WarGames (1983) * * *

Directed by:  John Badham

Starring:  Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman, Barry Corbin, John Wood

WarGames was released in 1983, when the home computer was not common and the threat of nuclear war was still very common.     The movie is like a time capsule, but yet remains timely.     WarGames is about paranoia and the fear of computer glitches threatening our personal and national security.     David Lightman (Broderick) is a computer genius who underachieves at school, but that's ok, he can hack into the school's mainframe and change his grades.   (Broderick's Ferris Bueller did the same thing in 1986, only he changed his number of absences).    

One day he sees an ad in a magazine for a video game company and uses his telephone modem to hack into the company's system to find "the really good games".    There is one:  Global Thermonuclear War, which he plays and chooses to be the Soviets since they seemed to have a larger nuclear weapon collection.     However, this causes David to somehow accidentally link up to the nation's central nuclear defense computers, and the possibility of starting an actual nuclear war becomes very real.     The game seizes control of the defense computers and within 72 hours will be able to figure out the top secret launch codes to our country's nuclear missiles.    

The feds soon track down David and bring him to NORAD to determine if he is indeed a Soviet spy or a kid who stumbled across an unintended glitch in the system.    How and why the nation's central computer defense systems are linked to a video game company advertising on the back of a magazine is never explained fully, but that's okay too.     The events for a well-crafted, suspenseful thriller are in motion.     When I first saw the film in 1983, it presented one further scary possibility in which we found ourselves in a nuclear war with the Soviets.     Watching the film again recently, the fears of computers being used to enable identity theft and threaten privacy still remain.     Even with the focus on North Korea's nuclear program in the news, the possibility of a nuclear war remains remote, if not extinct. 

WarGames leads to a simplistic, yet relevant conclusion which captured the Cold War sentiments of both the Soviets and the United States.     Nuclear wars have no winners because everything will be destroyed and the remaining population which survived the blasts will soon die of radiation poisoning anyway.    No one benefits.    But both sides knew this, but kept the scant likelihood of nuclear attacks in the nation's subconscious until the threat of such attacks became like crying wolf.     Within a few years, both sides reduced their nuclear arsenals and by 1991, the Soviet empire collapsed, thus ending the Cold War.  

As far as WarGames itself, it remains implausibly entertaining and thoughtful.    The Soviets are unseen, but just the idea that they are out there gives the film a villain.    NORAD's top brass, led by John McKittrick (Coleman) are not malevolent.    They just want to find out what happened and why.    The fact that they suspect innocent David of something more devious makes us root for David to escape and find out the truth for himself.      WarGames manages to hold up fairly well for a movie made only 34 years ago considering the huge leaps in technology and a shifts in ideology which define our society today.