As this film is old enough for some readers not to have seen it (or heard of it) I won't be putting spoilers in. But I can say without losing sleep that the Pentagon's system can't tell between a game and a real attack. That's pretty much built into the premise.
War Games was a hit, mining the late Cold War fear of nuclear holocaust and pop curiosity about computer systems and hacking. It was also the big movie debuts of its central duo, Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick who had Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller in their near futures. The computer technology is vintage with the home setup looking boxy and clunky (acoustic modems and voice synthesisers) but the higher up it gets the more it resembles the old '60s trope of computers as magic boxes with flashing lights. But this is not a documentary about information technology, just its use by that old enemy of humanity: humanity.
John Badham directed, taking over from Martin Brest. Brest had envisaged a dark thriller but was fired in favour of Badham with his teen movie approach. But the big dark cloud of nuke apocalypse was still moving overhead so it couldn't quite play out like a Dean Jones and Jan Michael Vincent Disney pic and get away with it. What we do get is a credible cold war thriller lightened by teen energy. The '80s at the cinema were already turning into the first wave of worldly teens so the tension between David and the heavy from the Pentagon is not the kind that ends in a line about pesky kids. Dr Strangelove, a decades old black satire about the nuclear threat, was still a riot of palpably nervous laughs.
This means that War Games plays as an efficient thriller with an ethical heart which manages to be neither dismissive of the gravity nor hampered by it. The teens are, if not quite wholesome, beautiful and not beyond tough life lessons. Matthew Broderick pours all the cool sass he would refine for Ferris (a film I hate but whose cultural value I'm forced to admit) which probably served as his audition for it. Ally Sheedy is interestingly both excited by the thrill of the badness but increasingly drawn back to the ethics that applies not just to the early hacking but the war system that reveals itself.
The middle act pursuit by the pair of the brain behind that system might stretch credibility now (where it would be shown to be crushingly difficult) but if you can suspend yourself across it you'll be treated to a fine dialogue about the terrifying possibility that nuclear cataclysm has moved outside of the control of human will. It's fine because it's delivered in a situation of safety and comfort and spoken gently. It's like sitting down to hear bad news.
The world wouldn't know about it for many years but 1983 was the year when annihilation was averted when the Soviet system misidentified a detected early warning blip as an attack. That was averted by a single officer refusing to execute his orders. It wasn't known but the possibility of life on earth being reduced to foraging among ashes due to an error was in the shade of every conversation about the news. John Badham is not given place among the auteurs but his rap sheet is solid. After decades of TV his move to the big screen included the Frank Langella Dracula and Saturday Night Fever to start with. By choosing to nurture the gravitas of his young stars and let it emerge from the vigour of their sense of fun. Doing that kept the film on message without letting it drag and delivered a note of hope to an audience that was in danger of accepting the threat around and above them. It's not the life-suckingly bleak Threads or even the more sanitised The Day After but War Games still works. Could we do one for the climate crisis? That already comes with a teenage star.
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