WarGames (1983)
Shall we play a game?
Revisiting the films that thrilled you as a youth can be a bittersweet experience. What horrifying things will they reveal about the teenager you once were, to the teenager on your sofa? Forewarned is forearmed…
Elevator Pitch
Teen nerd David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), showing off to potential girlfriend Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), mistakes a military computer for a games company and hacks into it. In turn, the military computer mistakes his game playing for the opening moves of World War III. For the world to be saved, David and Jennifer must track down the computer’s creator, Falken (Jon Wood), and persuade the AI that nuclear war is a very bad idea indeed. By teaching it to play noughts and crosses (alright, *sigh*, ‘tic-tac-toe’).
WarGames combines three existential terrors in one jolly teen romp: the destruction of society by amoral teen hackers, the destruction of culture by artificial intelligence, and the destruction of the species by nuclear armageddon. Of the three, in 1983 the first was the most novel. The Cold War was at one of its hottest pitches and World War III seemed imminent. Politely lethal artificial brains were a regular feature in films, just as jobs lost to automation were a regular feature in the news. But computers in the home? A new technology of unimagined power that only teenagers knew how to use? This was a whole new thing to be frightened of.
To be fair to WarGames, despite revolving around a teenager accidentally starting World War III it does not demonise personal computers as a threatening teenage craze. (Much.) Instead, it rather glorifies the teenage hacker; its audience, after all, was precisely those boys who were intending to change society, one line of BASIC at a time. David’s hacking gets him into trouble, but it also gets him out of it. He approaches both social systems and computer systems with inventiveness and psychological insight; these skills make him both a proficient hacker, and someone who eventually saves the world. It ends up having a surprisingly clear-eyed balance between pessimism over how technology can amplify humanity’s worst instincts, and optimism about how, as a tool, it might help us overcome them.
And it has a remote control pterodactyl in it.
Delights
The film opens in a nuclear bunker, where a missile commander is quailing at the command to turn his key and launch armageddon. He is played by Jon Spencer, who played Leo in The West Wing. His junior officer is played by Michael Madsen. This film is thick with delightful ‘80s character actors, from James Tolkan (Back to the Future, Top Gun) to Barry Corbin (Northern Exposure), to John Wood (have we covered Ladyhawke yet? We need to do that), to Dabney Coleman.
The film is technically delightful, too. John Badham manages to keep everything light while also keeping it moving, which is an achievement when so much of the film is people staring at screens with an occasional break for typing. This is helped by a lovely sound palette of ‘computer noises’, hums and beeps and clicks that whirr away in the background, providing the metronomic pulse of a cursor blink. The computer displays in the NORAD situation room, meanwhile, are particularly beautiful: sparse ‘80s graphics that tell clear visual stories. This is probably because they were designed by Colin Cantwell, who also designed the TIE fighter X-Wing for Star Wars and worked with Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sci-fi design royalty, in other words.
Most of all, there is the sheer ‘80s America of it all. It’s not that there’s a lot of ostentatious wealth or the promise of excitement; it’s that there’s so much ostentatious ease and the promise of safety. The suburb in WarGames is the ideal suburb, one that’s full of video game arcades and junk food, where both your parents work and you have a lock on your bedroom door. A place for wandering out of and running back to. The sheer comfort of it all. Even the clothes. You have no idea how comically hard it was to find a zip-up hoodie in the ‘80s Home Counties.
Discomforts
There are some unfortunate Hollywood nerds at one point, quacking and bickering in their basement: “Remember you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? You’re doing it right now.” But this is more than made up for by all the heroic nerds, including the protagonist.
More uncomfortably, it's a movie made largely for ‘80s suburban white boys, so it's perhaps inevitable that the cast is overwhelmingly white and male too. On the plus side this means that it is largely (accurately) white men who are trying to blow up the world.
It does also mean, though, that poor old Ally Sheedy is given little more to do than giggle and ask questions on behalf of the audience. So, not a great deal of overt misogyny (this is a kid’s film, after all) but an awful lot of structural.
Can we show the kids?
As a sort of lived history exhibit, possibly; maybe — if you can get them to put up with something so low on action and slow on editing — as an example of how today’s existential horrors aren’t that new.
Is it as good as you remember?
As a computer-obsessed 13-year-old myself, the appearance of the first Tron (1982) and then this was a significant one—two punch in my personal canon. Viewed from any other perspective WarGames isn’t a good film, but it’s decently made and surprisingly watchable 40 years later, even if that is through bifocals heavily frosted with nostalgia.
What distinguishes it now is its museum-quality preservation of a particular moment in time; an image of what it was like to be an adolescent in the early ‘80s, to grow up under the constant threat of annihilation, to suspect that if you did make it to 30, it would be as a mutated scavenger in an irradiated wasteland. What was the point, then, of trying to grow up at all? Especially when we had the relentless output of the consumerist-entertainment complex with which to distract ourselves while we awaited our doom: Star Wars and computers, comics and Space Raiders.
The film provides some self-aware commentary on this self-willed apathy. Professor Falken, the scientist who built the nuclear AI, tells David that he quit the project because he couldn’t get his computer to understand the concept of ‘futility’. Noting that David is desperate to save the world, Falken gives him a lecture on the extinction of the dinosaurs: ‘There’s a time when you should give up.’ But David eventually succeeds where Falken failed, and he does so by playing a computer game; or rather, by getting the machine to play noughts and crosses against itself. Saving the world by sitting at home playing games was the kind of wish fulfilment young Gen X boys could get on board with. And the AI’s final judgement on the experience was a motto for all slackers, encapsulating what we felt about what Falken calls ‘the horror of survival’, the whole complicated business of having to be a successful adult in a nuclear world:
‘Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.’
For a slightly more sobering ‘80s vision of nuclear war, there’s always the monumentally terrifying BBC TV film ‘Threads’:
‘Nowt We Can Do About It’
As the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, the idea that the Covid pandemic was ‘like the war’ or required ‘a bit of Blitz Spirit’ became a familiar one. It was in part, perhaps, the leaking out of Boris’s own barely restrained Churchill fantasies – but at its heart was a more fundamental …
Yes! I think this piece sums up “War Games” very well. We rewatched it as adults (some years ago now) and it was very much an exercise in nostalgia more than anything else. I think that is ok though. I find even with excellent films that have really stood the test of time, if I first saw them in my teens or childhood, the initial thrill of a rewatch is that almost subconscious recall of who I was when I first watched it.