Movie Monthly - Rollerball

Welcome back to Movie Monthly’s celebration of the very thin crossover line between sci-fi and sports this November with a look at all things future, techno, and athletic.  Last  week we looked at Robot Jox, the story of a distant future wherein nations hashed out their disputes through the tried and true method of giant robot fights, this week we’ve got arguably the opposite inverse film with Rollerball, the 1975 dystopian future sports film starring James Caan.  It’s actually kind of amazing how much Rollerball serves as a counter point to Robot Jox; corporations instead of nations, teams instead of individuals, entertainment rather than politics, a well known star with an actual career rather than “that guy from Alien Nation,” a really awful remake in 2002 instead of a reappraisal by nerd culture in recent years, and most key of all: Rollerball was the product of ‘70s pessimistic futurism while Robot Jox was the result of ‘80s blockbuster fun giving way to ‘90s shallowness and polish.

Even despite their differences both Robot Jox and Rollerball stand as great examples of the blood sport subgenre, though Rollerball is a bit more faithful to the core idea of this particular sci-fi niche.  In the bleak dystopia of Rollerball’s universe the old world governments have completely fallen away, replaced by massive corporations.  The idea is that now, the various corporate masters of Earth are divided by the role they fill in the world’s needs such as entertainment, power, manufacturing and so forth though nationalistic divides still remain.  

At the heart of this strange new world is the titular Rollerball, a gladiatorial combat sport that’s most in line with roller derby but way more lethal.  The players orbit around a massive circular track, most on roller skates with football padding though some are on actual motorcycles, and the two teams can pretty much bludgeon each other to death trying to get a small and incredibly destructive metal ball into one of the two hoop/goal areas.  Our hero is simply known as Jonathan, a star Rollerball player who’s being forcibly retired for the crime of being too good at the sport. 

That central conflict is key to what makes Rollerball as strange a case as it is, especially for the blood sport subgenre.  Most of the time, blood sport films are essentially about translating the real life horrors of the coliseum and Roman gladiatorial arena to the broad palette of contemporary or future times.  Films like Hunger Games or Gamer are all about using incredibly violent and bloody “sports” to pacify the masses to avoid a rebellion within some kind of fascist system.  In Rollerball that’s not really the case, at least not specifically.  

The actual game of Rollerball in the film isn’t portrayed as that much of an opiate of the masses as one might expect from this scenario.  It looks like a pretty amazing spectacle and we know people love it but there’s no real indication of its use to “distract” people from the real issues because no real issues are shown in the film.  If the ruling corporate oligarchy is secretly doing all manner of bad things we certainly never see it and if there is a revolution of any kind we certainly aren’t hearing about it.  That’s because revolution, pacification, and spectacle culture aren’t on the film’s mind as much as culture war in general. 

See, even though Rollerball doesn’t serve the role of an opiate for the masses in the film it does serve to enforce a doctrine, a resounding cultural conclusion that reverberates across the entire world; that one person can’t make a difference.  That’s actually the literal point of Rollerball, it’s a game that’s been mathematically calculated to prevent any kind of all-star or MVPs to develop, it’s a game where individualism and personal effort are only ever rewarded with death.  The whole thing is basically a little morality play to endear the masses to their role as cogs in the corporate machine.  

That’s why Jonathan is being forced into retirement for the crime of being too good, he’s an anomaly within the perfect mathematics of the sport, someone who’s just violent and athletic enough to survive on his own and rise above his teammates to a place of celebrity.  This essentially makes him Neo from The Matrix, a mathematical anomaly within a pacifying system that no one knows what to do with, the only difference is that in Rollerball being “The One” is about being the most psychotically violent person in a whole host of violent murderers rather than a key figure in any kind of human resistance. 

That kind of uncertainty is a big part of Jonathan’s character and the film’s overarching cynicism that I mentioned earlier.  There’s no greater struggle in the film outside of Jonathan’s fight to assert his own individual skill at Rollerball, which is essentially just his quest to murder as many people as possible.  So, by the end of the movie even if our hero achieves his goal of rampant slaughter the world is still under the domineering thumb of an unelected corporate oligarchy that views people as machinery within their structures.  It’s sort of like the ending to Robocop where Murphy achieves his personal quest for identity but Detroit is still at the complete mercy of Omnicorp regardless.  

Actually it’s even harsher than Robocop’s ending as even Jonathan’s victory is decidedly ambiguous as his ultimate show of strength is to just violently bludgeon the last few members of another team to death.  You’re left very much with a sense of “this is winning?” at the film’s final moment though I do like the incredibly ‘70s nature of the conflict at hand.  Rather than being a battle of good vs. evil on any metric it’s a battle of naked brutality versus veiled inhumanity.  All the titans of ‘70s sci-fi like Omega Man, Soylent Green, and Planet of the Apes were grounded in an overarching focus on man’s inner destructive nature but I’d say that Rollerball is the one most removed from humanity’s positive attributes. 

None of this is to say that Rollerball is bad or even FEELS that pessimistic all things considered.  The fact that the film is able to transcend its own bleak outlook on the human condition and the nature of our world as a whole is owed mainly to the skill of director Norman Jewison.  Jewison is a weird director to handle this material given that his previous major films included The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming, a cold war comedy, and the twin musicals Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, but he does a great job with Rollerball.  His main strength with the film is in the actual Rollerball sequences, which are glorious to behold.  

Rollerball is filmed as a sport that hurts just to look at and the very ‘70s aesthetic of the track and gear just makes it more unsafe looking.  Everything about the sport from the ball to the track looks like it’s one wrong move away from killing you and the fact that so much of the game is high impact bludgeoning only adds to that air.  It’s all so incredibly visceral and tactile that you can’t help get swept up in it.  Even though the rest of the film can suffer from a slow pace and some less than impressive set work these sequences redeem the whole film, especially if you can walk the thin line between appreciating the ideological conflict at hand and really getting into the spirit of the gory action. 

I won’t pretend Rollerball is a perfect film or even one that’s that well remembered by most but it’s a personal favorite.  The visual look of Rollerball is like no other blood sport film out there and there’s enough intelligence in the set-up and situation of the film to make the gory spectacle more than just a shallow wallow in tasteless violence but on the other hand the violence is so fun and enjoyable it helps soften the blow of the film’s ultimately very bleak and nihilistic world view, they’re two great tastes that go great together.  

I get the sense that if the movie had maybe gone even further with the inescapable nature of the corporate state of Jonathan’s world, having them embrace and brand super stars as marketing tools people might like this film better as then it’d actually be really similar to the likes of Network or A Face In The Crowd but that would only serve to undercut the much darker and more egalitarian view of the film.  The point of a movie like Network is that even if we do rise up against the corporate machine it won’t matter because they’ll just package and sell our revolution while the point of Rollerball is that in rebelling against civilized control means embracing brutality and chaos. 


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