WarGames

The human personnel in a missile silo are faced with the task of maintaining a launch station. They never thought they would actually get the order to launch. To them it’s just a routine job: monitoring the blinking lights while they make idle chitchat. What human could possibly accept what it means to actually push The Button? When men are ordered to fire, unaware that it’s an attack drill, they fail to do so. This convinces the brass at NORAD to take humans out of the equation all together. A super computer, they reason, would have all the capabilities of a human, with none of the pesky conscience.

Following the suspenseful opening is a conventional introduction to our protagonist. Seventeen year old David Lightman (Mathew Broderick) is a high school kid who spends too much time in his bedroom, messing about with his modem-enabled Imsai 8080 computer. His girlfriend’s character is never really fleshed out, but that doesn’t matter because she seems like a real girl and her interest in David never came off phony.

One day David is leafing through a magazine when he discovers an advertisement for a mysteriously marketed video game that won’t be revealed until Christmas. David refuses to wait. He commands his computer to dial every phone number within the game studio’s area code so that he can create a list of every modem in the area. When David accidentally connects to the super computer at NORAD, he thinks he found the studio he’s looking for and launches a game called Global Thermonuclear War. The super computer is more than willing to play, as it’s an artificial intelligence that plays war games 24/7, constantly learning, constantly improving. Unfortunately, David soon learns that he may have inadvertently started the ball rolling towards World War III.

WarGames occasionally insults the intelligence (micro-cassette recorders can be hacked to open keypad-protected doors), but it’s fun and cleverly so. If anything, it really captured the attitude of real life hackers who, though often vilified by the media, are the people who gave us affordable computers and created the internet in the first place. There are some things I didn’t like about the movie, notably the stereotypical computer specialists who help David crack NORAD’s backdoor password, but the climax of the film is unlike any I’ve ever seen. It hit me hard and it stuck with me.