Rollerball (1975)

(Criterion Streaming, January 2020) For viewers like me, raised on the notion that Rollerball was just this dumb dystopian movie about some fantasy sports, actually watching the film is in order. Not the remake: The original one, with James Caan somehow playing an elite world-famous athlete. Because there’s a lot more in the margins of the film than you’d ever expect: Darkly funny, perceptive stuff that adds so much depth to it that you’ll regret ever thinking it was a silly film. (But that’s OK: You can blame the remake.) With chameleonic director Norman Jewison at the helm, how could it be silly? Jewison has done many movies, and if some of them weren’t as good as others, none were stupid. So it is that Rollerball, beyond the brutal roller-skate sport, quickly starts sketching the bread-and-game nature of the event in a society dedicated to social control. The film draws a merciless portrait of the rich (down to them burning down a tree for fun) and of information control—one of the best throwaway lines has an entire century having been accidentally deleted from the computer memory banks now holding all knowledge. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily want to portray Rollerball as this underrated classic—it’s got more depth than you may expect from the marketing, but it’s no masterpiece of dystopia. Even the more generous commentators won’t be too sure whether the added material is just fluff around the Rollerball raison d’être of the movie, or if the Rollerball is the hook to talk about the then-fashionable idea of a dystopian future. But I was surprised—I wasn’t expecting much, and got something somewhat better than expected. The final tally is a Science Fiction film of the mid-1970s that’s not quite as depressing or childish as many of its contemporaries. That’s already not too bad—see it with Soylent Green for a change of pace.

(Second viewing, Criterion Streaming, June 2020) I’m not sure why I returned to Rollerball after only a few months, but here we are, and the film does hold up to a fresh revisit. Much of it isn’t as satirical as it must have been intended at the time: corporate anthems and violent manufactured sports are a thing of reality, and it’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re not seeing as many science fiction films actually attempting to anticipate a future (either as satire or realism) these days. What is worth a look is the film’s pre-Star Wars approach to SF in a 1970s context: The OCR computer font is a dead giveaway, but so are the social issues tackled here. It’s also not shy at all about its social themes—they’re explicitly discussed in the film by the characters themselves, and reinforced by the decadent aristocracy changing the rules on whims advantaging them. The blend of such commentary with action sequences is the film’s notable trait (and Jewison’s direction certainly changes during the rollerball scenes), although it may weaken the film is other ways, the flash outshining the substance. Rollerball could have been better, but it’s still surprisingly good.