfort over freedom? Was that the only choice we could have made?

I can also see the point that much of human history has been a struggle against poverty and need. The struggle for freedom has often existed parallel to that, largely because people blame their status of being in poverty and need on the fact that they're not free. So, people want the freedom to at least have a chance at trying to live a better life.

However, if a better life is already provided for them by the corporate directorate, what do they need freedom for? I think the movie leaves the question open-ended and vague, as a lot of 1970s movies were wont to do.

 

[John53]

I saw it as a teenager when it was released.

 

[Stevicus]

Another thing about the movie was the music, such as the opening theme:

It also seems each city has their own corporate anthem in which everyone is supposed to stand up for, just like the national anthem at sporting events.

 

[NArdas]

I saw it as a teenager when it was released.

So I was banging your girlfriend at the time while the filme played? what a weird coincidence, what are the chances?

 

[John D. Brey]

Anyone see this movie? Just wondering what others thought of it.

Love James Caan in that, Brian's Song, and The Gambler. Him and Steve McQueen were bad as$es in the 70's.



John

 

[NArdas]

 

[Sedim Haba]

I just rewatched this movie over the weekend. Has anyone seen it or remember it when it came out?

It has an interesting premise, set in the future (2018, apparently), in which all nations have vanished, and the world is run by a giant corporate conglomerate. They've eliminated war and poverty, and everyone lives a life of relative comfort and ease. Old sports, such as the NFL or World Cup were done away with, and the entire world was focused on Rollerball as the main professional sport.

I found a relatively recent article which revisits the movie and puts it in a more contemporary perspective.

Rollerball imagined a completely different future of fame - The Verge





That was a weird scene of them at the party shooting out those trees. Even back in the 70s, nobody understood that scene.



Rollerball probably was bad as far as predictions go - although maybe not as bad as Back To The Future Part 2.

We don't live in a corporate controlled world, or do we?

And the sport itself was pretty brutal - comparable to a modern version of gladiatorial games. In the movie, the corporate executive (played by the great John Houseman) said that the game was invented to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. However, Jonathan E. was a superstar, whose popularity and fame made him world famous. Therefore, they wanted him out, as they saw him as some kind of threat.

Anyone see this movie? Just wondering what others thought of it.

Oh, I remember that movie. From your link:

The ‘70s produced a glut of high-concept dystopian movies about consumerism and the dark side of mass culture; beyond Rollerball, it’s a category that includes Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, ZPG, and even the infamous Zardoz. They’re all loosely about futures where comfort and civilization come at the expense of individual freedom and the natural world, and Rollerball is no exception — in what is by far the film’s weirdest scene, a bunch of socialites drunkenly blow up trees with laser guns.

Oh, I remember the trees scene. The most disturbing scene in this movie was the 'bubble-memory'
scene. I actually worked with what was called 'bubble memory' back in the day. Truly prophetic.

 

[Brickjectivity]

Has anyone seen it

I've seen at least part of it but do not remember much connected with it. Additionally there is a Japanese cartoon that borrows from it but also includes mech armor. If I recall the cartoon has sky cities with aloof masters and prime citizens living there, and on the ground are people living off of the junk which falls down and competing in pointless competitions for the right to ascend and live in the sky cities.

 

[Mock Turtle]

I've seen it probably more than once but my memory isn't too good as to details. I can remember the ending of course. Quite powerful when first seen, and always worth watching if it comes up on TV.