Below is the late, great Roger Ebert’s review of WarGames, one of the best movies of the 1980s. I posed it because I recently was on a podcast called Staff Picks, talking about the film. It was a blast to revisit and discuss the movie, and the host, Mario Lanza, did a great job. You can listen to it HERE.
I am
writing this review on a word processor that is connected to a computer that
sets the type for the Sun-Times. If I make an error, the computer will tell me.
Observe. I instruct it to set this review at a width of 90 characters. It
flashes back: Margin too wide. Now things get interesting. I ask it to set the
width at 100 characters. It flashes back: Margin too narrow. That's because
it's reading only the first two digits of my three-digit number. It thinks I
said 10, because 100, of course, is ridiculous.
Computers
only do what they are programmed to do, and they will follow their programs to
illogical conclusions. Example. This time I tell the computer to set my review
at a width of 10 characters. It does! Having read 100 as 10 and found 10 too
narrow, it reads 10 as 10, and lets me have my way. I've outsmarted the S.O.B.
Sooner
or later, one of these self-satisfied, sublimely confident thinking machines is
going to blow us all off the face of the planet. That is the message of
"WarGames," a scary and intelligent new thriller that is one of the
best films so far this year. The movie stars Matthew Broderick (the kid from
"Max Dugan Returns") as a bright high school senior who spends a lot
of time locked in his bedroom with his home computer. He speaks computerese
well enough to dial by telephone into the computer at his school and change
grades. But he's ready for bigger game.
He
reads about a toy company that's introducing a new computer game. He programs
his computer for a random search of telephone numbers in the company's area
code, looking for a number that answers with a computer tone. Eventually, he
connects with a computer. Unfortunately, the computer he connects with does not
belong to a toy company. It belongs to the Defense Department, and its mission
is to coordinate early warning systems and nuclear deterrents in the case of
World War III. The kid challenges the computer to play a game called
"Global Thermonuclear Warfare," and it cheerfully agrees.
As a
premise for a thriller, this is a masterstroke. The movie, however, could
easily go wrong by bogging us down in impenetrable computerese, or by ignoring
the technical details altogether and giving us a "Fail Safe" retread.
"WarGames" makes neither mistake. It convinces us that it knows
computers, and it makes its knowledge into an amazingly entertaining thriller.
(Note I do not claim the movie is accurate about computers -- only convincing.)
I've
described only the opening gambits of the plot, and I will reveal no more. It's
too much fun watching the story unwind. Another one of the pleasures of the
movie is the way it takes cardboard characters and fleshes them out. Two in
particular: the civilian chief of the US computer operation, played by Dabney
Coleman as a man who has his own little weakness for simple logic, and the Air
Force general in charge of the war room, played by Barry Corbin as a military
man who argues that men, not computers, should make the final nuclear
decisions.
"WarGames"
was directed by John Badham, best known for "Saturday Night Fever"
and the current "Blue Thunder," a thriller that I found considerably
less convincing on the technical level. There's not a scene here where Badham
doesn't seem to know what he's doing, weaving a complex web of computerese,
personalities and puzzles; the movie absorbs us on emotional and intellectual
levels at the same time. And the ending, a moment of blinding and yet utterly
elementary insight, is wonderful.
- RogerEbert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in
2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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