War Games (1983)
Genre: Drama
Format Viewed: DVD
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
Just what I needed – a trip back to the 1980’s! And clearly, this was a movie that I should’ve seen a long, long time ago…
It’s really no secret just how much of a dork / geek / computer nerd yours truly is 99.42% of the time, so believe me, it was a real treat to get wind of this gem and its historically geek-like theme, although also admittedly shocking that somehow a computer-centric flick like this managed to slip by my radar for nearly two and a half decades! I stumbled onto this particular flick while reviewing a random list of the “geekiest movies” ever to come out of Hollywood – a list that also included such personal favorites as Hackers, The Net, and Virtuosity – at least for their vision, despite their lack of “accuracy” with regards to the technological world that they were based upon! Of course, while part of me is actually pretty glad that some of those theatrics don’t actually happen that way in real life, just as always it can be very amusing to come across folks from time to time that clearly learned everything they know about computers from watching a few clips of “virtual reality simulators” from this list of old favorites!
Not that my computer hasn’t ever gotten infected with the Cookie Monster Virus or been controlled by some devious hacker, despite the fact that it wasn’t even plugged into the wall…
I think one of the highlights of War Games for me was just getting to see Matthew Broderick in his younger days – pre-Ferris Bueller, even – just because I’m so used to him playing slightly older roles, a la Godzilla, Inspector Gadget, and so forth. Of course, it wasn’t hard to see the man as a young computer geek when one of the major roles that I remember him for was a robotic crime fighter who had helicopter blades in his hat! Needless to say, it was certainly a believable role for the guy and I like to think that I hold my Hollywood computer geeks to some pretty tough standards…
One thing that’s particularly amusing about this one for me, intentional or not, is just the amount of sheer dry humor throughout the movie – no doubt amusing because I love me some sarcasm like I love me a new pair of pants! References to the Whopper (albeit spelled W.O.P.R. in the movie) and many of the dialogs between Broderick’s character and his female lead’s, Ally Sheedy, added a quaint touch of humor to a script that was undoubtedly intended to be a straight-up thriller where the fate of the world lies in the hands of a computer simulation, and I think that really helped make the movie all the more enjoyable for me. Even the very best of thrillers in my world all have a splash of humor to them because my little world in general couldn’t survive without humor – the scene that immediately comes to mind is the exchange between Ben Affleck and Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears when they’re suiting up for their secret mission in the dead of night … Affleck’s character is freaking out about what they’re about to do because he essentially just does a desk job, whereas Schreiber thinks nothing of it and is too distracted by the fact that Affleck got to take his tickets for a fancy White House dinner. War Games had a lot of little nuggets like that thrown in as well, and at the end of an hour and a half, I appreciate things like that.
So now I think that I’ve officially completed “the list” and watched just about every single geeky movie that mattered from the last two decades, but of course, I’m still open for suggestions so if something comes to mind that I just have to see, by all means drop me a line and I’d be happy to add any additional tidbits of dorkhood to my NetFlix queue to eventually grace my home theater system here in Casa de Sevener! I’m not sure which parts of that last sentence are nerdier than the others, but I think even Matthew Broderick would agree, it’s ok to be a computer geek.
Go, Gadget, Go…
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