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ROLLERBALL
Rating: 
USA/Japan. 2002.
Director – John McTiernan, Screenplay – Larry Ferguson & John Pogue, Based on the Screenplay & Short Story by William Harrison, Producers – John McTiernan, Charles Roven & Beau St. Clair, Photography – Steve Mason, Music – Eric Serra, Visual Effects Supervisor – John Sullivan, Visual Effects – Digital.art.media (Supervisors – Mitchell D. Drain & Craig Mumma), Howard Anderson Digital (Supervisor – Howard Anderson III), Pacific Title & Art Studio (Supervisor – Mark Freund), Panoply (Supervisor – Jonah Loop), Pixel Magic (Supervisor – Raymond McIntyre Jr) & R!ot (Supervisor – David Sosalla), Special Effects Supervisor – Conrad V. Brink, Makeup Effects – Karrieann Heisner, Production Design – Dennis Bradford & Norman Garwood. Production Company – Helkon/Toho-Towa/Mosaic Media Group/MGM Pictures.
Cast:
Chris Klein (Jonathan Cross), Jean Reno (Alexei Petrovich), LL Cool J (Marcus Ridley), Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (Aurora), Naveen Andrews (Sanjay), Oleg Taktarov (Denekin)
Plot: Jonathan Cross has become the No. 1 player in the ultra-violent game of rollerball, a combination of motocross, ice hockey and football. It is played across the former Russian republics and has been turned into a top-rating cable show by its promoter Alexei Petrovich. But then Jonathan uncovers evidence that Petrovich has been deliberately arranging near-fatal accidents in order to increase ratings. As Jonathan tries to quit the game, Petrovich hunts him down and then places him in a game without any rules with the intention of killing him.
Rollerball is a remake of the big budget 1970s sf film Rollerball (1975). While the original Rollerball has been greeted as a rather ponderous bore by most sf fans, it was one of the most financially successful sf films in the days before the modern sf blockbuster. This remake comes from John McTiernan. [McTiernan must have some odd reverence for director Norman Jewison as Rollerball is the second of Jewison’s films he has conducted a remake of, following The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)]. McTiernan is one of the great action directors in the American mainstream who has made classics such as Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990), as well as the marvellously underrated Nomads (1986). In the 1990s though McTiernan’s career has faltered somewhat with successive flops such as the environmentally conscious Medicine Man (1992), the mega-disaster of the witty action movie spoof Last Action Hero (1993) and the rather ho-hum box-office and critical responses that the otherwise quite reasonable likes of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) and The 13th Warrior (1999) were greeted with. Continuing along this downward path, Rollerball was held up for some months before being granted a release and then when it did come out was greeted with some astonishingly bad reviews and consigned almost immediately to videostores.
It is important to remember that in 1975 there was no real identifiable genre such as the action film. The original Rollerball was really mounted as a Dystopian sf message film about the struggle for individuality in an homogenized future. But a large part of the reason for the film’s success was in audiences reacting to it as an action film, rather than to its often heavy-handed message component. The remake however comes in the hindsight of two decades action movie-making – indeed one where the idea of ultra-violent future bloodsports has become somewhat of a cliche in the sf/action subgenre. Equally this is a post-NFL, post-WWF Rollerball, where the idea of such bloodsports has become almost a reality – in fact WWF CEO Vince McMahon’s son Shane makes a cameo appearance in the film.
The remake, co-written by McTiernan’s Red October screenwriter Larry Ferguson, follows the same basic plot as the original – the hero Jonathan has become the most popular player in the game, he begins to doubt its purpose, his best friend gets killed, he defies the corporation, and there is a climax where he is placed in a game with no rules. The ensuing 27 years between the two films has allowed a few changes to come in – there are now women and more ethnic players. The most radical of the changes is that the remake ditches anything to do with the future setting. The film could almost be set in the present, as the opening scenes in San Francisco would seem to indicate. Rather than a corporate-ruled future the remake has quite interestingly been set across the milieu of the near lawless states of the former Soviet Union.
The changes have stripped Rollerball of all its message content and streamlined it into a modern action film. Out entirely has gone the issue of Jonathan standing up against the system for his individuality. All that the original’s struggle for individuality has become here is a humdrum anti-media tub-beating – in place of the message of individuality, there is a far less interesting message about one player standing up against a corrupt corporation and its exploitation of the players for ratings. And this is something that the film never manages to find anything particularly interesting to say about at all. McTiernan and his scriptwriters have also extended the ending of the original with a series of appallingly pat and cliched scenes where the Russian peasants rise up and overthrow their corrupt capitalist exploiters. Ironically the film suffers from exactly the same hypocrisies that the original did – that to make a film about the corrupt use of cathartic bread and circuses violence to pacify the masses, it actually has to resort to making a film which appeals to the same violent instincts in its audience.
But as the action film it has now been turned into it is rather dull. The plot is not particularly well developed – the corporate conspiracy angle is given surprisingly little development, rather it seems than McTiernan wants to spend his time throwing in scenes with the heroes racing full-length skateboards, fast cars and a motorcycle chase sequence across the snowy Russian roads (which for some reason comes shot all in sickly green infra-red night light). Oddly the climactic game comes with surprisingly little in the way of affect. There is more emotion invested in the subsequent revolutionary overthrow, which McTiernan does at least direct with some liberatingly violent affect. It’s a disappointment from McTiernan who directed some of the top action films of the 1980s. One can put Rollerball down to a dry spell on McTiernan’s part, but sometime soon he’s going to have to do something to regain his stride.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
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