WARGAMES United States 1983 Directed by John Badham
Cast: Matthew Broderick [David], Ally Sheedy [Jennifer], Barry Corbin [Gen. Beringer], John Wood [Stephen Falken]
Rating: 4 out of 5
It's a fact that a good thriller or action movie doesn't need violence to be good or worth watching. All it takes is potential violence to make the audience bite their nails. And what kind of violence could be more efficient than a global thermo-nuclear war?
And potential violence is the premiss WarGames is built upon. A computer whiz-kid, David, is usually contended with hacking into the school computer to change his grades. But after having read an advertisment for an upcoming computer game, he wants to be the first to play it. Instead of getting into the computer at Protovision Software he accidentally comes to the frontgate of NORAD. With the help of Jennifer, a girl in his biology class, he starts to play a nice game of nuclear war with WOPR, War Operation Plan Response (a top-notch computer at the time, but now hardly faster than my own computer)
I remember being 12 and watching this at the cinema. It was very efficent at giving you a scare in those days and that hasn't changed. Of course, a nuclear war seemed to be much more of something that could actually happen back in 1983. I wouldn't be surprised if this gave people nightmares. I hope it still does since you still hear about school kids hacking into the computers at Pentagon.
Broderick and Sheedy are just fine as the young teenagers (although her interest in David remains a mystery). But the rest of the actors are, by no fault of their own, restricted by the script to play one-dimensional grownups. David's parents are the same kind of parents that populate all these college comedies from the 1980s, movies like Secret Admirer, Porky's or Zapped and the NORAD general Beringer is straight out of Dr. Strangelove.
If for no other reason, you should see this movie to enjoy how far the computer technology has gone since those days. David uses the same telephone for calling friends as calling other computers. The modem is some kind of device that he puts the headset on. Far from any 56K modem my guess is that it's some kind of 2400 bps modem, the kind of technology you now find at your local technical museum. The big computer at NORAD has a lot of flashing lights (just like those you see on Star Trek or any old sf-movie) but it's hardly impressing compared with what you can get today.
What are the lessons we can learn from WarGames? 1. Make sure there are no secret backdoors into military computers. 2. Thank you, whoever it was, for giving us a graphical user interface when we use our computers!
Mattias Thuresson mattias.thuresson@mbox300.swipnet.se 980419
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