WarGames (1983)
Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
THE SUMMARY: A young hobby hacker accidentally accesses a US military computer system programmed to run nuclear war simulations, and nearly starts World War III before recruiting a retired Expert™ Scientist™ to help him stop it. A classic mediocre watch for me - a decent joke and a thought provoked here and there, but enough plot holes and wasted romance time that I wouldn’t recommend it or watch it again.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER MATT P: A quintessential ‘80s movie - it’s definitely dated but Matthew Broderick is good in this.
THE BEST:
The classroom scene: The best scene of the movie has almost nothing to do with the central plot - it’s in the classroom when David arrives late and the teacher hassles him and Jennifer for poor academic performance. Yes, ‘your wife’ is the best joke in the movie, but there’s a nostalgia to the discipline of this school environment too, or at least the teacher’s attempt at it. Now that we’re in an era of participation trophies, inflated grades, and positive reinforcement even when totally unearned, it’s refreshing to watch a hard-ass teacher who actually expects effort and excellence from his students.
The metaphor of tic-tac-toe: The broad metaphor of tic-tac-toe prompted a lot of thought for me. The idea is that the simple game of tic-tac-toe is the same as the world’s most complex game of nuclear warfare in that both games are pointless, they cannot be won, and as the Joshua computer says, the only winning move is not to play at all.
I appreciate this metaphor not because I agree with it entirely, but because it had me thinking later about whether I agree or not. Of course ideally, we would all like to avoid the pointless game of war, but surely refusing ever to play isn’t the answer either, and clearly sitting out isn’t always a winning move. If you don’t play and your enemies do, you will be beaten.
There’s a lot to think about with that predicament as it applies to today’s politics. Sure - we may want to be left alone and not play the stupid game at all. But what happens when others insist on playing the game against us? How long can we run away from the game and avoid it until we can’t retreat anymore and have to win the game for ourselves?
My personal mark of a good movie is how much it makes me think later, and while I have plenty to criticize in this one, it did make me think, and that’s worth a Wicky or two.
The FBI drives a pedo van: I enjoyed the presentation in the scene of David’s arrest at 7-Eleven. The FBI disappears him into a van that doubles for agent hobby use on the weekend. Accurate.
Your wife!
I couldn’t find video of the scene or a better image, but that’s the point of the FBI pedo van. It hides well.
THE WORST:
I can understand some government incompetence, but the security premises here are preposterous: I have no delusions of confidence in the abilities of the federal government, even those supposedly top men in the alphabet agencies of top secrets. However, from a security perspective, several of the plot points are just downright silly. Even if I excuse the ability to tamper with the government’s war games computer by simply guessing a password - maybe that’s how things were early on - why in the hell would NORAD be giving tours of their nuclear war command center ever, let alone during an active nuclear threat?
And how is it that David and Jennifer, once joined by Dr. Falken, simply run into the NORAD facility without anybody ever attempting to stop them or even ask them a question, again - while under an active nuclear emergency.
And when the FBI has David in custody, and per the agent’s questioning, they believe him to be a foreign-assisted super-hacker, why do they leave him unattended with access to their computers?
The lack of not just digital security but physical security in this movie is completely silly, and impossible to take seriously.
David’s MacGyver skills are over-the-top: Even though it’s preposterous, I could excuse the one instance of David hacking his way out of his detention room by wiring an audio recorder into the door lock to get it to unlock itself, if that was the only instance of this MacGyver nonsense. But it isn’t.
At least that one is plot relevant. He needs to escape custody - that’s how he escapes custody. But the movie has to show off these ridiculous implausible skills again later, just because they can. David hacks a payphone by using a bottle opener he finds on the ground to somehow prompt a dial tone. It’s completely absurd and serves no necessity. How about he just has a quarter, or finds a quarter, or bums a quarter? Making a phone call is not some impossible task that only he could do, but they have to make it some skilled hacker feat.
We get it - he’s a hacker! Wow!
Just make the damn phone call
The romance is forced and irrelevant: Remember Short Circuit? Ally Sheedy wasn’t good in that either. I don’t get the fascination with her - she’s not a compelling actress or character. She’s just there to be the obligatory female companion to satisfy the need for a forced love story with some nerd. She did it in Short Circuit and she does it here too.
Jennifer’s own implicit confession to irrelevance and uselessness made me laugh - when the crew is trying to figure out how to break the Joshua computer’s lockout, David asks her and Dr. Falken ‘what are we gonna do?’ Jennifer responds: ‘I told you not to start playing games with that thing!’
Yes, female nagging. That will get us out of this imminent nuclear apocalypse. Thanks for that.
THE RATING: 3/5 Wickies - it would be a perfectly mediocre 2.5, but half rounds up in the movie’s favor. Just enough philosophical thought and ‘80s throwback nostalgia for me to be mildly entertained.
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NEXT WEEK: The Bourne Identity (2002)
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