A mixture of speedway, roller-skating, basketball and raw gladiatorial combat: that's rollerball, sport of the future, opium of the people, and the subject of Norman Jewison's eponymous film, which tells the story of Jonathan E., the star who becomes too big for the game. There's much that can be criticised in this movie, but also much to admire. On the downside, the future is rendered very much in accordance with a now-dated 1970s vision of modernism; the crowd scenes never truly come to life; we never really get an impression of how people who are not rollerball stars actually live; and most crucially, the players seem to possess an unexplained indifference to the imminence of death. The last point is actually quite important - the psychology of facing extinction is an underplayed element in the film, when a plot is launched to kill Jonathan, it's impact is diminished by the fact that people seem to die, largely uncared for, as a normal result of conventional play. On the other hand, the movie stages several games of rollberball for us, itself an achievement in an age before computer graphics; foresees the sybaritic lifestyles of contemporary sports stars; and paints a bold, impressionistic vision of future society - the details may be missing, but Jewison is quite audacious (for a director of a mainstream movie) in how he uses images and (mostly classical) music to reveal the essence of the world. Moreover, there's also something of the feel of 'The Parallax View' and other classic 1970s conspiracy thrillers about this film; the sense that the truth is always hidden behind the next corner (that's not my phrase, but it better describes the Kennedy/Watergate-inspired mood of the best of American movies of this period better than any I can create myself). 'Rollerball' is by no means perfect, but it does seem reminiscent of an age when Hollywood was more adventurous; it was recently remade, but surely what today's studios should have been doing was not copying the formula, but making a 'Rollerball' of their own.
Review of Rollerball
