Rollerball
The year is 2018 and the world is controlled by company states. Jonathan E (James Caan) is the best known, most celebrated and highest paid Roller ball player in the world. At a ceremony honoring Jonathan once again, the corporation makes it known that they want him to announce his retirement. His success is becoming inconvenient. But Jonathan is still upset that his wife was taken from him by an executive. Since he doesn’t have any love for the executives and no reason to retire, he refuses.
Since Jonathan refuses to retire, the rules of the game keep changing to make them more violent. The aim seems to be to kill Jonathan if he doesn’t retire. The executives can’t force him to retire or do anything to him publicly because he is so well loved. But if he dies during a game, then that’s just something that happened. As Jonathan digs to find out why there is so much pressure on him to leave the game he loves, his friends and teammates start dying or being maimed as the violence in the games is upped. Jonathan slowly finds out that the game itself was created not only as a blood circus for the spectators, but to show the futility of individualism. By being so successful as an individual in the game, Jonathan is considered a threat to the political order. The stakes keep being raised until the final game has no rules, no time limit and possibly no survivors.
The political angle in the game is a perfect reason to keep upping the violence and give the movie more weight than a simple futuristic game movie would. And James Caan gives a great performance as a man who simply wants the wife and game he loves, but is getting pressured to lose them both. The movie is a classic science fiction movie from the time before Star Wars.