WarGames (1983) Review

Official trailer

WarGames is a 9. John Badham made a thriller in 1983 about a teenager with a modem and an autodialer, and forty years on it’s still the film that gets computers closest to right.

Matthew Broderick plays David Lightman, a bright kid who changes his grades from a bedroom terminal and goes looking for an unreleased game. Ally Sheedy plays Jennifer, the classmate he drags along. Dabney Coleman plays the man running the missile program and John Wood plays the scientist who built the machine and walked away.

WarGames is the hacking movie I’d pick over every slick one that came after it. It’s the rare film about computers that doesn’t make me wince, and it pulls real dread out of a kid, a phone line and a room full of generals. I think it’s smarter than its teen-movie reputation, and a lot more frightening.

It cost about $12 million and made roughly $79 million, and it changed federal law, something almost no thriller can claim.

The Setup

The film opens in a missile silo, where two officers are ordered to turn their keys and one of them can’t do it. That failure rate pushes the Air Force to take the men out of the loop and hand launch authority to a computer at NORAD.

Meanwhile David is wardialing, running his modem through every number in Sunnyvale looking for a games company, and he finds a system that won’t identify itself and offers him a list including chess, poker and Global Thermonuclear War.

He picks the war game, plays the Soviets, and NORAD watches Soviet missiles appear on the big board. The machine doesn’t know the game is over when David hangs up, and it keeps playing.

It Gets Computers Right

Everything on screen is how it worked in 1983. The autodialer running numbers overnight. The acoustic coupler. Finding a back door by reading about the designer’s dead son. Guessing a password because the man who built the system used his child’s name.

That’s social engineering, and the film had it years before anybody in the mainstream used the phrase. David doesn’t break in through brute force. He learns who built the system and thinks like him. The speech synthesis, the printouts, the terminals, the sound of a connection handshaking, all of it is right. Films made forty years later still can’t manage a realistic command line.

My favorite thing about the film is that it knows real intrusion is patient work, a kid reading about a dead boy and guessing a password, and it makes that patience thrilling. I’d take that one password scene over every flashing green screen in the hacker movies that followed.

Broderick and Sheedy

Broderick plays David as a bored, arrogant kid who isn’t malicious and is far too pleased with himself. He changes a girl’s grades to impress her and treats a nuclear war computer as a challenge because he can’t imagine consequences.

Sheedy has the harder role and makes it count. Jennifer is the one who keeps asking what happens if he’s wrong, and she carries the audience’s common sense without being a nag.

John Wood’s Stephen Falken is the film’s soul. A scientist who taught a machine to learn, lost his son, and retired to an island to wait for the end. His explanation of futility to two teenagers on a beach is the best scene in the film. John Wood is the performance I’d single out. He plays Falken tired all the way down, a man who’s already grieved for the world, and his calm on that beach frightens me more than anything on the NORAD board.

Barry Corbin’s General

The first director, Martin Brest, didn’t last. He was let go early in the shoot and John Badham took over, and Corbin remembers the cameras had been rolling about a week when Badham arrived. Badham gave him one note for General Beringer, the man running the floor at NORAD: “I want you to play this like you’re wearing your uniform like it’s overalls.”

Badham built the whole character with it. Beringer isn’t a polished academy general. He came up through the ranks, and he wears that uniform the way a working man wears overalls, because it’s what he puts on to do the job.

Corbin went to high school in Lubbock and served in the Marine Corps before he ever acted, and he made most of Beringer up as he went. “Most of what I said, aside from the military stuff, the def-cons and all that stuff, was just stuff I said off the cuff,” he told The A.V. Club. The readiness levels and the jargon had to be right, so those he said as written. Everything else was Corbin inventing a four-star general in real time.

So the lines fans still quote back at him almost certainly came out of his own head. “Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.” And the one people love most: “I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good.”

It cost him something. “It kind of ruined me for learning lines, though,” he said.

The writers based Beringer on a real officer, General James V. Hartinger, who ran NORAD at the time, and it shows. When a post about Corbin’s performance went around Facebook, veterans in the comments said he sounded just like the general officers they’d worked for. He’s the one man in that mountain who says what everybody’s thinking, and he’s right about the machine from the first scene. I’d put him next to John Wood as the best thing in the film.

The Look of 1983

Badham shoots NORAD as a cathedral: a vast dark room, a wall of screens, ranks of officers watching lights move. It was a set, built because the real facility wasn’t available, and it defined how audiences picture a command center for the next forty years.

The contrast with David’s bedroom is the film’s best visual idea. One kid, one terminal, a tangle of cables, and the same map on both screens. The pacing helps too. The film spends its first half on a teenager being clever and its second half on adults realizing they can’t stop what he started, and the shift happens without a single dropped beat.

The Politics

The argument underneath is mutual assured destruction, and the film makes it without a lecture. Falken’s position is that the war can’t be won, McKittrick’s is that the system removes human weakness, and the film proves one of them right in the last five minutes. The tic-tac-toe ending, where the machine plays itself to a standstill and then runs through every nuclear scenario to the same conclusion, is the cleanest way anybody has dramatized futility. The final line is the film’s whole thesis, and it’s earned instead of declared. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

That tic-tac-toe sequence gives me chills. Watching the machine burn through every scenario and arrive at the same dead end is the reason I rate this a 9, and I can’t think of a Cold War thriller that ends better.

What It Changed

President Reagan watched it at Camp David, asked his advisors whether anything like that could really happen, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told him that the problem was much worse than the film suggested. That exchange fed into the first national policy on computer security. Congress cited the film during hearings that led to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 1986, the law that still underpins American hacking prosecutions. A summer thriller about a teenager with a modem changed federal law. The film’s accuracy is the reason anybody in Washington took it seriously.

Why It Still Works

The hardware is obsolete and the method isn’t. People still guess passwords built from family names, systems still trust anyone who gets through the front door, and the gap between what a machine is told to do and what its owners meant is still where the damage happens.

It also treats its teenagers as intelligent, unlike most films of the period, and lets the adults be competent without being right. That’s a 9. It’s tense, it’s funny in places, it’s accurate, and its argument about automated systems making decisions humans should be making has aged into something closer to current events than history.

Is WarGames worth watching?

Yes, and it’s a 9. It’s the most accurate film ever made about computers, it’s properly tense, and John Wood’s Falken gives it a weight that most thrillers of the period never reached.

Watch it for the hacking and stay for the argument about handing decisions to machines that can’t tell a simulation from the real thing. I give it a 9 because it gets the technology right where nearly every other hacker movie turns silly, it’s tense from the silo to the last line, and that question about machines hasn’t dated at all.

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