"Social Commentary! I choose you!"
Everyone remembers the first violent film that they encountered. Some snuck into the cinema to see Nightmare on Elm Street. Some were just watching post-watershed TV and were caught offguard by A Clockwork Orange or Urban Legend. Others were sat down by a parent and told, "Look, if this gets too much, tell me, but this film is awesome!" And so it was for me with Rollerball. What I remember most about the first viewings of this film is a sense of "Wow, the violent bits are fun. I don't understand the rest but I'm sure I will when I'm a bit older!" So now that I am older, and a bit wiser (shut up, yes I am), I've returned to Rollerball to see whether I can enjoy it on a new level.
It is the future (the distant lands of 2018, to be specific) and corporate businesses have replaced governments world wide. It is almost a utopia - to quote the film's enigmatic tagline: "In the future there will be no wars, but there will be Rollerball". Rollerball has replaced every sport and is played in practically every city on the planet. It is technically a ballgame (think handball meets fight club meets Starlight Express), but it has one significant difference: it is a full contact blood sport. The corporations use rollerball to show an ever-more bloodthirsty populace that individuality is pointless, that you can only achieve anything through cooperation, which keeps the masses subdued. We view the story through the perspective of Jonathon E, key player in the Houston team and star of the sport who, becoming the very kind of individual that the corporations fear, is asked to retire and, when he says no, the rules are changed to make the game more and more dangerous in an effort to put a permanent end to Jonathon E's celebrity.
If that plot summary seems a little cliche to you, well, you're not wrong. And yes, my nose wrinkles as well at a film trying to suggest that a sport (even a violent one) could be so universally loved that it would quash all individual thought (a concept actually done better in a much, much worse film The Running Man, where the game is a punishment for criminals as well as entertainment). And when the film does go for the hard-hitting social commentary, it misses "subtle" by a wide margin.
Spot the bad guy. Hint: he's the one engulfed in flame.
But that's kind of how dystopian sport movies are. Think about the aforementioned The Running Man, or Death Race 2000, released only months before Rollerball. Even the wonderfully made Battle Royale spends so much time building the parameters of its game that the time left for the actual message falls on the short side.
And on the subject of world-building, Rollerball surpasses even Battle Royale (if you know me, you know how big a statement that is). There is never a point at which the audience would realistically question the world which Rollerball inhabits, as the characters are never caricatured or overplayed. The film is not even particularly "sci-fi" (save for one scene where we see an unrealistically powerful pistol). Most importantly, the sport of rollerball makes absolute sense. The opening ten minutes of the film manage, for me, to do what cricket has failed to do in twenty-five years: concisely explain the rules in a way that makes absolute sense, without boring me to tears. The sport is so playable in fact that the cast and crew did exactly that between takes (minus the violence, one hopes, but then this is James Caan...) and the director, Norman Jewison, was horrified to learn that there was interest in starting real-world rollerball leagues.
If only J.K. Rowling had been so conscientious...
Combine the immersive sense of the world that is built through the film, the clear message being portrayed and some impeccable acting from the lead performers, and you have a film that absolutely deserves the praise it received in its own era.
The reason, however, that it is worth returning to the film today is that, forty years down the line, the movie has taken on new significance. Perhaps one of the most significant criticisms that a modern audience could have of Rollerball is that it isn't violent enough. As realistic as the game itself looks, we are asked to believe that people are literally dying to Shatner-esque faux punches and, this being the 70s, you rarely see the "blood" part of "bloodsport".
Dave's "Line Painting With My Face" business was short-lived.
But isn't that fascinating in itself? A film from the 70s states that one day we will be so obsessed with violence that we will cease to see the horror in it, and in the 2010s, we release The Hunger Games, bloodier by far, as a 12A? It's an interesting thought and shows, if nothing else, that Rollerball was foreward thinking enough to almost be considered precognative.
Overall, I'm left curiously torn by this movie. When I was younger, the violent bits thrilled me because I was young, and the talky bits bored me because I didn't understand them. Now that I have a greater appreciation of cinema and the world at large, I find the talky bits are a bit heavy-handed and the violent bits aren't quite violent enough to make the point that it is trying to make. However, given that those reactions are exactly what the film criticises in its audience, it's hard not to be completely captivated by a film that wasn't just striding ahead of its time, but skating.
That's a wrap.
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