The 2002 remake of Rollerball was pretty wretched, playing down the social commentary of the James Caan original while amping up the violence and spectacle. But the remake's future had one big plus: quick, clever glimpses of post-Soviet Central Asia as a new Wild West with Russian as the lingering lingua franca.

However, this morning's Times hints that tomorrow's sportif Great Gamers may speak Mandarin instead, as "China Quietly Extends Footprints into Central Asia". The pipelines, the highways, the consumer goods, the Confucius Institutes; here I was thinking Central Asia's future might look Turkish, but with Istanbul so far away I can just glimpse the hazy outlines of a Han Samarkand.