The strategy ultimately fails and in the final game, where rules have been dispensed with completely and where the teams play until one or the other is comprehensively destroyed, Jonathan E is the sole survivor, triumphantly slamming the ball in the opponents goal. Jonathan triumphs, at least temporarily, but we never learn his fate. In the future there will be no war. The symbolic aliens are frequently replaced by a savage authoritarian regime trampling on freedom. Rollerball demonstrates the dangers of corporate domination.
Corporations become the enemy of freedom.
Jonathan E doesn't accept the order he receives to retire. This defiance creates conflict ultimately played out in the Rollerball arena. Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Rollerball is a visionary portrait of the brutal, authoritarian and overlit future that beckons ever more powerfully from the basis of the present techno-corporate landscape.