Day 8 WarGames (1983)

In 1983, director John Badham had the unique experience of having two major summer films open within just a couple of weeks of one another. “Blue Thunder” is a techno thriller with a conspiracy plot that opened first. I will be covering it later in the Summer. “WarGames” was the less expensive but more financially and critically well received of the two. It took advantage of the era in which it was made and told a nightmare story that was made convincing, even if the computer material was not accurate.

This is one of the earliest examples of what would become a well worn path for thrillers in the next two or three decades, it’s a hacker story. David Lightman is a high school student who is absorbed in computer technology to the neglect of his classwork. He is very bright but as is typical in a teen story, he applies his smarts to only the areas he is interested in. David is played by Matthew Broderick, this was only his second film. Three years later he would also do a little hacking of his school records in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, which we will also be catching down the road. David and his friend Jennifer, played by Ally Sheedy, have accidentally penetrated a defense department computer system while looking for a gaming company. The defense computer has games that it uses in creating war scenarios, and David chooses Global Thermo-nuclear War to explore the computer games he has found. Unfortunately, a new automatic program has been installed to reduce human hesitancy about firing nuke weapons and the computer believes it is playing out the actual scenario.

In the late 70s and early 80s there had been several reports of Defense Department alerts that turned out to be false alarms, but never the less had initiated military preparations for a nuclear strike. 1983 was, after maybe 1962, the peak of the Cold War. There were nuclear disarmament movements in Europe, and in the U.S. there were calls for what was referred as a “Nuclear Freeze”. The Soviets were going through Premiers like crazy, with at least three different leaders in President Reagan’s first term. After the Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan, and the collapse of democracies in southeast Asia to Communist based regimes, the U.S. has started investing in new weapons systems that freaked out many in the population. The famous “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had been moved to 3 minutes to Midnight and the arms race just made the scenerio in this movie more concerning.

“WarGames” succeeds on the basis of two important factors, the screenplay and the production design. The script by Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Original Screenplay. They took a burgeoning interest in computers and turned it into a paranoid fantasy of world destruction that felt believable if improbable. The story is populated with characters we can relate to, like David and Jennifer, but also Drs, Falken, and McKittrick. When you add in the dubious General, you get a combination of characters who are easy to understand, have clever dialogue, and never really act in the stupid manner that would usually be found in a movie.

The film opens with a great sequence in a missile silo that has been created by the film makers on the MGM lot, but it comes across as very realistic. The two airmen who are tasked to launch, follow their procedures , up to the point of turning that last key. Michael Madsen makes his film debut as one of the officers, the other is veteran John Spencer, and it is his reticence to follow orders and kill millions that leads to the scenario of the film. Spencer sells us on the idea that even a well trained man, will have doubts when faced with a monumental decision like the one in the test that they did not know was a test. We quickly transition to the main set for the film, where the film makers create a NORAD War Room that is apparently a lot more elaborate than the real ones. Ever since “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail Safe” the idea of a big board, showing all the military activities of the potential combatants has dominated the way we imagine how a modern war will be fought. This film takes the idea of the computers running everything, and gives us a visual tableau to see all of this on. Most computer movies have a single screen for everyone to stare at, and in the early 80s all you got were green letters against a black background. The production designers here create multiple screens that are like current big screen televisions, and colorful but simple graphics to play out the war scenarios that the computer, nicknamed the WOPR, is going though.

Admittedly, there is some back and forth action between the teen characters and locations that stretches’ the imagination. We supposedly go from Seattle, to Colorado, to Oregon and then back to Colorado in a brief amount of time. Some of this travel would have been engineered by the Air Force but the logistics are still a bit daunting.

So while the technology is old (enjoy the floppy discs and dial up modems), and the setting imaginative, this is a film that holds up as an entertainment because it is really about a situation that continues to be a problem. Tension around the world and fingers on a nuclear trigger has not disappeared. The school scenes will inform you why Broderick was a perfect choice for Ferris just a few years later, and movie magic continues to create worlds that we want to believe are real. One extra little treat, we saw John Wood who plays Professor Falken in the role of Salieri in the stage version of Amadeus the next January. Oh, and Mark Hamill was Mozart.