By Ben Bussey
It’s curious how a film can be an acknowledged cult classic and a popular point of reference, and yet still surprise you 40 years after its original release. If you haven’t seen the original Rollerball before (let this be the first and last time we speak at all of that rightly maligned 2002 remake), chances are it’s not quite the film you’re expecting it to be. The premise, not to mention the original poster art, suggests something along the lines of the same year’s Death Race 2000, or subsequent movies like The Running Man and Robot Jox: an adrenaline-charged exploitation spectacle drifting willy-nilly between arch satire of our supposedly civilised society’s taste for violence, and a straight-up action movie reveling in the very violent spectacle that it’s meant to be commenting on. However, Norman Jewison’s film is for the most part an altogether different brand of very 70s dystopian sci-fi, sharing more common ground with the likes of Logan’s Run and Zardoz in its presentation of a future hero, the best there is at what he does, who finds himself questioning all that he has been told to believe, and coming to the gradual realisation that he – along with everyone else – is being manipulated into living a lie by the powers that be.
From the core conceit of an ultra-violent sport on roller skates and motorcycles with studded gloves and metal balls which is used to satiate society’s blood-lust in an otherwise outwardly-idyllic future world controlled by the corporations, the uninitiated viewer will surely go in anticipating something very loud and very fast. It may well come as quite a shock to the system, then, that Rollerball is an often bewilderingly slow and quiet film, interested less in the game itself than in the crisis of conscience slowly stirring in the game’s biggest superstar player Jonathan E, played to astonishingly understated effect by James Caan.
It’s all too easy to envisage this premise being picked up by filmmakers and cast of a less subtle inclination and churning out something dim-witted and painfully over-the-top (as indeed was the case with that remake which I said I wasn’t going to talk about), but this was the near-mythic 70s, those days when intelligent, unorthodox cinema of seemingly genuine anti-establishment sentiment was openly embraced by the big studios, before the likes of Days of Heaven and Heaven’s Gate turned them off in favour of all that Jaws and Star Wars hullabaloo (pardon me going all Peter Biskind there). To see such an approach taken with something which would seem so populist and low-brow as Rollerball is kind of remarkable (in the extras it’s semi-jokingly described as Last Year at Marienbad with game sequences*), and in many respects it’s quite refreshing to see genre material treated so seriously – and, in its vision of a world literally owned by corporations, a great deal of rings very true today.
So much of Rollerball is underplayed and drawn out almost to a fault, from the portentous opening scene, slowly showing the Rollerball arena coming to life to the tones of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, to the lengthy off-skates scenes following Jonathan E through his plush corporate lifestyle and his tentative attempts to peek behind the curtain at the ones really pulling the strings. I suppose the intent may have been that the few scenes of the game itself – there are only three games in the entire film, plus a few training scenes – would hit like a slap in the face, the abrupt change of pace and fairly brutal violence waking the audience up after so many sleepy scenes beforehand. I’m not sure it quite works, though. As skillfully performed and well constructed as it all is – with a curiously European aesthetic, perhaps owing to it having been shot in the UK by noted British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe – to my mind it drags things out just that little bit too far. At almost 125 minutes Rollerball feels too long and languidly-paced, yet despite that length it still maybe doesn’t get as deeply into the nature of this corporate-owned world as we might like owing to its single-minded focus on Caan’s beleaguered, taciturn (semi-) hero. As relevant as the corporate focus remains today, there are still plenty of other dystopian sci-fi movies that explore similar themes in a similar way, arguably to more captivating effect. On top of which, I daresay some sports fans may take umbrage with the overriding notion that sports are merely an opiate of the masses, who only want it bigger, louder, faster and more aggressive.
Rollerball is a very good film, make no mistake – yet to my mind it’s just a little too clinical, too emotionally detached to really hit the mark. Still, existing fans will no doubt want to track down this Blu-ray edition from Arrow Video, because – as ever – it’s a great package, boasting a new interview with Caan, a pre-existing DVD documentary featuring Norman Jewison, writer William Harrison and other key players, and more; plus the film itself has never looked better.
And obviously, it’s at least 150% better than that remake. (Damn, did it again.)
Rollerball is out now on Blu-ray in the UK from Arrow Video.
* Must confess I’ve never actually seen Last Year at Marienbad, but I do remember the Blur music video To The End which paid homage to it, and that was suitable arty and obtuse.