Movie Review: WarGames 25th Anniversary Event, July 24 - Page 3

The warm-up over, WarGames itself finally hit the big screen for one special show. It was kind of like catching up with an old friend from 20 years ago. I couldn't always see what was coming, but I remembered it when I saw it. Among the pleasant semi-surprises:

• Getting a quick look inside the Minuteman Missile silos. I didn't know it until about a decade after my dad retired from his top secret job negotiating contracts for the Air Force, but those silos put food on my table when I was a kid. By the time I got to college, I'd concluded that dad had bought Minuteman nukes for a living, but he corrected me when asked, saying: "No. I bought the silos." WarGames gave me at least a fictionalized look into what my dad had wrought.


• The film score and sound design. I never knew just how far I could wax nostalgic over sounds from the video arcade! Using a combination of military-style march music and 1980s computer bloops and bleeps, the film score struck a perfect balance between the worlds of NORAD and David Lightman. Not surprisingly, "Sound" was one of three categories for which the film received an Oscar nomination. Alas, "Soundtrack" was not another.


• The intelligent and nuanced nature of the script — another category for which the film got nominated. The screenplay for WarGames could have gone for any number of clichés. For example (skip ahead of you don't want spoilers!):
  
  1. The commanding general could have been a bloodthirsty redneck warmonger.
  
  
  2. The resolution could have used a classic deus ex machina straight out of Star Trek to disable the computer.
  
  
  3. The script could have given us dialog making a direct comparison between young Lightman's skills and Falken's long-dead hopes for his now-deceased son.
  
  Instead:
  
  1. Colorful as he is, the general is the voice of reason, arguing with government civilians that humans, not computers, should control the warheads.
  
  
  2. The tic-tac-toe game does not halt the launch of WWIII by blowing the computer's circuits in grand Star Trek: TOS style, but rather helps the artificially intelligent computer to reach its own conclusion that mutually assured destruction is a pointless gaming strategy.
  
  
  3. We can read the excitement and pride in Falken's face as Lightman finds the solution, but the script never bashes us over the head by making explicit comparisons with Joshua.

Yes, of course, the movie also has elements that appear incredibly silly today. Network security is almost non-existent. A world-class computer scientist has a backdoor password into NORAD's WOPR war-strategy computer that anybody who's read his bio could hack. It's easy today to laugh at such nonsense, but as far as I can tell present-day network security (and password) standards resulted from hacker exploits. It didn't precede them.

Article Author: Cindy Collins Smith

Cindy Collins Smith is a writer/editor with contributions in several Midnight Marquee/Luminary Press books—including the recently published You're Next: Loss of Identity in the Horror Film. She is known in Ripper circles as the owner of the Hollywood …

Visit Cindy Collins Smith's author page — Cindy Collins Smith's Blog