The vision of the future in William Harrison's screenplay is afflicted with severe myopia and checkered with blind spots. (Its origin is Harrison's very short story in Esquire, and he'd be damned if he'd spend much more thought on it.) The short-sightedness may account for Norman Jewison's directing the thing with a preponderance of slow zooms moving into extreme closeups. As a result, though, the real danger of the future appears to be neither the dehumanization nor the ultraviolence as much as the creeping closeups. (James Caan's battle scars, one can see very plainly, are a fine makeup job.) The imagining of a future world dominated by computers, corporations, leisure, and so on, is nothing but a parody-sans-humor of the present world: Caan's macho athlete dresses in matador casuals; the bored Beautiful People are Fellini-esque revellers who troop outdoors in the dawn light to shoot fireballs at pine trees; and the sport of Rollerball is ninety percent roller derby, plus a shot-put which is fired around the track like a pinball and then is heaved into a magnetic goal the size of a catcher's mitt, plus motorcycles, plus blood. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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