Review of Rollerball (2002) by Luca D — 15 Feb 2013

A user that wrote before me said that this movie has no story. It's just a movie based on a sport which is a non sense and has no clear rules. And that the principal character is just in a "career crisis"".

Maybe I'm not a genius, but fail to recognize that behind a stupid and violent sport or a "career crisis" there's a lot more than what appears (that I would prefer to call a moral or personal crisis) it's pure blindness. It's so poor the sensation of dictatorship and the absolutely non-existence of freedom in the movie? And the fact that James Caan is just fighitng for his freedom of choice and for everything he wants to or he wants not to be or do? Just because there aren't any guns and bullets and wars and revolutions it's so difficolut to find this "little and insignificant" particular in the film?

I find the climate of the dicatorship even more present in this movie than in 1984. Even in the first 10 minutes of the film, in which they just show the game, this sense of pressure wield from the high transpares.

I really appreciated it and I finally understood (after maybe 10 or even 15 years) why my father, one evening, sent me to bed at the beginning of this film. I was 5 or 10 and it would have been impossible to me to fall asleep probably after having watched it!