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Rollerball is one of those movies that, once you dig down past the disco-era cheese, you might find very thoughtful and prescient science-fiction. On the other hand, you might just find another layer of that cheese. Norman Jewison’s 1975 fable of full-contact sports gone insane dares you not to take it seriously, to dismiss it as merely a more cerebral cousin of Logan’s Run.
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Those of us who grew up during the Cold War and remember it as a time of very real suspicion and fear probably look fondly upon this lightweight but not unsophisticated farce. It’s message that “Russians are people, too” probably seems a little simplistic to those too young to remember the times in which it takes place, but in its day, the concept was sufficiently radical to make an impact in the box office. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most popular American films behind the Iron Curtain.