CineBad!!!

Oof! Let me say right now that we only watched half of this movie! It was too boring! It’s actually very rare that we turn a video off before it’s finished– but this one was an exception! Maybe we would have enjoyed this film more if we were sports fans or something.

James Caan stars as Jonathan E. (He must be related to Sheila,) a star of the futuristic sport of Rollerball. Rollerball is supposed to be a really violent sport played on rollerskates (and motorcycles) in a big circular rink. The players get to run over each other, and slam their elbows into each other, and wipe out against the side of the rink and other manly things like that.

Rollerball is a big American obsession. In the future, each city of the world (there is only one country in this particular grim vision of the future) is owned and controlled by a different corporation. Houston is controlled by the Energy Corp. At the beginning of the Rollerball game, everyone stands up for the “Corporate Anthem.” Subtle, eh? There are two rigidly defined social classes: (with uniforms, of course, to increase the cheese value) Executives and Workers– and people like Jonathan, who are basically troglodytes who have nicer-than-average jobs and get to live with special privileges, like big houses and government- assigned “wives.” They even have “privilege cards” to help them purchase Executive-class goodies.

Alas, because of Jonathan’s runaway popularity, he poses a threat to the Executive Class. The Corporation tries to get him to retire, and are planning some mysterious changes to the game of Rollerball, changes that make it more and more violent (sort of.) Jonathan stands for all-American macho no-nothing plain-folksy goodness, and he cares very, very deeply about the sport. Unfortunately, the Corporation doesn’t give a rat’s hiney about what he thinks! They just want him to submit to “Executive Decision Making.”

OK, so this is a fairly typical mid-1970′s Futuristic Dystopia about government or whatever dehumanizing the Little Guy. The dialogue is fairly boring, and the plot is nothing spectacular, and the Rollerball scenes are way too much like actual real-live sporting events to hold my attention. So I was pretty bored.

This film deserves three swiss cheeses, however, for its incredibly silly set design. For example, in the future, there is (apparently) only one Corporation-approved font. They use the same goofy transistor-age font for everything in the movie, including the players’ uniforms. Also, just about everything in the future is burnt orange. Uniforms, furniture, even official notices from the Corporation are printed on burnt orange paper! They must be really hard to read, considering that they’re printed in that goofy sci-fi font!

Also, there are some pretty wacky-looking buildings in this film! Rollerball was actually filmed in Munich, Germany (but set in Houston, TX.) Munich must be a pretty funky-looking city. The Library Of The Future in this movie looked like a giant silver mushroom with little teeny windows in a giant ring around the top.

Anyway, I can’t tell you much more about this film. If you choose to watch it all the way through yourself, I accept no responsibility. Next!