I honestly kind of hate that this movie has some relevance again.  Yeah, I’m starting kind of heavy here but this movie has a very personal feel for me.   I was ten years old when WarGames came out in 1983, a year  I remember  spending a good deal of  a bit scared that someone was going to screw up and the whole world was about to go up in a nuclear fireball,  This same year we also had the terrifying miniseries The Day After, Reagan and Andropov were rattling sabers at each other and we all had this feeling that for whatever reason, some idiot might accidentally start the whole thing.  So, you can see the parallels.

And in all of that, WarGames arrives.  A movie that feels like the standard “kid gets involved in secret shenanigans and has to work his way out” plot that has resulted in a ton of movies since then.  But what makes WarGames a bit more relevant than its fellow shenanigans movies (The Manhattan Project comes to mind) is that there’s a little more going on here.  This movie has something to say about nuclear war and deterrence and the use of computers and humans doing what might be considered insane things in the most logical way possible.  It might not always hit the targets but this movie takes some pretty big swings that are worth admiring.

For those who may have never seen this movie (and really, you should), we follow David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), an obviously smart screw-up high school student who’s also an amateur hacker.  He sees an ad for a computer games company and uses his hacking abilities (which he’s already shown off to a girl he’s into, Jennifer (Ally Sheedy)) to try and find a backdoor into their system to play the new games early.  However, he accidentally finds a login for a Defense Department war simulation system.    Thinking that he can figure out the password he researches the system’s designer, the deceased professor Falken and manages to figure out the password and start a nuclear war simulation.  Unfortunately, the people at NORAD think the simulation is real.  From there, the plot thickens as the line between simulation and reality blurs and no one is quite certain if the computer is still running a game or counting down till WWIII.

(As a side note, I’m not sure how authentic the hacking is in this movie but it definitely feels right for 1983.  There’s a lot of figuring out passwords not by brute forcing them through using a million combinations but by finding where someone has written down their password and the like.)

Using this framework, WarGames becomes a taut thriller that also delves into how much we’ve come to rely on technology, even in 1983.  Lightman is really only half of the movie, though Broderick is the star; the other half of this movie is a fantastic cavalcade of character actors who spend a lot of time debating technology and defense, but always in an entertaining way.  We have Dabney Coleman in his usual irascible curmudgeon mode as the tech head at Norad, Barry Corbin as the Air Force general in charge, John Wood as the deceased (sort of) Falken; there’s a lot of good, recognizable people doing good work here and discussing interesting things.

Now that last bit isn’t getting across one thing that I have to emphasize about WarGames: it’s fun.  We’re talking prime Matthew Broderick here, with that likable smartass persona that would stand in him such good stead through the ‘80s on full display here.  He’s just so damn personable on screen here and you really want to see where all of this is going.  While the specter of nuclear disaster hangs over a lot of the movie it’s never an overbearing slog (something that, for instance, The Fourth Protocol can have a problem with).  I was watching the movie with my wife, who’s half-watched it with me before but was giving it more attention this time, and she was pleasantly surprised at how long the movie is; it’s nearly two hours long and feels easily a half hour shorter.  This thing moves.  There’s a lot of characters, a lot of plot and yet the movie never feels like it needs to be edited down, even when we’re spending a few minutes with a Air Force guard trying to put the moves on a nurse or John Spencer in a delightful few minutes with Michael Madsen explaining a particular strain of weed and how it’s better than Thai Stick.

In the end, WarGames is a movie about our relationship with nuclear weapons and computers and how we just might have a little bit of hope if we take two seconds to think about things.  Wrapping that all up in an ‘80s Matthew Broderick thriller makes the medicine go down, but it’s medicine that never feels bitter in the first place and this is a really fun, smart movie that I’m happy holds up as well as it does.

As a final note, director John Badham had a very interesting career with some weird highlights to it outside of box office successes like Short Circuit and the two Stakeout movies.  He directed Saturday Night Fever, which if you haven’t seen in it a while is a weirdly dark, dark movie.  I’m a huge fan of his baseball movie, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, which is a great use of Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor and James Earl Jones in a Negro Leagues story and is really worth tracking down.  Then there’s Point of No Return, the remake of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita which I think I’m one of the few defenders of but I maintain has some interesting things to say and is not just a straight translation.  All of these are worth your time if you want to dig a little deeper in Badham’s back catalog.