Tonight I popped in the original version of Rollerball. Very cool flick, I’ll post more thoughts on it later on. However, I did find a HTF thread about the recent remake, and one of the members made a really neat post concerning the differences between Sci-Fi themes of the 70’s and today. I didn’t want to lose track of his post, so I’m copying it here.
Sci-Fi made a fundamental change from the pre-space program/CPU world of the 50’s/60’s to the cyberpunk era of the 80’s/90’s.
Cyberpunk (early examples are Gibson’s Neuromancer novel and Scott’s Blade Runner film at the forefront) deals with some key issues:
- A.I. vs human thought. What is “human” intelligence?
- Cyborg body parts vs flesh. What is “human” period?
- Those 2 lead to the famous “More Human than Human”
- Dystopian society. The future run into the ground with overpopulation, etc.
- Governments replaced by global CORPORATIONS. The common man dominated/owned by these corporations.
- Designer drug abuse becomes rampant, often being used to enhance a human’s ability to function more than as simple escape, although escape is also a popular use. The masses are subdues by drugs by corporations as well.
So what we saw was a change from the optimistic future of earlier sci-fi in which the future would be CLEAN and PERFECT, robots would enhance human life, PEOPLE would be truly free, and “good” governments would win out a rule the universe fairly.
Think Star Trek and tons of 50’s sci-fi in which we soared through the galaxy. All the dangers came from outside sources, aliens, and sometimes even the aliens were friendly. War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
But once we saw the outcome of the space program and computers, that these things were NOT helping society become utopian we started to see a backlash.
I always have called it the “Future Shock” era named after the book from that era. People became disillusioned with what technology would bring to their lives. The extrapolation of this eventually became Cyberpunk.
But this in-between phase in the 70’s, the future shock sci-fi era was rife with films that started to touch on 1 or 2 of the cyberpunk elements without bringing it all together yet.
- 2001 — AI runs amock
- THX 1138 — False utopia, drugs used to subdue society.
- Soylent Green — Distopian, overcrowded society.
- Logan’s Run — False front of utopian society gives way to the true anti-technology utopia of the outside world.
And many others like Planet of the Apes, The Andromeda Strain, Silent Running all touched on these concepts.
And one of the first films to truly depict CORPORATIONS run amock and to question the future utopian societies: Rollerball.
While we find the 70’s art design to be corny, the premise underneath it all is very much a perfect forefather to Blade Runner or Neuromancer.
John E represents the common man of course, battling the corporation. We see drugs in common use helping to subdue the public, along with the game itself. John’s success undermines the game’s ability to subdue the masses, and therefore he undermines the corporation itself.
In the meantime we also have supercomputers running most of the show and a question of whether or not Moon Pie is still “alive”.
In the end, in what would become a fundamental Cyberpunk theme, John USES the system against itself. He beats the system by playing the game better than the game could handle.
That is the true theme of the original, man versus the corporation and the undermining of the false utopia. Not unlike battling the Tyrell Corporation a few years later or pulling people out of the false utopia that is The Matrix by actually going into the Matrix.
And this is the biggest tragedy of the Rollerball remake. All those concepts are apparently pissed away, the things that made the film great, and instead all the focus shifts to the most superficial aspect of the film, the violence of the game.
— posted by Seth Paxton on the Home Theater Forum