WarGames (1983)
Directed by John Badham
High school student David Lightman has a talent for hacking. But while trying to hack into a computer system to play unreleased video games, he unwittingly taps into the Department of Defense's war computer and initiates a confrontation of global proportions. Together with his friend and a wizardly computer genius, David must race against time to outwit his opponent and prevent a nuclear Armageddon.
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What critics compared WarGames to
Nuclear missile horror stories used to be more frequent in the years after the Cold War first heated up, most famously 1964’s accidental diptych Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, followed by 1983’s accidental diptych WarGames and The Day After.
…the best “impending nuclear war” films are John Badham’s WarGames and Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile…
…but whatever happened to nail-biters such as WarGames (John Badham, 1983) and Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964)…
This is the lesson of WarGames (1983) after all: “The only winning move is not to play.”
The threat of nuclear war was evoked regularly in films such as WarGames (1983)…
I also had a strange fascination with films that dealt with those themes from the horrific presentations of the aftermath in the TV film, The Day After and the feature Testament to the dystopian depictions in Miracle Mile to the near-miss silliness of WarGames and the scarily timely docu-portrayal of a nuclear power plant accident in The China Syndrome.
Actually, it’s quite laughable, but for the sake of those sensitive to spoilers, I’ll leave it with this: it seems the screenwriters loved “2001,” “WarGames,” and “The Terminator” so much, they decided to pluck what they needed to fill their own creative pockets, even cribbing from Hitchcock for the grand finale.
Then there's the film's many obvious sources of inspiration, which include (but are not limited to) 2001, Blade Runner, Tron, Wargames, The Terminator, The Fugitive, the Bourne films, and Live Free or Die Hard.
When your movie is essentially ripping off “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “WarGames,” however, it is not as easy to forgive.
The two worked together on Badham's superior "WarGames" (1983), and they spend the short time discussing the similarities between the two films.
(A conversation with Halliday’s online avatar closely recalls a similar scene with Professor Falken in WarGames , and carries the same sense of melancholy.)
As a book, RPO is rooted in iconography without seemingly understanding the meaning behind any of it; a fanboy’s silly wet dream, harnessed around the thinnest of plots and silliest of set pieces (a whole sequence set inside the Matthew Broderick movie WarGames ?
He has the infectious grin of a young Matthew Broderick— the similarities between them might be distracting if it weren’t such a pleasure to be reminded of what it was like to discover that earlier cheeky grin back in the WarGames, Project X and Ferris Bueller era.
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Similar themes have been used and reused--even in previous movie hits, like 1983's "WarGames," a teen thriller with Matthew Broderick accidentally reprogramming the Pentagon's war machine computer (a film that may have inspired a lot of real-life hackers).
Just as Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy worked to unravel a conspiracy born of a stealth enemy, would-be sweethearts Jonathan and Nancy teamed to get to the bottom of the mystery that had targeted his brother and her best friend.
“Dungeons & Dragons,” earth tones, rotary phones, wood paneling, banana seats, “Aliens,” “Star Wars,” pudding cups, Stephen King, John Carpenter, rugby shirts, all manner of terrible haircuts, John Hughes, the Evil Empire, “War Games” and, above all, the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg — “Stranger Things” creators Ross and Matt Duffer reference and re-reference the cultural touchstones of an American childhood they are too young to have shared with loving, amber-hued abandon.
Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) continúa aportando los chispazos cómicos, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) sigue representando el saber técnico o la ética y este Cruise de 61 años recurre a más CGIs que de costumbre para sus piruetas y saltos al vacío del montón, no obstante las persecuciones en Abu Dabi, Roma y Venecia resultan bastante aburridas, el latiguillo del interés romántico asesinado ya cansa -ahora fallece Ilsa, reventada por un Gabriel que oficia de esbirro de La Entidad- y en sí todo el asunto de la “computadora bélica peligrosísima” sabe a rancio porque fue explorado demasiadas veces desde Juegos de Guerra ( WarGames , 1983), de John Badham, algo asimismo vinculado a la paranoia alrededor del holocausto nuclear y a los errores de la tecnocracia moderna.
“Choose or Die” might encourage you to think back to 1983, when “WarGames” ended with a salutary observation about Pentagon nuclear war simulations—“the only winning move is not to play.”
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Naturally, given the subject matter, Ender’s Game stokes memories of John Badham’s Wargames, another movie in which young gamers got to play boom boom but ultimately saw the folly following a brush with annihilation.
Nerve feels like a cross between the Jackass series and movies, in which people who should know better do stupid things for the amusement of the viewing public; Hackers (1995), in which a group of teenagers get embroiled in a cyber-virus plot; and Cruel Intentions (1999), the awful remake of Dangerous Liaisons, in which teenagers screw each other over for fun (you could easily see shades of Wargames (1983) and the Brat Pack movies of the 1980s in the film too).