20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History
4. Rollerball (2002)
The original Rollerball, released in 1975, was a near-future dystopian nightmare, in which the world was controlled by various corporation-states. The game of ‘rollerball’, an ultraviolent, high-octane cross between roller derby, motocross, and a cage fight, has been instituted to replace every other form of competitive sport, including war.
In the film, James Caan’s protagonist Jonathan E. is rollerball’s premier exponent, and a global icon of the sport. The problem is that the ulterior purpose of the game is to discourage any form of individual effort - to impress upon people that individualism itself is futile, and so maintain the status quo. Jonathan E.’s popularity is threatening that objective, and so the corporations elect to try to force him to retire voluntarily. When he refuses, they attempt to have him killed while playing, thus cementing their narrative once more in the eyes of their audience.
Like Swept Away, it’s impossible to remove the political subtext from Rollerball without killing the movie - a point proven by the 2002 remake by John McTiernan, which did exactly that. Relocating the story much closer to the present day, McTiernan placed the game of rollerball itself to the Eurasian and Central Asian countries and states - you know, because only those weird, barbarian foreigners would play a sport as lurid and violent as this.
The retooled story - if you can call it that - centres around another star player Jonathan. This time, the game’s eeevil foreign promoters don’t want him to quit, because they make a lot of money out of the game, which they’ve been increasingly rigging to make it more gory and more violent (ie more entertaining).
It’s almost unfair to blame any one person for the freeway pile-up that is the Rollerball remake: it was hacked to pieces during shooting, during multiple reshoots and during post-production. The initial shooting script is nothing like the final product, and the film is such an unholy garbage fire that watching it makes you want to gouge out your own eyes as a warning to others.
As a movie, it’s a massive failure. As a remake, it succeeds in one thing, and one thing alone: it sabotages the reputation of the original movie, which at least tried to present its audience with food for thought.