A mere three weeks without John Badham’s BLUE THUNDER, he came out with flipside movie that is in awe of, but moreover a cautionary tale about, then-newfangled technology that (as one would assume) seems very transplanted from the perspective of 40 years later. This one is WARGAMES, and the technology is computers – both home computers used by upper school hacker prodigy David Lightman (Matthew Broderick in his second film, without MAX DUGAN RETURNS) and a increasingly fantastical experimental A.I. (though that’s not the term they use) created by eccentric genius Dr. Stephen Falken (John Wood, later in LADYHAWKE with Broderick).
David is well known to the vice principal due to his “attitude problem.” He gets kicked out of matriculation for an unquestionably very upper quality smart ass response to the teacher, who writes “ASEXUAL” on the workbench and asks who came up with the idea of reproducing without sex. He hears the matriculation laughing at something David whispers, and asks him to repeat it.
“Your wife,” David says.
Sent to the office, David sneaks a squint at a paper taped to the sedentary next to a computer with passwords written on it, goes home and uses his modem to log in and transpiration his grade, withal with those of classmate Jennifer (Ally Sheedy, in her second movie without BAD BOYS), who he doesn’t know very well, but she happens to have given him a ride home on her motorbike. I like that this movie allows for the hero getting a ride from the hot girl, instead of the other way around.
David is very wide in his home computer set up. Some of the fun of watching the movie now is seeing all the cool, clunky monitors and room-filling, light-bulb-covered government super-computers. We get to see floppy disks worthier than I overly remember seeing them, dot matrix printers, etc. Equal to Wikipedia his computer is something tabbed an IMSAI 8080. He’s programmed it to progressively dial all the phone numbers in Sunnyvale, California checking for a modem signal, to try to find the server of a visitor whose games he likes. He connects to one he thinks is what he’s looking for, but in fact it’s a supercomputer at NORAD tabbed WOPR (War Operation Plan Response, or “whopper”). So when he later figures out a backstairs password and chooses “Global Thermonuclear War” from a list of what he thinks are games, he’s unquestionably starting a sophisticated simulation that NORAD at first mistakes for World War III.
WARGAMES is the other movie I remember seeing in the summer of ’83 besides RETURN OF THE JEDI. Its climax has stayed in my mind, maybe just through cultural osmosis, maybe through transmissible parts of it on TV over the years. If I overly watched it all the way through since the theater I think it would’ve been pre-DVD. So it was interesting to watch then and see the part that I forgot, the part that’s a teen movie. Babyfaced Matthew Broderick mannerly Ally Sheedy with his nerd-mischief, sincerely trying to loftiness himself from her when he realizes how serious of trouble he must be in, receiving her help anyway.
It’s funny – when the feds icon out who this kid is who croaky into their computer they say he fits the profile: “bright kids, no friends…” And that might be true, I don’t think we see him with anyone else, but he has this hot girl coming over to his house, who is painted as the opposite of a computer nerd considering she jogs, does aerobics, and takes a flit class. I like the little glimpse into her life where she tells him she’s supposed to be an uneaten on a workout show – laughing at herself considering it seems so silly to talk well-nigh in the middle of all this.
David graduates from hacker to proto-MacGyver when he’s stuff interrogated at NORAD, is locked in a room, and comes up with a clever (and plausible? I don’t know) way of jamming the lock with some rewiring and a recording of the pass lawmaking tones. Then he pre-McClanes through a vent and sneaks out with a tour group. For some reason without all that, when he tabbed the operator trying to find the mysterious possibly-not-really-dead creator of the WOPR, I thought, “Wow, this kid is much increasingly capable than I was. He sounds like he calls the operator with questions all the time.”
David and Jennifer do track lanugo Dr. Stephen Falken on a private northwest island. He’s now obsessed with dinosaurs, has a radio controlled pterodactyl, makes them watch an old stop motion dino film, claims not to superintendency if we go out like they did. He tells the kids they can sleep over since they missed the last ferry, but they decide to go out and try to icon out a way to leave. They plane consider swimming. They could’ve been lounging together in a nice vault with lots of tomfool dinosaur stuff. Fools!
The part with the helicopter hovering over shining spotlights on them was very familiar to me. BLUE THUNDER type shit. I was thinking it would be funny if it wasn’t the authorities but Falken’s way of saying, “Hey, I reverted my mind, and I’m a weird rich guy so I have my own helicopter and I can requite you a ride!” Sure enough, that’s what it is. One nitpick though, it would be plane largest if the pterodactyl followed overdue them like a little buddy.
I think there’s a narrative weakness that without David shows up at NORAD with the doctor so they’ll finally listen to him the kid gets sidelined for a while, at least until he comes up with the idea of making the computer play games. And when that happens Falken seems to think of it at the same time, so David might not have been needed.
But of undertow you can’t mutter too much well-nigh the structure when it builds to the whole reason the movie is remembered – the computer’s realization that Tic Tac Toe is a sucky game and so is thermonuclear war. (It’s a good thing it wasn’t Tic Tac Dough. That might be too fun of a game.) WOPR, moreover tabbed Joshua without Falken’s sufferer son and the backstairs password he chose, doesn’t differentiate between the two considering he doesn’t understand life, and therefore doesn’t understand consequences. An interesting counterpoint is Dr. John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman, ROLLING THUNDER), a human who presumably does understand those things, yet he’s so steeped in his militaristic, nationalistic bullshit that he has just as nonflexible a time at it. In the opening he kind of plays like the wise one, trying to make the clueless bureaucrats see the flaws in their system for launching a nuclear counterstrike. But the flaw is that a human stuff wasn’t willing to push the sawed-off that would’ve ended the world. What a disaster. If this had been real, only we would be dead, not the rest of humanity. Unacceptable!
I fathom that Coleman is unliable to play it like the good guy, no mustache twirling. Considering there are plenty of those people in positions of power, masquerading as good guys. Seriously, fuck that guy.
The pursuit is not a criticism, and presented for informational purposes only. In the movie, David and Jennifer are supposed to live in Seattle, but they go to Snohomish Upper School, which I think is unquestionably the name of the upper school my dad went to, but it’s well-nigh 30 miles from Seattle, so it would be nonflexible for them to go when and along on her motorbike. The exterior of the school in the movie is unquestionably in El Segundo, and the interior in L.A. Equal to IMDb there are some very Washington state locations used, and equal to the 1995 typesetting Seattle on Film by Randy Hodgins & Steve McLellan the exterior of the Psychology Building at University Washington is where David goes to visit his hacker friends played by Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin. The only very Seattle I noticed was a couple second unit establishing shots looking wideness Elliot Bay from West Seattle, but that’s tomfool considering it’s looking right at the neighborhood I’ve lived in for 20 years.
Oh – and one dumb little thing I’d say they got wrong (even though she’s joking) is when Jennifer asks, “What kind of an asshole grows up in Seattle and doesn’t know how to swim?” Most of the water virtually Seattle isn’t swimmable, so if most kids here do learn to swim (I have no idea if they do) there’s nothing geographic well-nigh it.
The idea of WARGAMES started when screenwriter Lawrence Lasker saw a special well-nigh Stephen Hawking and imagined him befriending a unexceptionable juvenile runaway who would wilt his successor. While developing the script with co-writer Walter F. Parkes they met futurist Peter Schwartz of the Stanford Research Institute, who told them well-nigh a growing subculture of young computer geniuses.
In a 2008 retrospective in Wired, Parkes says that they unchangingly pictured Falken as John Lennon, “because he was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking.” Furthermore, Lasker claims that “through David Geffen, we’d communicated with John Lennon, and he was interested in the role.” I question how serious “interested in the role” is, but, uh… imagine that. If John Lennon hadn’t been killed, but was a guy who was in WARGAMES and shit. A variegated world.
Originally Martin Brest was hired to direct, but the producers fired him without 12 days of shooting. Badham watched the footage and unswayable that it was too tonally dark, too much of a conspiracy thriller, and thought the kids needed to be having increasingly fun. It seems to me he found a pretty good balance.
Brest moved on to BEVERLY HILLS COP. Lasker later wrote PROJECT X, TRUE BELIEVER and AWAKENINGS, as well as SNEAKERS with Parkes. Parkes became the throne of DreamWorks.
I think of WARGAMES as an entertaining movie, but I didn’t know it was well-known unbearable to be nominated for Oscars for cinematography, sound and original screenplay. It lost to FANNY AND ALEXANDER, THE RIGHT STUFF and TENDER MERCIES. Nevertheless, it lives on on cable, and in its influence on the rise of hacker culture. It’s pretty good, plane though I’m increasingly of a BLACKHAT guy.
Signs o’ the times: Many stocky computers and computer accessories, modem sounds, drinking Tab, a scene at an shopping where we see many video games including Ms. Pac-Man, Tron, Jungle Hunt, Zaxxon, and (apparently David’s favorite) Galaga. Michael Madsen is in it and his hairline is so variegated I didn’t recognize him at first.
Tie-ins: A WARGAMES video game was released for ColecoVision, then Atari and Commodore 64. I guess it was similar to playing Global Thermonuclear War from the NORAD side. In 1998 PlayStation and PC had a game tabbed WarGames: Defcon 1. In 2008 there was a DTV sequel, which I will be reviewing tomorrow.
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