1975: ROLLERBALL

What’s it about?

After bringing his Houston rollerball team to the brink of the world championships, superstar player James Caan is pressured by his team’s corporate owners to quit the sport before the end of the season. Unable to understand the request (and suspicious of the executives trying to strong-arm him), Caan refuses to retire and instead intends to play out the final two games with the rest of his team.

Meanwhile, rule changes in the playoff games turn the dangerous sport into a downright gladiatorial one. First, penalties are eliminated in the semi-finals, which results in players practically executing each other on the rink without repercussions. For the championship game, time limits are removed -- which logically requires the winners to be the last men standing on the rink.




Is it any good?

I’ve had occasion to allude before to some movies about the futuristic sports we will all be playing in the year 2000 and beyond. There’s the globe-spanning cat and mouse of THE 10TH VICTIM (1965), the cross-country auto race of DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), the board game assassinations of QUINTET (1979), the gladiatorial combats of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), the game show hunt of THE RUNNING MAN (1987), the brutal jugger of THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989), the pod race of THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999) and so on. Even the wargames and training exercises in THE GLADIATORS (1970) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) fall generally under the heading of games, even if they aren’t traditional spectator sports.

One thing that these future sports and games all have in common is their reliance on the entertainment value of violence -- and often the expectation of death on the courts. It’s true that movies very often focus on the violence inherent to even contemporary games -- the specter of death stalks (sometimes quite literally) the prison football of THE LONGEST YARD (1974), the road rally of THE GUMBALL RALLY (1976), the boxing of the ROCKY series, the quidditch of HARRY POTTER, the party game of THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), and even the chess match of THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) -- and yet, sports where death is a planned outcome of the event are still found almost exclusively in science fiction. (Or, I suppose, historical fiction about ancient Romans or Aztecs.)

In this context, ROLLERBALL is interesting in the sense that the sport starts out as a high-speed, high-impact game where death and injury are incidental (but tacitly expected) occurrences -- much like auto racing, boxing, steeplechase, hockey, and countless other sports today. True, rollerball looks much nastier than most any real sport I can think of, except perhaps the original no-rules “ultimate fighting” mixed martial arts tournaments of the 1990s. Rollerball is played with two teams of ten (seven on roller skates and three on motorbikes) who endlessly circle a rink at high speeds. Heavy metal balls are shot at high velocities into the rink, where they are picked up by players who then try to score by jamming them into small goals placed around the circuit. Body-checking, tackling, shoving, and fighting are all accepted parts of the game. At the start of the movie, even running another player over with a motorbike only results in a three-minute penalty.




Over the course of the movie, rollerball becomes even more violent as rule changes eliminate penalties and then time limits. The rule changes are presented as ways to keep fans interested (though there may also be an ulterior motive), but the result is that the game quickly turns into one of those far more common future sports where the maiming and killing is not just incidental -- it's the whole point. Those kinds of games always struck me as unrealistic -- it’s pretty difficult to imagine a world where DEATH RACE 2000 or THE RUNNING MAN could actually happen, for instance -- but ROLLERBALL makes the transition from violent sport to outright blood sport almost plausible. (Not shown in the movie: Any kind of public outcry against the rollerball rinks littered with bloody bodies and burning motorcycles. Though it does appear at the end of the film that the crowd may have finally gotten more spectacle than they really wanted.)

The three rollerball games that play out onscreen were certainly my favorite parts, as they contain some really amazing stunt work. There aren’t many quick cuts and no green screens here -- there really are stunt men on rollerskates and motorcycles ramming into each other on an inclined rink. As with most sports, the uniforms and numbers make it easy to follow who is doing what to whom (or who is having what done to them by whom), and the illusion that the game might actually possibly work is never fatally broken. There’s also practically no explanation of the rules of rollerball -- just tidbits here and there in the play-by-play announcing and a little later in character dialogue -- but it’s very easy to pick up simply by watching.




But the evolution of the sport is just the best part of ROLLERBALL -- there is, for better or for worse, more to the movie than that. The mystery angle -- the question of why Caan is being asked to retire if he’s so good at the game -- is not bad either. It seems like some kind of corporate conspiracy is afoot, and (this being a movie of the 1970s) that perception turns out to be correct. Despite Caan’s paranoia, however, the conspiracy never really becomes very ominous. It mostly amounts to a lot of cajoling and wheedling, though it does seem likely that the rule changes are put in place partly to help drive Caan from the game.

ROLLERBALL also envisions a future where corporations rule the world. National governments have collapsed, and cities are administered directly by one of a handful of massive monopolistic corporations that supply the necessities and luxuries of life. Houston is an Energy city and Chicago is a Food city, for instance, but even the characters have trouble remember who exactly is running each city and even what each corporation does. Though people in this world are mostly free from want, there’s little freedom of choice in any aspect of life and a small “executive class” controls all decision-making and enjoys most luxuries. Information has also been centralized in a way that is possibly more prescient than the film makers imagined. Books have all been digitized and are stored in a central database so that the corporations can edit and summarize them for the masses or restrict access altogether.

There are some slow parts to the movie -- most sections play out with very little exposition, so there are scenes like a long party where some information is learned through background chatter but which also seems to drag on and on. There’s also a subplot about Caan’s pining for his ex-wife which doesn’t go much of anywhere. But all in all this is a pretty great movie, and the rollerball games alone are worth watching for.




What else happened this year?

-- Don Johnson wandered a post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog in A BOY AND HIS DOG.
-- THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW forever made Tim Curry the favorite actor of sexually deviant theater geeks everywhere.
-- Roger Corman's DEATH RACE 2000 put David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone in a gory satire of the media obsession with violence, and contains one of the greatest puns in cinematic history.
-- Meanwhile, THE STEPFORD WIVES turned its satirical sights on a horror-tinged version of suburban America.
-- And anybody who spent any time in an elementary school classroom in the 1980s probably saw ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN on VHS more than once.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1975...

ROLLERBALL is about as awesome as it gets. (Unless you are a sexually deviant theater geek, in which case you already know what to do.)