Rollerball

Saw Rollerball, a 1970s sci-fi. It takes place in a future dystopia ruled by corporations and fueled by the murderous sport of rollerball. The rollerball sequences are pretty exciting in a sports-film kind of way. There's chanting crowds and blood and excitement. I liked how real the sport felt (for a sci-fi future sport anyway.) The film opens with a fairly unglamorous scene of cameras being set up and balding TV execs with little mustaches conferring. The court is not super-futuristic, but is made of laminated wood and paint. Unfortunately, the rollerball scenes don't really convey much plot or idea on their own, so we get some of the inter-game adventures of one of the star players. This is where the film becomes a bit weaker.

Unfortunately, this is the 70s and the protagonist is this sort of cowboy philosopher. He makes vague references to freedom and, in leaden, pause-riddled monologues, denounces the decadent future-culture, praising instead the pursuit of an ill-defined "freedom." The future-culture exhibits this decadence mainly by consuming lots of drugs and by wife-swapping according to some byzantine schedule (which it is not clear if it only applies to rollerballers or the elite caste or what. And is this a societal institution, controlled by a bureaucracy, or some kind of service? More importantly, is it possible to get a rotating harem of husbands?) There's a party which is so decadent and soul-crushingly dismal that even the wives are openly weeping. It gets really heavy-handed sometimes.

There's some uncomfortable bits of 70s race/sexism. The wives, like I say, seem to be rotated which is just bully for the guys, but less so for the gals. At one point the protagonist demonstrates his independence by bravely cutting his wife's face. The Tokyo team's team-color is yellow in what I assume was just an unfortunate coincidence. The protagonist makes much of his wife being taken from him but when the powers that be capitulate and bring her to him, he finds she has been gotten to and tainted. He rejects her, but does he reject her because she has compromised her integrity or (what's more likely) because she has been sullied?

Also, there's this weird notion that the powers that be are frightened by a really good rollerball player. He's told he's a threat, that they'll give him anything he wants (eg getting his wife back) if only he quits, that he'll be killed if he doesn't, etc etc. Why? I don't believe that a government so intrusive that it controls love-lives can't fake a resignation. We are bluntly told why the powers that be want to stop him (from being too good at sports, let's not forget!) but their reason makes no sense to me. I think this nation-wide amazement at a single, inscrutable individual is an artifact of the weird super-individualism of the 70s. The hippie movement had just finished glorifying the disruption of power structures and the government was working on demonizing collectivism and I think this melded into some strange myth of The Man Who Was So Free That He Somehow Changed Everything. Very bizarre.

I didn't think much of this film. It's much more restrained than Deathrace, but not really as fun or as comprehensible. It's not very subtle, but still manages to be confusing. The protagonist is this dickish kind of dude who feels he owes no one an explanation but unfortunately includes the audience in this information embargo. He struts about contemptuously and we're supposed to just eat it up. Perhaps I'm reacting to a philosophy here? I am someone who traded dreams for comfort long ago (in a perfect world, I'd be an actor. I gave this up on this in high school.) and maybe the film makes more sense than I'm allowing it to, here in my cubicle. But I'm fairly, grumpily certain that it's just being kind of childish and unclear. Harrumph.