Review of Rollerball (2002) by Stefano L — 24 Feb 2010

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

Maybe I'm not a genius. Maybe I'm not be able to do a lot of things, but not recognize that behind a stupid and violent sport or a "career crisis" (that I would prefer to call a moral or personal crisis) it's pure blindness. It's so poore the sensation of dictature 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 of 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 difficolut to find this "little and insignificance" 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 wich they just show the game, this sense of pressure wield from high transpare.

I really appreciated it and I 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 for weeks probably after having watched.