I find it interesting how sports invented for movies are always a tad ridiculous. The titular game in 1975’s Rollerball seemed to me to have elements of roulette, roller derby, motorcycle racing, jai alai and basketball. The game the Whos play in How the Grinch Stole Christmas feels saner in comparison, and that one was a combination of lacrosse and croquet.
This game is played in a round arena where the floor is tilted downward towards the center. The objective is to get a heavy metal sphere into a slot. Two teams compete, most of the players on skates, though each team also has a motorcyclist. I never quite grasped the point of the motorcycles aside from they look cool, and it provides the opportunity for something to explode. By the end of the film, I think every one of them has exploded. They must be putting something other than gasoline for fuel in these things, possibly nitro glycerin.
Each match begins not with the national anthem, but with the corporate anthem. I have a nagging suspicion taking a knee during the corporate anthem would be deadly. You see, this takes place in a dystopian near-future where corporations have displaced nations. In place of governments, various boards of directors run different cities. Supposedly, there aren’t wars in this future, there is the only the sport of Rollerball. This is similar to Robot Jox, which I assume was influenced by Rollerball in that regard.
James Caan, as the captain of Houston’s Rollerball team, is the world’s greatest and best-known player. John Houseman, one of apparently six people who rule the world, has informed Caan he must retire. He doesn’t bother giving the player a reason why he should walk away from the only thing he’s good at. This raises hackles, as Caan already lost his wife to an executive who wanted her for himself.
A great part of the remainder of the film is Caan trying to get information for why he has been asked to leave the game. He even tries to learn more about the past, but discovers such information is only available by visiting a great computer in Geneva that is the repository of all knowledge. I thought the idea of history not being accessible at the library was interesting as an example of how controlling the past controls the future. The Geneva trip only compounds Caan’s frustration, as the artificial intelligence he finds himself posing questions to has something akin to a nervous breakdown.
In a different film of this vintage, there would be a far greater conspiracy in which Caan finds himself. One would also expect people who have been asking questions for him, such as his trainer (Moses Gunn), to meet an untimely end. To my considerable surprise, there isn’t a larger conspiracy—it is simply Houseman fears for any one player to become bigger than the game itself and possibly be an inspiration to the populace. Think of Spartacus. Also, those characters digging into the conspiracy will still be there by the end credits. I found this to be a bit of a bait-and-switch I only appreciated after a couple of days of thinking about the film.
That’s not to say there is any shortage of death here, as the sport encourages violence. Since Caan won’t retire on his own, the game keeps changing to make it unlikely he can continue to survive playing the game. Before a match in Tokyo, all penalties are removed. Given an earlier scene revealed the most number of deaths in a game had been eight, I wondered what one would have to do in the arena to incur a penalty. By the end of the last match shown in the film, there are enough corpses lying around to give the uncanny feeling somebody staged an indoor reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg that went too far.
Despite there being a great deal of violence in Rollerball, it is portrayed in a manner clearly positioning it as a critique of public bloodlust and the ability throughout history of those in control being able to placate the masses with bread and circuses. By the time the credits rolled, I was even sold on the idea of the futuristic sport, despite it still recalling to my mind the roller disco club scene from Xanadu. Now, that is something that would inspire me to commit acts of violence.
Dir: Norman Jewison
Starring James Caan, John Houseman
Watched on Scorpion Releasing blu-ray