Sara and I watched one of our all-time favorites this week. It’s
the 1983 sci-fi/drama “Wargames” starring a young Mathew Broderick and Ally
Sheedy & others. Even though the time period is 1983, it is about computer
hacking and the serious threat that presents. So the movie is still applicable
to today’s problems.
I highly recommend this movie. Find it on cable or streaming. I
guarantee you will enjoy it.
Below is the review by Roger Ebert with some editing by me
I give it 4*** out of 4****
Sooner or
later, one of these self-satisfied, sublimely confident thinking machines is
going to blow us all off the face of the planet. That is the message of
"WarGames," a scary and intelligent new thriller that is one of the
best films so far this year (1983). The movie stars Matthew Broderick ( who later stars in “Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off” 1986) as a bright high school senior who spends a lot of
time locked in his bedroom with his home computer. He speaks computerese well
enough to dial by telephone into the computer at his school and change grades.
But he's ready for bigger game.
He reads about a toy company that's introducing a new computer
game. He programs his computer for a random search of telephone numbers in the
company's area code, looking for a number that answers with a computer tone.
Eventually, he connects with a computer. Unfortunately, the computer he
connects with does not belong to a toy company. It belongs to the Defense
Department, and its mission is to coordinate early warning systems and nuclear
deterrents in the case of World War III. The kid challenges the computer to
play a game called "Global Thermonuclear Warfare," and it cheerfully
agrees.
As a premise for a thriller, this is a masterstroke. The movie,
however, could easily go wrong by bogging us down in impenetrable computerese,
or by ignoring the technical details altogether. "WarGames" makes
neither mistake. It convinces us that it knows computers, and it takes its
knowledge into an amazingly entertaining thriller.
I've
described only the opening gambits of the plot, and I will reveal no more. It's
too much fun watching the story unwind. Another one of the pleasures of the movie
is the way it takes cardboard characters and fleshes them out. Two in
particular: the civilian chief of the US computer operation, played by Dabney Coleman as a man who has his own little
weakness for simple logic, and the Air Force general in charge of the war room,
played by Barry Corbin as a military man who argues that
men, not computers, should make the final nuclear decisions.
"WarGames"
was directed by John Badham, best known for "Saturday Night Fever" . There's not a scene here
where Badham doesn't seem to know what he's doing, weaving a complex web of
computerese, personalities and puzzles; the movie absorbs us on emotional and
intellectual levels at the same time. And the ending, a moment of blinding and
yet utterly elementary insight, is wonderful.
