WarGames

Gotta love WarGames. Deep in the Cold War, thousands of missiles threaten to destroy humanity. Are humans willing to take the steps to annihilate humanity? This question provides the tension that drives WarGames. On the surface, it's about a loner teenager who accidentally starts a military computer on the path to an unprovoked nuclear armageddon, but deep down, it's the man vs. machine material that makes it exciting.

And oh what a machine we have! The WOPR (love the name) has more blinking lights than you can shake a stick at, and it makes weird noises that aren't just a cooling system. The machine is filmed in motion, either with close-ups of the lights and the LCD display (a countdown to the end of the game of war) or with a moving camera. For convenience, the console output is copied to a voice synthesizer, which is a little too prosodic to believe. A corollary: humans in this movie always vocalize while they type (unless it's just been dictated to them), another great convenience. The beauty of the synthesized voice, though, is the innocence that it portrays, making it a very spooky villain.

And what about the actors? Ah, to think back to a time when Matthew Broderick was the ultimate teenage actor. Ally Sheedy is here, too. Both are given dialogue that establishes the characters far beyond what a modern making of this movie might've had. When Broderick's character explains that he can't swim, it's great character development, something that's sorely lacking now. We also have Barry Corbin and Dabney Coleman playing two men who can hardly stand to be in the same room together, and their unvoiced dislike for each other is palpable. John Wood is possibly the least believable as the scientist who has given up on the world.

Nitpicking

• For a computer that spends all of it's time thinking through simulations of wars, the WOPR spends an awfully long time playing out the available scenarios. Hasn't it already tried them all?
• Broderick plays a cracker who knows his way around a war dialer, but has to have a back door explained to him. This is necessary for the audience's sake, but I would've preferred to have another character ask for the description.
• Can a teenager really afford to get the same speech synthesizer that the government would have in a facility like NORAD? Non-technical folks would potentially be confused by a change in the computer's voice, but some explanation is probably in order.
• When Broderick disconnects his modem from the government system, his screen continues to show a ticking countdown. That must be a very special terminal emulator to make something like that work.