ROLLERBALL (1975) Best fake-sport movie ever? Maybe. As a general rule of thumb, I hate sports, I hate movies about sports way more, and worst of all are sports movies about sports that don't actually exist (Baseketball, anyone?). I can't say I'm all the way sold on the original Rollerball, but it does manage to transcend most of the shit that makes me hate other sports movies. Rollerball takes place in the super-corporate future where people dance forehead-to-forehead and stand for corporate anthems instead of national anthems (exactly one guy looks like he means it, and he looks like an idiot). We find this out in short order as the movie starts out with a game of everybody's new favorite spectator sport, actually the only spectator sport left...yeah, that's right, rollerball. Good guess. Rollerball - the game, not the movie - is like roller derby with spiked gloves and a metal ball about the size of a softball which you're supposed to dunk in a, uh, receptacle, or something. With motorcycles. James Caan is the master of rollerball, a huge star who actually plays the sport for the love of it instead of the opportunity to whore himself out to fast-food and footwear companies (remember, this is science fiction). John Houseman (the "We eeeeeeearn it" guy) is a charismatic but faintly slimy corporate honcho, who gets more overtly slimy as the movie goes on. He believes this governing style is beneficial and utopian, so long as all the Joe Averages out there "don't interfere with management decisions". Since he believes it's utopian, ancient sci-fi law state that it must in actuality be dystopian! Houseman wans Caan to retire - but why, goddammit? Caan's at the top of his game, he's making the corporation assloads of cash, and the people love him. Oh wait, that last one could be trouble when your society is based on the suppression of individuality. Caan's "Champion" character doesn't have much personality beyond his place in the plot to defy The Man in his own way, though. He's soft-spoken, introverted, not much given to posturing - he certainly doesn't much resemble the champion athletes of today's sports. Off the "field", he doesn't even seem capable of the kind of bone-crunching mayhem asked of him in the game. More expected is John Beck, sort of the super-cool macho "rock star" type of athlete, who's kind of annoying, though he is fairly sympathetic for most of the movie, until he rapes a girl. The sport of rollerball itself is believable as a sport that could suck in a lot of fans, unlike, say, Slamball. Gameplay is shown with attention to making sure a viewer doesn't have too much trouble understanding how it's played. It's the movie's most successful aspect - which came as no small surprise to a sports fan (ha!) like myself. Seriously, it looks like fun. Like in a lot of future-movies from the 70's, the future looks an awful lot like the 70's; in this future, helicopter technology hasn't advanced at all! The 80's kinda had this problem too, but not so severely - it's a little early to tell how 90's the 90's ones look. Otherwise, books are all transcribed to a central computer that flakes out whenever it's asked the wrong questions (Windows). Drugs are easily available to keep the population super-mellow (Prozac). People watch four TV's at the same time (the internet). You hear sometimes about how the sci-fi portrayals of the future foreshadow a future that ultimately comes to pass - moreso with this movie than many, it seems. I don't know how true that is, as I see no reason to believe 2003 looks any more like this than 1975 did. Were corporations really less in charge then, or were people just less aware of it? Were people less self-medicating, less sheep-like, less inclined to sit back and let TV do their thinking for them? My questions are semi-rhetorical - I was there, but I was two. I look back and see a whole lotta Message Movies in sci-fi drag. I admire quite a bit about this movie, but it still ultimately falls victim to my prejudice against sports movies. I just hate them, and I hate Message Movies too, and while maybe that means I shouldn't be reviewing any, hey, tough shit. Rollerball does enough right to leave me feeling more indifferent than hateful. Try not to hold my indifference against it. Rollerball was remade last year into a movie I've yet to hear a single good thing about, so don't get your Rollerballs confused. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE