In the opening scene of the 1983 blockbuster WarGames, two missile commanders
(played by Michael Madsen and John Spencer!) receive an order to launch a
nuclear attack, and one almost kills the other in a dispute over how to
proceed. Those kind of "what if" scenarios were rampant in the Cold War era,
and if WarGames
were exclusively about nuclear paranoia, it would be an amusing nostalgia
piece, quaintly reminding us of what we used to worry about. But WarGames is also about issues that
still resonate, like Internet security, authoritarian arrogance, and coming of
age.
Director John Badham (taking over for Martin
Brest, who was canned shortly after shooting began) brings a light touch to
Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes' tense, well-structured script, by keeping
the action focused on what matters most to the audience. Matthew Broderick plays a high-school computer
geek—the prototypical model—who accidentally hacks into the system controlling
the U.S. missile-defense system, and starts a simulation that the system reads
as real. With his girlfriend Ally Sheedy by his side, Broderick tries to duck
the military and find the system's reclusive, misanthropic creator by using his
phone-phreaking skills, his dot-matrix printer, and floppy discs roughly the
size of a legal pad.
Badham and company elide a lot of technical
details of hacking, but the basics of the nascent computer culture still feel
spot-on, right down to the body type and personalities of Eddie Deezen and
Maury Chaykin, who play two of Broderick's techno-literate confederates (and
work in Seattle, no less). More important is how WarGames plays up the contrast
between teenagers—rebellious on the surface but conformist by
nature—with a cynical adult world that has become convinced that nuclear
annihilation might not be so bad. What endures about WarGames is the way Broderick
keeps trying to talk sense to both the adults and the computers—the
former when they blindly follow what enormous electronic screens tell them to
do, and the latter when they innocently ask, "Shall we play a game?"
Key features: A lively commentary track
from Lasker, Parkes, and Badham (the latter one of the most gregarious DVD
commenters around), plus four lengthy retrospective featurettes revealing the
unrecognized influences of Stephen Hawking, John Lennon, and videogame
soundtracks on the making of WarGames.