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The 1975 Film
- Adaptation Displacement: The movie is based on a short story from 1973.
- Awesome Music: At the very beginning and very end of the film, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
. - Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The film is a protest against violence. However, director Norman Jewison said that, to his horror, a group was interested in financing a real-life version of the game, but the studio said no.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Of a dark humor sort. The idea that a corporate-run world would be a paradise where we lack for nothing — save independent thought — feels laughably naïve in today's world, where massive corporations have no problems screwing people to increase their profit margins (not to mention good old fashioned incompetency).
- Narm: The use of classical music, to some, makes parts of the movie seem rather pretentious and thus hard to take seriously.
- Retroactive Recognition:
- Robert Lee (a.k.a. Taro in Mind Your Language) has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance as an Energy Corporation executive.
- A man collecting coats is played by David Griffin, who would later be best known for playing Clive Dempster in Hi-de-Hi! and Emmet Hawksworth in Keeping Up Appearances.
- An executive is played by Mac McDonald, who would later be best known for playing Captain Hollister in Red Dwarf.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: As if the film's Crapsack World wasn't depressing enough, Jonathan's victory in the end occurs at such a high price that it's almost completely meaningless. And given the general state of things, his little insurrection is probably doomed to fail anyway. As such, viewers may find it difficult to care about what happens to anyone.
- Unintentional Period Piece: Modern audiences may find it baffling why a corporation would want to stamp out individualism or not take advantage of Jonathan's popularity. This is due to the fact that modern neoliberal capitalist society encourages "individualism" (so long as it involves buying stuff to make you "stand out"), but this was less of a case for the pre-Reagan era business world which was associated with stifling conformity, which the film was critiquing.
- Values Dissonance: Moonpie and his teammates make tons of racist remarks towards their Asian martial arts teacher and the Japanese team. Jonathan is somewhat more respectful.
- Values Resonance: The film's critique of spectator sports' putting profit before the welfare of the athletes became relevant decades later as the real-life issues of unpaid college athletes and the pay gap between professional players and business owners became more prominent.
The 2002 Film
- Audience-Alienating Premise: The 1975 version was a brutal, R-rated sci-fi dystopia/action film with a message against the glorification of violence, and is considered a classic. The 2002 remake, though, went through a truly epic Troubled Production. A well-received script focusing on the social commentary was heavily rewritten, abandoning the sci-fi setting and the commentary in exchange for attempting a Bloodier and Gorier modern sports film. Afterwards, much of the violence, gore, and nudity was reshot, edited out, and digitally censored to earn a PG-13 rating. The result was a remake hated by fans of the original, and an exploitation film too tame for exploitation fans. Reviews were savage, and the film bombed.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- Slipknot as street performers in the remake.
- The remake has an entire scene that is filmed in a grainy green as if through night vision goggles. The reason for this is never explained, and afterwords the scene goes back to normal looking and the whole thing is never mentioned again.
- Questionable Casting: Jean Reno as the Kazakh Big Bad in the remake. No, really. Karim Debbache sums it up accurately:Karim: In the French dub, Jean Reno speaking French with a broken Russian accent dubs Jean Reno speaking English with a broken Russian accent.
Pinball game
- Awesome Music: The gameplay music is damned catchy, and definitely an ear worm.
