WarGames dvd movie.|
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Features • NTSC In Theaters : 03 June, 1983 |
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WarGames description Cute but silly, this 1983 cautionary fantasy stars Matthew Broderick as a teenage computer genius who hacks into the Pentagon's defense system and sets World War III into motion. All the fun is in the film's set-up, as Broderick befriends Ally Sheedy and starts the international crisis by pretending while online to be the Soviet Union. After that, it's not hard to predict what's going to happen: government agents swoop in, but the story ends up in the "hands" of machines talking to one another. Thus we're stuck with flashing lights, etc. John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) directs in strict potboiler mode. Kids still like this movie, though. The DVD release has a widescreen presentation, theatrical trailer, Dolby sound, director commentary, optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. --Tom Keogh |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | It Takes Two Hands To Handle A WOPR |
| All storytelling revolves around three themes: Man against Man, Man against Nature, and Man against Himself. In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, a fourth paradigm was added, that being Man Against Machine. Largely told in the cinematic mode, Man against Machine has given us any number of low-budget American International Pictures releases, as well as such classic films as FAIL SAFE, DR. STRANGELOVE, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the TERMINATOR films, THE MATRIX and its sequels, and WAR GAMES.
WAR GAMES is a late Cold War Era entry (1983), and probably the only Teen Angst movie of this kind. Despite the inherent weaknesses of the Teen Angst genre, WAR GAMES manages to have been (and remain) satisfyingly entertaining, even after a quarter century. WAR GAMES remains timeless. David Lightman (played by a pimple-faced, squeaky Matthew Broderick) is an underacheiving teenage computer genius who spends his time entertaining himself by hacking into the school computer and changing people's Grade Point Averages. Somehow, David manages to hook up with the pretty and popular Jennifer (played by a presumptively virginal Ally Sheedy). While trying to impress Jennifer with his pocket-protector machismo, David hacks into what he believes to be an online War Gaming site. Presented with a whole plethora of possible games, David, of course, skips over such boring choices as tic-tac-toe, poker, chess, and even the intriguingly named Falken's Maze to play Global Thermonuclear War. David HAS hacked into an online War Gaming site. Unfortunately for David, and for us, it's NORAD. Having just completed a study showing that human button-pushers won't push their buttons in the event of an attack, NORAD has given the ultimate responsibility for button-pushing to a new computer, WOPR (the acronym is a little vague). WOPR doesn't realize that David is a hacker. WOPR also doesn't know that it's all a simulation. So WOPR starts World War III. David and Jennifer, realizing that it is all a terrible misunderstanding, spend the rest of the film trying to turn off the rambunctious little toaster oven. The ending is a Cold War parable. After two and a half decades part of the fun of watching WAR GAMES is looking at all the quaint high-tech antiques. The computer geeks are an army of screaming, whining, barely toilet-trained four-eyed migraine makers. David's modem is a hard dock model that basically swallows telephone receivers. Reel-to-reel tape drives still look impressive. 5.25 disk drives are on the cutting edge. PCs as such don't exist, but 8088 integrated monitor-dual floppy drive-keyboard models are everywhere. No one's heard of the Graphical User Interface yet, and everything is reduced to green typing on black screens, the equivalent of computer cuneiform. DOS doesn't and Windows wasn't. Amazingly, David's home dinosaur can turn the typed word into an audio feed, allowing WOPR to talk. Tres cool, man! As for the WOPR itself, it is appropriately named, being about a third of the size of a typical Burger King restaurant. Very well endowed with more beeping and flashing things than a Vegas Casino, WOPR has about as much computing power as an abacus, and works just about as well, but it is pretty to look at. Even though the WOPR couldn't play a DVD, your computer can, and WAR GAMES is a fun popcorn-and-soda flick that's worth having in your collection. |
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