Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #14 May 2015 | Page 33

Cinema Obscura - The Overlooked
Gems of Cinema

Rollerball (1975) - Big Business
Is Watching You
By Jeff Durkin
‘Corporate society takes care of everything. And all
it asks of anyone, all it’s ever asked of anyone ever,
is not to interfere with management decisions.’ - Batholomew (John Houseman)

Dystopias come in many forms. There are brutal totalitarian regimes, like George Orwell’s Oceania, with a
population cowed by fear and violence. In others - for
example George Lucas’s sterile underground city in

THX 1138 - the population is controlled by drugs or
other behaviour altering techniques. In Soylent Green,
the Earth of 2022 is dying, polluted and overpopulated, with the human race forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale depicts a polluted, strife-torn America in which
infertility is widespread and a Christian fundamentalist
government uses single, fertile women as broodmares
for ruling class males.

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