Ok so if you ever met me in person and the opportunity arose, I would bore you with my oh so deep understanding of these two sports films.
Rollerball
Now Rollerball is a film that would get in my top 20 ever. Not just for the action sequences, the action sequences are amazing, but the society that it doesn’t explain that they live in.
Quick summary. The world is owned by corporations and there are no wars they just watch sport and there are about 5 corps that own everything. We only get to see the world of the elite through the eyes of the best Rollerball player ever. Jonathon E.
His wife is taken from him because a corporate guy wants her and he is told to retire because he is more popular than the sport. So he has a breakdown and tries to destroy the sport. They keep changing the rules to get him killed and it results in this game where it’s Texas vs Tokyo where lots of players are killed but he is the last man standing and with everyone dead he does a victory lap and then scores a goal and ends the film.
I mean, how cool is that lol. Just imagine it in American Trailer Voice ‘Rollerball’
But they also put you in this society where it’s all Brave New World, everyone is on drugs and nihilistic, Jonathon loses his wife and starts to question his identity. there is this very prescient and out of place scene in the film where he wants to learn about history and he goes to Switzerland where they have The Internet and it turns out that history is just all in a computer and there are no books anymore.
There is also a brilliant bit where Jonathon as the king of entertainment meets the king of corpos who is apparently Number2 in the global politics ranking and he tells him that not even Number1 knows what is happening, and it’s all being run by the biggest number 0. Zero is the computer.
So that makes you think about AI and how it runs now, we are all told what to do by computers, and computers are not as smart as people
Anyway, that’s Rollerball . next!
The Running Man
The Running Man is a very loose adaptation of a Stephen King short story, it’s about a dystopia where they just literally kill people for sport. The film itself is absolute peak 80s everyone on cocaine and being silly, like Rollerball they don’t bother to explain anything, it’s just a world that you want to see. We love dystopias we don’t care if it was the climate or the far right, just get to the dystopia already.
Ben Richards is a helicopter pilot who refuses to shoot protesters and as punishment he is put in a work camp and then when he escapes he is caught and put on a gameshow to fight armed lunatics. It’s glorious nonsense
Why I love it.
It’ s the birth of cartoon Arnie. He was already a huge star, but a film like this, just so silly and he is constantly doing puns and just being funny how he is, it’s amazing, like you relate to him and think that you are similar, despite the fact that he is a 10m tall Austrian sociopath. I genuinely love Arnie, it’s like Jackie Chan, they turned out to not be nice humans, but they gave up their humanity so that we could enjoy it, and I will always be grateful to the mad bastards
I mean, come on lol. It’s like when someone does a bicycle kick in football, like there is a reason that people don’t do bicycle kicks and only psychos practice them. It’s jumping in the air and putting your legs over your head, Ronaldo didn’t do bicycle kicks, there is an element of chaos
The film is like that. What if American Wrestling had guns? It’s so stupid and it could have been the worst film ever. Somehow they just packed the film with movie stars and it’s a weird artefact of when America was fun and not depressing.
3 is actually 2, the whole silliness of it. It really is the ultimate ‘these are childish’ Like it is theatre. I don’t know for a fact, but I bet Arnie is a fan of Shakespeare, he can really do all of the campness from English theatre, he is after all a German, and all Germans secretly want to be English
Anyways, there you go.
edit: I rewatched Rollerball and the Tokyo game is not where it ends. There is a final game against New York where everyone dies
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