“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play…”
Looking back on ’83, here’s another Cold War-era thriller of a slightly more hopeful tone than last time’s subject—one also touching on the now even more pertinent topics of AI and video gaming. While movies adapted from games have been mixed at best, as we’ve discussed, movies about the topic itself have proved more interesting, between cult classics like Tron and Existenz—so let’s see how well this one holds up…
Directed by Lawrence Lasker, WarGames stars a young Matthew Broderick, a few years before he’d be taking the best day off in Chicago, as hacker David Lightman. David’s main preoccupations include fooling around with arcade machines, flirting with his girl pal Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), and trying to access various company computer lines. For the time, this was quite an accurate depiction of hacking in an age where the internet as we know it was basically embryonic—and forty years on probably remains as accurate as it seems to get from Hollywood. There’s even a pre-online depiction of all the social research David needs to do to access the password of a promising computer gaming repository he seems to find—which, yes, involves largely rummaging through library microfilm archives.
Of course, turns out the gaming list he found is actually the subroutines of a military AI that NORAD has installed to run America’s strategic deterrent. And in the process David has triggered the computer to begin the procedures that will spiral into WW3. The plot might seem a little silly when you take a step back, but as always, the key is how it’s sold—the NORAD sets are incredible, and even inspired the real operators of the Cheyenne Mountain complex to upgrade their setup in what seemed like a little bit of jealousy. The military officials and scientists are all played memorably, including of course the very Texan Barry Corbin as the head general. Most of the details, like the Defcon system, are gotten down—so when things start to spiral out, it all feels believable enough now, much less to the audiences of ’83.
Just as memorable is the late arrival in the last act of John Wood as Doctor Falken, the initially nihilistic creator of the AI who seems to espouse views that perhaps were more common than you might think around this time—that nuclear war is inevitable, no use thinking about, so just live out your days however. It takes our young leads of course to break him out of that, and that leads us to a climax that’s tense and fun enough, even if you probably shouldn’t think too hard about how everyone’s coming and going from NORAD in time.
Overall, for the most part WarGames is still a perfectly enjoyable and well-executed eighties flick—not for nothing was it nominated for Academy awards related to its production and verisimilitude. The climax is very memorable, with a certain quote that, unfortunately, reminds as powerful and relevant now as it did then.
And, of course, the slightly chilling thing is that in ’83, so the story goes anyway, the world really did almost go to the brink thanks to a computer error. Stanislav Petrov supposedly was confronted with missile contacts on a malfunctioning screen—and at this point in time, it wouldn’t have taken much to convince the paranoid Kremlin politburo that the inevitable had finally happened. Of course Petrov made the right choice—but this was one case where Hollywood proved more on the ball than anyone would’ve liked…
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