In 1975, the sci-fi movies Death Race 2000 and Rollerball depicted 21st century futures that still feel relevant 50 years later.
In the middle of the 1970s, a group of filmmakers peered into the future and saw a hellscape of cruelty and violence. Released within months of each other in 1975, Death Race 2000 and Rollerball imagine 21st century dystopias where bloodthirsty competitions play out on TV.
The films are similar in genre and theme, but stylistically poles apart; one is blackly comic, the other grim-faced; one is pluckily low-budget, the other grand and expensive-looking. All the same, Death Race 2000 and Rollerball both offer a fascinating glimpse of the 21st century that, for all the 70s hairstyles and clothing, looks strangely recognisable.
Death Race 2000 came out first, but that was because producer Roger Corman, the wily old rascal, caught wind of Rollerball being in production and hurriedly commissioned a dystopian sports film of his own. Directed by Paul Bartel, Death Race 2000 was made for about $300,000 and released in April 1975 – beating Norman Jewison’s $5m Rollerball to cinemas by roughly two months. Both became sizeable hits.
Each film is set in a near-future USA in which totalitarianism has set in and the populace is kept amused with violent, televised competitions. In Death Race 2000, it’s a pan-American race from New York to the west coast, with drivers earning points for the pedestrians they fatally run over on the way. Its nominal hero is Frankenstein (a somewhat leaden David Carradine), a masked driver whose navigator, Annie (Simone Griffeth) is secretly the granddaughter of a resistance group which aims to sabotage the game.
Among the competing racers is an early-career Sylvester Stallone as Joe ‘Machine Gun’ Viterbo, a preening hothead who has a tendency to fire his Tommy gun at spectators. (Stallone rewrote much of his own dialogue; one line, “How does it feel to know you’re gonna spend the rest of your life in pain? The rest of your life is about a minute and a half,” sounds like a dry run for a similar quip in Sly’s Demolition Man: “You’ll regret this for the rest of your life. Both seconds of it…”)
Rollerball, meanwhile, stars James Caan as Jonathan E, the seasoned veteran of the title sport – a bludgeoning ballgame that takes place on an oval roller derby rink. Competitors hurtle round the track, hastening their speed by occasionally clinging to the back of a motorcycle before attempting to pound a metal ball into a goal. It’s the year 2018, and a series of crises and wars have replaced governments with corporations. Society has drifted into a Brave New World-like era of drug and entertainment-fueled decadence, with Rollerball being one of the most-watched sports on TV.
The star player of Houston’s team, Jonathan E is a celebrity in a game that is supposed to be a metaphor for the insignificance of the individual. Irked at Jonathan’s fame and refusal to retire or at least die in the arena, the corporation – represented by John Houseman’s glowering Bartholomew – tries to pressure him into quitting. When that doesn’t work, they start tinkering with the rules of the game, turning an already gladiatorial sport into an outright bloodbath…
Death Race 2000 and Rollerball were based on short stories, written by Ib Melchior and William Harrison respectively. They were both inspired by real-world sports and the behaviour they observed around them. Melchior was struck by the ghoulish reaction to the death of a competitor during an Indy 500 race, and went on to write The Racer, first published in 1956. Harrison saw violence unfold during a basketball game and was moved to write The Rollerball Murder, published in 1973. (Harrison was also hired to write the film adaptation’s script.)
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It’s no coincidence that the resulting movies emerged in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and as America reeled from the long and bloody Vietnam war, which shuddered to an end just as Death Race 2000 emerged in April 1975. Those events – plus the 1970s oil crisis and others – bred a new sense of cynicism and disillusionment that bled into TV and film. Just as the conspiracy thrillers of the era spoke to a growing sense of distrust of institutions, so Death Race 2000 and Rollerball imagined that the US might only be a conflict or a crisis away from drifting into totalitarianism. Each imagines the part that the media would likely play in both shoring up a regime’s power and keeping the broader population in its place.
In Death Race 2000, races are eagerly reported on by leering news anchors who cheer at every death and minimise all mishaps as being intentional or the work of French saboteurs. Much like a certain US leader today, the President in Death Race 2000 (played by Sandy McCallum) is a vocal hater of the European Union, a bloc he says was brought about to “screw America”.
Television plays a similarly unquestioning part in Rollerball – seemingly, the only thing playing on the world’s screens is the sport itself, along with bogus documentaries about its players that merely serve to further the corporation’s agenda. In the worlds of Death Race 2000 and Rollerball, the journalists that disrupted the schemes of Richard Nixon have long since died out.
Amid the gore and fury of the sport itself, Rollerball’s major theme is the control of information. In one scene, Jonathan E goes to a library to enquire about some books he’s tried to borrow; there, he’s told that the volumes are classified. More chillingly, it’s implied that physical books have been taken out of circulation; their contents have been scanned into a supercomputer, which we later learn is called Zero. It seems that Jonathan isn’t allowed to read a book directly, either; instead, he’ll have it ‘summarised’ for him by the computer.
Later in the film, Rollerball’s tone shifts subtly to incorporate a bit of Death Race 2000’s broad satire. Jonathan, dogged to the last, wants to find out who exactly makes decisions in the corporation that controls everything. Heading to Geneva, he meets an eccentric librarian (Ralph Richardson) who looks after the aforementioned Zero supercomputer.
It’s then revealed that the sleek, corporate future seen elsewhere in the film is little more than a facade. Described as the world’s ‘filing cabinet’, Zero has managed to mislay every piece of information pertaining to the 13th century. “Not much in the century,” the librarian says, airily, “just Dante and a few corrupt popes. But it’s so distracting and annoying…”
Jonathan then gets to ask the question that’s bugged him for some time: “I’d like some information about corporate decisions. How they’re made and who makes them.”
Zero refuses to answer, infuriating the librarian to such a degree that he eventually loses his temper.
Did Zero really mislay the 13th century, or was the deletion deliberate – part of a wider corporate campaign to quietly drain the world of its knowledge? Was the computer forbidden to answer Jonathan’s question by a human, or was it being wilfully coy because it’s the one making decisions, and not its creators?
In some respects, the answer to those questions is less important than the implied warning of how technology, knowledge and entertainment can be used as a means of control. As Norman Jewison put it in his director’s commentary (as transcribed by Reel-Librarians), “We came up with the name of Zero for the name of the computer, because we felt that somehow zero was the beginning and the end of everything […] this is where Jonathan realises that even the computer will not reveal certain truths that he wants about who’s in charge. So we have a society in which nobody knows who’s calling the shots.”
From a 2025 perspective, Rollerball’s idea of books ‘summarised’ by AI and information tightly controlled by corporations sounds eerily prescient. It could be said that Death Race 2000’s depiction of an America ruled by a vain, populist dictator also sounds rather familiar.
Those parallels aside, these 1970s movies also have something useful to say about cruelty, and how those in power can appeal to the darkest aspects of human nature in order to control us. Elon Musk, a billionaire industrialist who’s currently hacking his way through government institutions, recently said that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy.”
Death Race 2000 and Rollerball, by contrast, show where a society that lacks empathy could wind up. It is far from a pretty sight.
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