Sports hero Jonathan E (James Caan), on a search for historical understanding in the dystopian future society envisioned by Rollerball (1975), seeks answers in a local library, only to learn that all books have been converted to data and "summarized" for easy consumption. Librarians, in turn, have been replaced by clerks oriented for soothing public relations rather than information retrieval. Jonathan E travels to Geneva in search of answers about corporate decision making in hopes of learning why he is being forced into retirement by his team's corporate owners. There he discovers an artificially intelligent, liquid core supercomputer called Zero, "the world's file cabinet," which has unfortunately recently misplaced the entire thirteenth century. Zero responds to his operator's direct questions about corporate decision making with obstinate resistance and infuriating tautologies until the operator resorts to physically assaulting the computer in frustration.

In Rollerball, set in 2018, warfare has been sublimated into a hyperviolent sport designed specifically to demonstrate the futility of individual effort to an increasingly docile public. The computerization of culture thus serves as only part of the process of dehumanization to which this society has been subjected, with the film's primary critique aimed at global corporatism, rather than at technology in itself. Although the film was successfully marketed as an action movie, its subplot involving the creation of a worldwide information system constitutes an unexpectedly protracted sequence midway through the narrative. Caan's Jonathan E is the consummate rugged individual who resists both corporate hegemony and the life of luxurious complacence that is offered to him in exchange for his individuality.

This generically incongruous segment of Rollerball is also worthy of note because it represents the first time among the films considered here that the basic technology of a mainframe computer is imaginatively reconceived. The futuristic "liquid core," which lies at the heart of the supercomputer Zero, may account in part for its erratic behavior but it also represents a radical departure from the real world technologies driving mainframe computers of the 1970s. Compared with the dystopian, technologized future of Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), a computer capable of being entrusted with all of the world's knowledge requires something that transcends flashing lights and wires. Zero's liquid core actually more closely resembles the hybrid organic cortex of Proteus IV (which also runs amok) in Demon Seed (1977).

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