By the 80s Italian popular cinema was on the ropes. The new wave of Hollywood blockbusters was completing the work of destruction begun by television. Budgets for Italian genre movies were getting tighter and tighter, that’s assuming you could get any kind of financing at all. There was desperation in the air, and a frantic search for new genres to tempt audiences back to movie theatres.
The post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller seemed like a good bet. In the wake of the success of the first two Mad Max movies and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York it seemed like a very commercial proposition. So it’s not surprising to find Lucio Fulci making such a movie in 1984.
Warriors of the Year 2072 ( AKA Rome 2033 – The Fighter Centurions, Italian title I guerrieri dell’anno 2072) more or less fits into this genre. There’s no mention of an actual apocalypse but clearly there’s been extreme social disintegration leading to a totalitarian society that maintains order through bread and circuses. Mostly circuses.
The circuses are ultra-violent TV shows. Like so much science fiction of that era it fails to predict the internet but it does predict the popularity of reality TV based on cruelty.
Drake (Jared Martin) is the current TV superstar. He’s the main attraction of a killbiker show, killbiking being guys on motorcycles trying to kill each other.
Sam (who owns a rival network, World Broadcasting System or WBS) has a plan for a new series that will be even more violent – gladiators fighting in a recreated Colosseum in Rome.
The gladiators will be criminals condemned to death. The one who survives gets his freedom. These guys are not just murderers. They’re psycho killers.
The trick will be to persuade Drake to participate. That’s easy enough – just frame him for the murder of his fiancée.
Drake is inclined to be less than coöperative right from the start. The gladiators are subjected to conditioning to make them even more violent and hate-crazed but Drake is not only determined to resist, he hopes to lead a rebellion. So as well as all the other movies that have obviously influenced this one you can add Spartacus.
Of course it all leads up to mayhem in the arena, and it’s mayhem on motorcycles. And motorcycles used as chariots.
There’s going to be a major double-cross and just about everybody is going to be betrayed. Drake and his newly acquired girlfriend Sarah (Eleonora Brigliadori), who works for WBS but he thinks he can trust her, will have to figure out a way to avoid a disaster on a huge scale.
The similarities to a movie like Rollerball are obvious but this film is also at times reminiscent of Westworld. The world of Warriors of the Year 2072 is run by super-computers and WBS has its own AI, known as Junior. Whether he’s a benevolent AI or an evil one remains to be seen.
I’ve already mentioned Mad Max, Escape from New York, Rollerball, Spartacus and Westworld among this movie’s influence. One could also add A Clockwork Orange. Italian genre movies were notorious for ripping off foreign big-budget movies but in this case there’s such a bewildering mishmash of influences that Fulci ends up making a movie with a certain flavour of its own.
Tight budgets are not usually a problem for people like Fulci who have actual talent, but it is a challenge to make a science fiction movie like this on a tiny budget. This is a movie that aims for, and needed, a bit of an epic feel. Having said that, on a visual level it mostly works. It has style and energy. For those who like gore there are a few decapitations and a fairly well executed face-melting scene. The motorcycle combat scenes are excellent crazy fun.
The plot gets a bit complicated but if you’re a fan of Italian genre movies you’re probably not overly worried about plot coherence. The plot does create the right atmosphere atmosphere of paranoia.
The performances are fine. They’re what the movie required. None of these people were expecting to win Oscars.
Warriors of the Year 2072 delivers action and excitement and interesting visuals and that’s enough to keep me happy. I liked it. Highly recommended.