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by smackeyacky 33 days ago
Rollerball has the central premise that society is outsourcing all decisions to a central computer and everybody just blindly follows, to the point where nobody checks whether it’s functioning properly.

First time I watched it I thought it was beyond far fetched. In the age of LLMs I’m not so sure anymore.

3 comments

"Logan's Run" is similar, but with the idea pushed further. I think Rollerball is more political in specifically targetting corporations as being malignant forces.
I’ve been trying to get some of my younger colleagues to give both movies a chance without success so far. I think they find it tough to get past the practical effects and old school actor acting.
Whilst it's not in the spirit of getting younger people to appreciate older scifi, you could always mention the Jenny Agutter nude scene.
logan's run is too bad of a movie to be anything else, sadly.
The short scene where they are in the "computer room" and the operator mentions that they lost the entire history of 14th century painting, or something like that. So relevant to contemporary memory holes and wholesale data losses.
I'm surprised that the font used for the "Rollerball" title wasn't mentioned at typesetinthefuture.com