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Is either of you a paleontologist? I desperately need a paleontologist
I can't remember not liking WarGames (1983). I watched relatively few movies growing up and even fewer from my supposedly formative decade, but John Badham's teenage techno-thriller was one of the exceptions. I took its moral to heart immediately, not to mention reclusive Stephen Falken with his pterosaur glider and his philosophical despair. Then I didn't see it again until 2008, and then not again until Monday night when it played at the HFA—preceded by Aleksandra Domanović's From yu to me (2013), a neat, poignant short about global politics and ccTLDs and women in computing which I recommend everyone take a half-hour and watch—as part of their dubiously themed but artistically well-chosen series on the early internet. I'd still call it a proto-internet movie rather than an internet movie, but as science fiction, as a snapshot of its era, and as a distressingly still relevant position on nuclear war, it really holds up.
As counterintuitive as it sounds to say of a movie in which a clever high-schooler accidentally hacks a military supercomputer instead of a game company and almost kicks off World War III, I think WarGames holds up in great part because it doesn't go big. The stakes are high, but the premise is simple, the technology is pointedly, ordinarily accessible, and the characters are all about the size and complexity of real life. In light of the current self-congratulatory fetish for all things nerdy and 1980's, it is especially notable that Matthew Broderick's David Lightman is just a kid. He's not a quip-tossing genius, too cool for school; he's not a downtrodden dork, either. He's a bright, unmotivated seventeen-year-old whose semi-failing grades would likely be straight A's if he paid half as much attention to his homework as he does to the red-and-blue-switched IMSAI 8080 in his bedroom and the blocky array of home electronics—modem, monitor, dot-matrix printer—with which he's surrounded it; he's faunlike, adenoidal, snarky without always getting the last word and gauche without being rude, and there's a sharp joke in the later inability of the proper authorities at NORAD to believe that he could have cracked their massively encrypted system without assistance or malice when he's exactly the sort of person who would. It happened to be a case of mistaken identity, but if he'd known who that mysterious menu of games belonged to, starting with "Falken's Maze" and ending with the tantalizing "Global Thermonuclear War," he'd probably still have white-hatted his way in, just to see if he could. And he's quick-witted and resourceful, with a phreak's tricks up his flannel sleeve when he needs to key himself out of an electronically locked office or call home from Colorado for free, but he's not omnipotent: he's adolescent. Impending nuclear holocaust is a little out of his pay grade. The screenplay by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes doesn't have quite the same handle on Ally Sheedy's Jennifer Mack, but I noted and really appreciated this time around that even if she spends most of her dialogue asking the audience's questions about computers, she's not arm candy. Her arc with David isn't about being won. They start from the sort of solid, casual friendship where she can give him a ride home on her scooter and he can invite her up to his bedroom without any elbow-nudging innuendo; they hook up almost tangentially in the process of endangering and then saving the world, mercifully without any don't-want-to-die-a-virgin nonsense. They carry on conversations through bathroom doors. When he calls for help from three states away, she doesn't just buy him a plane ticket to Oregon, she meets him at the airport because she's not going to be left out. She's even kind of a jock to David's geek, spurring his classic cry of frustration: "No, I can't, okay, Wonder Woman? I can't swim!" I don't want to make too much of their friendship because it never struck me as unusual as a young viewer, but I've seen worse in '80's teen movies since; it was nice not to see worse here. They're adorable together, sharing snacks and sodas as they play what they believe is the Soviet side of an as yet unreleased strategy game: "What's a trajectory heading?"–"I have no idea!"
The rest of the film is similarly pitched. David's parents are normally embarrassing suburban parents, his fellow hackers at a local university's computer lab semi-socialized but not cartoons—Eddie Deezen's Malvin is the closest to stereotype with his glasses and his hectoring and he's absolutely right that the key to the unknown system's backdoor lies in the past of its programmer. Even the government is no more supernally competent than anyone else in this story, which is part of the point and the problem. Dabney Coleman's Dr. McKittrick is short-tempered and protective of the supercomputer he's staked his reputation to introduce into the chain of command and he won't be put off the idea of David as a Soviet catspaw, as if forgetting that he got his own start as a young and eager clipboard-carrier to the greatest name in computer science since Alan Turing. Barry Corbin's General Beringer is genial and technophobic and doesn't want to retaliate against an apparent Soviet first strike if he doesn't have to, but unlike the men in the silos in the film's pseudo-apocalyptic prologue, he's willing to push the button if his President so commands (and his President is Reagan, which makes the whole thing even more hair-trigger in hindsight). The story itself is hardly science fiction at all. All of the hacking techniques demonstrated by David over the course of the film, from the serial phone-pinging then known as demon dialing to simply knowing where the school keeps its system passwords, are accurate to the time. There are technical goofs or glosses in the various computer setups, and the most impressive one was faked up out of hammer-painted plywood and blinkenlights dancing to the tune of an Apple II, but the use of computers in this movie is realistic, right down to the collapsing boundaries of public and private space. The one real piece of science fiction is the nature of the supercomputer and even that's an open question for most of the film. For all its pulse-pounding light show, the climax turns in a real sense on the question of genre, whether McKittrick's WOPR, Falken's Joshua, is an artificial intelligence or just a tactical computer with enormous banks of data and very good learning algorithms—and which will be more likely not to blow up the world.
And I suspect I will always love Stephen Falken, brightly bitter, lankily British, and fully as impatient with authority as any American teen. The character's name points toward the late Stephen Hawking and the role was written with John Lennon in mind, but as played by John Wood he most strongly recalls a latter-day Turing, only his death at forty-one was a government forgery and his Christopher-ghost in the machine is his loved, lost child, whose name he gave to his dream of a machine that could learn from its mistakes. Plotwise, he's the cynicism and fatalism of the adult world that Jennifer and David's youth and hope and stubbornness will sting back to life, but he's not a dry, wise, reserved mentor—he's abrupt and excitable, weirdly cheerful about the prospect of bees taking over the planet after humanity's radioactive demise. I never did Listen with Mother (1950–82), so it was not until this last viewing that I recognized the significance of the first lines of his extinction spiel: "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin." He would have listened to the program with the first Joshua, that fair-haired toddler visible in the old broadcast about Falken's research that David gets on tape out of the library (Jennifer decides the scientist is "amazing-looking"; she's not wrong. He looks even better in his Pacific Northwest hermit phase). Some joke on himself, to tell a bedtime story after all these years—of inevitable, comforting annihilation, to a pair of strange children just about the right age to wake painful memories. It is sentimentally predictable that the events of the film should give him back his faith in humanity, which is why it's much better that the events of the film justify his faith in his machine. Remind me to be glad there was no chance of Spielberg ever directing this thing.
So, sure, the filmmakers were guessing about the countdown direction of DEFCON, sure, the huge tactical screens across which Joshua fireworks its crucial games of tic-tac-toe and thermonuclear war were more impressive than anything NORAD really had under Cheyenne Mountain at the time, sure, the ability of an FBI-arrested teenager to escape from a top-secret military installation by blending in with a tour group is almost certainly the least plausible thing in the movie: it still holds up. It has been visited only lightly by the sexism fairy and not at all by the fatal gap between the imagined future and the real thing. This particular near-miss with Armageddon maybe couldn't happen anymore, but it still looks like it could have happened then. And it is very hard for me to think of it in terms of nostalgia when the nuclear football is back on the table. There is nothing safety-blanket-like about David's sob of "Oh, Jesus, I really wanted to learn how to swim. I swear to God I did . . . I always thought there was going to be plenty of time" and nothing uniquely 1983 about hoping there is still time, for one reason or another. The script is perhaps wistful in thinking that our technological children will be wiser than their meatsack parents, but it's refreshing to see a techno-thriller ultimately stand down from its anxiety. The world-saving ending of WarGames isn't the destruction of the machine, it's the fierce smile on Falken's face as he watches his intelligent computer—his child—finally learning for itself the one rule of game-playing he never could teach it, the first law of MAD that some flesh-and-blood leaders even as we speak give every evidence of failing to grasp. He once called it the lesson of "futility," but as we watch Joshua prove or achieve sentience we understand it's nothing so bleak. "A strange game," the machine muses, its voice the synthesized echo of its parent's. "The only winning move is not to play."
(There is an obvious question about what will become of Joshua after the credits roll, since we now have an AI at loose ends in the basement of NORAD. My mother who saw the film with me thought that it should be given some kind of legally recognized status and then permitted to play games professionally, like a proto-Deep Blue. It likes games and it likes people. And it understands bluffing now, so it'll make a killing at poker.)
In short, I remain very fond of this movie and I wish more people in power believed its conclusions, because I don't want to die in a crater of radioactive glass, however nice the succeeding bee civilization would turn out. This move brought to you by my winning backers at Patreon.
As counterintuitive as it sounds to say of a movie in which a clever high-schooler accidentally hacks a military supercomputer instead of a game company and almost kicks off World War III, I think WarGames holds up in great part because it doesn't go big. The stakes are high, but the premise is simple, the technology is pointedly, ordinarily accessible, and the characters are all about the size and complexity of real life. In light of the current self-congratulatory fetish for all things nerdy and 1980's, it is especially notable that Matthew Broderick's David Lightman is just a kid. He's not a quip-tossing genius, too cool for school; he's not a downtrodden dork, either. He's a bright, unmotivated seventeen-year-old whose semi-failing grades would likely be straight A's if he paid half as much attention to his homework as he does to the red-and-blue-switched IMSAI 8080 in his bedroom and the blocky array of home electronics—modem, monitor, dot-matrix printer—with which he's surrounded it; he's faunlike, adenoidal, snarky without always getting the last word and gauche without being rude, and there's a sharp joke in the later inability of the proper authorities at NORAD to believe that he could have cracked their massively encrypted system without assistance or malice when he's exactly the sort of person who would. It happened to be a case of mistaken identity, but if he'd known who that mysterious menu of games belonged to, starting with "Falken's Maze" and ending with the tantalizing "Global Thermonuclear War," he'd probably still have white-hatted his way in, just to see if he could. And he's quick-witted and resourceful, with a phreak's tricks up his flannel sleeve when he needs to key himself out of an electronically locked office or call home from Colorado for free, but he's not omnipotent: he's adolescent. Impending nuclear holocaust is a little out of his pay grade. The screenplay by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes doesn't have quite the same handle on Ally Sheedy's Jennifer Mack, but I noted and really appreciated this time around that even if she spends most of her dialogue asking the audience's questions about computers, she's not arm candy. Her arc with David isn't about being won. They start from the sort of solid, casual friendship where she can give him a ride home on her scooter and he can invite her up to his bedroom without any elbow-nudging innuendo; they hook up almost tangentially in the process of endangering and then saving the world, mercifully without any don't-want-to-die-a-virgin nonsense. They carry on conversations through bathroom doors. When he calls for help from three states away, she doesn't just buy him a plane ticket to Oregon, she meets him at the airport because she's not going to be left out. She's even kind of a jock to David's geek, spurring his classic cry of frustration: "No, I can't, okay, Wonder Woman? I can't swim!" I don't want to make too much of their friendship because it never struck me as unusual as a young viewer, but I've seen worse in '80's teen movies since; it was nice not to see worse here. They're adorable together, sharing snacks and sodas as they play what they believe is the Soviet side of an as yet unreleased strategy game: "What's a trajectory heading?"–"I have no idea!"
The rest of the film is similarly pitched. David's parents are normally embarrassing suburban parents, his fellow hackers at a local university's computer lab semi-socialized but not cartoons—Eddie Deezen's Malvin is the closest to stereotype with his glasses and his hectoring and he's absolutely right that the key to the unknown system's backdoor lies in the past of its programmer. Even the government is no more supernally competent than anyone else in this story, which is part of the point and the problem. Dabney Coleman's Dr. McKittrick is short-tempered and protective of the supercomputer he's staked his reputation to introduce into the chain of command and he won't be put off the idea of David as a Soviet catspaw, as if forgetting that he got his own start as a young and eager clipboard-carrier to the greatest name in computer science since Alan Turing. Barry Corbin's General Beringer is genial and technophobic and doesn't want to retaliate against an apparent Soviet first strike if he doesn't have to, but unlike the men in the silos in the film's pseudo-apocalyptic prologue, he's willing to push the button if his President so commands (and his President is Reagan, which makes the whole thing even more hair-trigger in hindsight). The story itself is hardly science fiction at all. All of the hacking techniques demonstrated by David over the course of the film, from the serial phone-pinging then known as demon dialing to simply knowing where the school keeps its system passwords, are accurate to the time. There are technical goofs or glosses in the various computer setups, and the most impressive one was faked up out of hammer-painted plywood and blinkenlights dancing to the tune of an Apple II, but the use of computers in this movie is realistic, right down to the collapsing boundaries of public and private space. The one real piece of science fiction is the nature of the supercomputer and even that's an open question for most of the film. For all its pulse-pounding light show, the climax turns in a real sense on the question of genre, whether McKittrick's WOPR, Falken's Joshua, is an artificial intelligence or just a tactical computer with enormous banks of data and very good learning algorithms—and which will be more likely not to blow up the world.
And I suspect I will always love Stephen Falken, brightly bitter, lankily British, and fully as impatient with authority as any American teen. The character's name points toward the late Stephen Hawking and the role was written with John Lennon in mind, but as played by John Wood he most strongly recalls a latter-day Turing, only his death at forty-one was a government forgery and his Christopher-ghost in the machine is his loved, lost child, whose name he gave to his dream of a machine that could learn from its mistakes. Plotwise, he's the cynicism and fatalism of the adult world that Jennifer and David's youth and hope and stubbornness will sting back to life, but he's not a dry, wise, reserved mentor—he's abrupt and excitable, weirdly cheerful about the prospect of bees taking over the planet after humanity's radioactive demise. I never did Listen with Mother (1950–82), so it was not until this last viewing that I recognized the significance of the first lines of his extinction spiel: "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin." He would have listened to the program with the first Joshua, that fair-haired toddler visible in the old broadcast about Falken's research that David gets on tape out of the library (Jennifer decides the scientist is "amazing-looking"; she's not wrong. He looks even better in his Pacific Northwest hermit phase). Some joke on himself, to tell a bedtime story after all these years—of inevitable, comforting annihilation, to a pair of strange children just about the right age to wake painful memories. It is sentimentally predictable that the events of the film should give him back his faith in humanity, which is why it's much better that the events of the film justify his faith in his machine. Remind me to be glad there was no chance of Spielberg ever directing this thing.
So, sure, the filmmakers were guessing about the countdown direction of DEFCON, sure, the huge tactical screens across which Joshua fireworks its crucial games of tic-tac-toe and thermonuclear war were more impressive than anything NORAD really had under Cheyenne Mountain at the time, sure, the ability of an FBI-arrested teenager to escape from a top-secret military installation by blending in with a tour group is almost certainly the least plausible thing in the movie: it still holds up. It has been visited only lightly by the sexism fairy and not at all by the fatal gap between the imagined future and the real thing. This particular near-miss with Armageddon maybe couldn't happen anymore, but it still looks like it could have happened then. And it is very hard for me to think of it in terms of nostalgia when the nuclear football is back on the table. There is nothing safety-blanket-like about David's sob of "Oh, Jesus, I really wanted to learn how to swim. I swear to God I did . . . I always thought there was going to be plenty of time" and nothing uniquely 1983 about hoping there is still time, for one reason or another. The script is perhaps wistful in thinking that our technological children will be wiser than their meatsack parents, but it's refreshing to see a techno-thriller ultimately stand down from its anxiety. The world-saving ending of WarGames isn't the destruction of the machine, it's the fierce smile on Falken's face as he watches his intelligent computer—his child—finally learning for itself the one rule of game-playing he never could teach it, the first law of MAD that some flesh-and-blood leaders even as we speak give every evidence of failing to grasp. He once called it the lesson of "futility," but as we watch Joshua prove or achieve sentience we understand it's nothing so bleak. "A strange game," the machine muses, its voice the synthesized echo of its parent's. "The only winning move is not to play."
(There is an obvious question about what will become of Joshua after the credits roll, since we now have an AI at loose ends in the basement of NORAD. My mother who saw the film with me thought that it should be given some kind of legally recognized status and then permitted to play games professionally, like a proto-Deep Blue. It likes games and it likes people. And it understands bluffing now, so it'll make a killing at poker.)
In short, I remain very fond of this movie and I wish more people in power believed its conclusions, because I don't want to die in a crater of radioactive glass, however nice the succeeding bee civilization would turn out. This move brought to you by my winning backers at Patreon.
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You've changed my opinion of the film by pointing out several extra reasons to like it which I hadn't already thought of. For example, I had never caught the ambiguity of whether Joshua really was an AI; I'd always simply assumed he was. (Although it certainly seemed possible that Falken had implemented an AI ‘under the radar’ – I was sure he knew Joshua was truly intelligent, but it seemed quite possible that he'd never quite got round to making that clear to the NORAD brass.)
When I was a child I had the film's novelisation on my bookshelf. (I've always rather liked film novelisations, in spite of a lot of them being terribly badly written, for the insight they sometimes give into the scriptwriter's intentions – many of them seem to have been written with privileged access to material beyond what ended up in the actual screenplay.) That version of the story slightly re-characterises David and Jennifer's initial relationship – it paints him as something rather more in the direction of "downtrodden dork with something of a frustrated crush on her" than the "solid friendship" starting point you describe here. So now I wonder if the filming process deliberately changed that, or just left it ambiguous enough for people to see it either way.
(Obviously, this is a question that can only be answered by a rewatch. The hardship.)
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You're welcome! Thank you for leaving the comment and letting me know.
(Although it certainly seemed possible that Falken had implemented an AI ‘under the radar’ – I was sure he knew Joshua was truly intelligent, but it seemed quite possible that he'd never quite got round to making that clear to the NORAD brass.)
I agree that no one else at NORAD, even McKittrick, thinks of the WOPR as a potential AI rather than just a very complex set of programs for running simulations and evaluating outcomes. David anthropomorphizes Joshua almost at once, but having a name and a voice will do that. (I am not sure that Jennifer knows enough about computers to differentiate machine learning and AI, but that's all right, she's an audience stand-in and we're certainly not expected to.) I really don't think that Falken knows for sure that he succeeded with Joshua—or Joshua succeeded with itself—until that final scene, which gets right outside the WOPR's remit of playing the game to win. This one's a rigged game. But if all Joshua did was mechanically "look for ways to improve its score," it would never have taken that step back and seen it.
That version of the story slightly re-characterises David and Jennifer's initial relationship – it paints him as something rather more in the direction of "downtrodden dork with something of a frustrated crush on her" than the "solid friendship" starting point you describe here. So now I wonder if the filming process deliberately changed that, or just left it ambiguous enough for people to see it either way.
Interesting! I imagine one would need to compare the novel to the shooting script to see whether it stuck more closely to the original conception or whether it took advantage of its wordcount to expand on the film: I can see it going either way. The screen version may also have evolved based on the actors' rapport. I am personally more in favor of the friendship because frustrated crushes are a dime a dozen, but it is always interesting to see how stories change.
(Obviously, this is a question that can only be answered by a rewatch. The hardship.)
Be brave!
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You're right, of course, that I don't know for sure that the WarGames novel I had did have any privileged access to the writer's original conception of the story. Some novelisations clearly do, because they include extra material not in the movie which later turns out to be a deleted scene reinserted in the Director's Cut edition or provided as a DVD bonus feature, at which point you realise the novel's author certainly had known something from behind the curtain, as it were. But not all, so yes, this particular tweak could perfectly well have been inserted by the novel rather than removed in filming.
(I suppose I could go and prowl round my mum's bookshelves and see if she's still got it, but I feel as if I'd probably have found it already by now if she had.)
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And I remember the scientist, Falkin, with his kite, and the hack with the telephone.
It's a good movie, and I wish more people did too. Remembered that not-playing is an option in things large and small.
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You know when a gangster gets peppered with automatic gunfire [... I was trying out and rejecting a narco drama last night], and your own body jerks a little--it was like that, too. Weirdly beautiful, viscerally ghost-painful.
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Agreed. And beautifully timed: by the end it's nothing but people watching screens and it's spellbinding.
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LOL today it'd probably be all greenscreen. I like it the way it is.
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It was all live—the graphics were designed and generated on an HP 9845C system, painstakingly transferred to 35 mm film, and projected onto the dozen enormous screens on-set. According to the visual effects supervisor, "It was the first film to have real time 24fps computer graphic displays (as crude as they now seem)." Wikipedia claims the film won an Academy Scientific and Technical Award for it and if so, it was well-deserved.
(Back to the Oscars! At the 56th Academy Awards, Wargames lost Best Original Screenplay to Tender Mercies, Best Sound to The Right Stuff, and Best Cinematography to Fanny and Alexander. I am . . . not going to argue with that last one. It should maybe have lost Best Original Screenplay to Fanny and Alexander, too. It was not nominated for Best Visual Effects because it does not look as though the category existed as such that year, but it would almost certainly have lost to Return of the Jedi, which got a Special Achievement Award instead.)
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ARGH
Best Sound to The Right Stuff
BAH
and Best Cinematography to Fanny and Alexander.
...OK not arguing there, that was the first movie I ever saw on VIDEOTAPE (it came in two or three giant two-packs and my parents kept it out for a couple of weeks) and even on that, you could tell how mindbendingly gorgeous it was.
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Thank you. I really don't think it's just residual early imprinting. I've seen something different and interesting in it every time I've rewatched it as an adult.
I vividly remember the computer going through the war simulations (the weird and ominous names for the various scenarios to go with every conceivable corner of the world in which a nuclear war could start), the blossoming bombs obliterating the map-screen, until at last, as with tic-tac-toe, it reached its conclusion.
Yes! "Syrian Provocation." "Zaire Alliance." "Atlantic Heavy." I can't remember the circumstances under which I first saw WarGames, but I can remember the tension of not knowing if it would hit on a "winning" combination of tactics just as it had brute-forced its way to the launch codes, because we the audience knew it would be a disaster, but we didn't know yet if Joshua would understand. But Falken is smiling, as the screen fills over and over again with soft white detonations of light: seeing what he'd always hoped for, which is not the end of the world after all.
And I remember the scientist, Falkin, with his kite, and the hack with the telephone.
I do feel nostalgic about the technology, not in the sense that I necessarily wish to return to it (although I would not miss the societal pressure of constant connectivity), but those black screens with blinking green letters and reams of fan-folded, mint-green printer paper are very dear to me. I remember acoustically coupled modems. I remember not carrying a wallet or a phone, but always making sure I had change in my pockets for a payphone. WOPR is beautifully designed to look like that smoothed-off Brutalist style of mid-century military hardware that made me think of soldering irons and oscilloscopes.
And I had those wooden dinosaur skeleton model kits growing up, but I kind of assumed most people my age did, like building model rockets. I did not have a pterosaur glider. I envied Stephen Falken both his many-pocketed, olive-green coat and his glider. And his house. It looked full of books and tinkering.
It's a good movie, and I wish more people did too. Remembered that not-playing is an option in things large and small.
Yes. You're right that the stakes don't always have to be war.
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That is totally my favourite part of the entire movie. And IIRC doesn't it kind of fade out with the light on his face, and then a soft blackout? That's how I remember it anyway. (Then you get the happy ending....but we've already had it.) HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS (....wait, I might've jumbled it. It doesn't matter too much tho.)
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Thank you! I enjoyed it so much and I was sick of not writing.
Here, have a photo of John Wood. He looks amazing-looking and rather like someone just collared Falken for an official portrait and he's about as into it as you'd expect from a man who spent the last ten years living on an island with a lot of model dinosaurs:
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OH oh I was gonna show you this
http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/bells/index.htm
'Waiting on the set of a film that was never completed, with Burr DeBenning and David Battley'
http://www.mckellen.com/images/0090.jpg (too big to embed)
LOOK LOOK LOOK
http://www.mckellen.com/blog/index.htm
HE BLOGGED DURING MOVIES
Magneto's Lair and The Grey Book were among the earliest blogs anywhere on the Internet, among the first few on non-technical subjects, probably the first widely-read and most likely the first about entertainment. Latest blog entries are about The Hobbit. (he doesn't say that, it's obvs the webmaster)
http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/xmen/lair.htm
Everyone wants to know will I look like this in the movie. I certainly like Magneto's awareness of his body. Maybe I'm doing this movie in praise of sexy 60 year olds.
I have enjoyed playing outsiders who want power - warriors like Coriolanus - though never a man who is so capable of achieving his ends as the master of magnetism.
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SUFFER WITH THE REST OF US.
'Waiting on the set of a film that was never completed, with Burr DeBenning and David Battley'
Thousand ships, launched.
HE BLOGGED DURING MOVIES
Oh, wow. I had no idea—I was barely paying attention to the internet in 1999, much less to the notion that actors might keep their production diaries online. Has any of this been collected in print? It's terrific!
"Maybe I'm doing this movie in praise of sexy 60 year olds."
I mean, I can't say it didn't work.
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I mean Michael Pennington has one similar enough it makes me wonder if they have the same Ancient Webmaster
http://www.michaelpennington.me.uk/
It's totally the same thing, there's a lot of text and info, but you really have to poke around.
Unlike Pennington I don't think McKellen's written books -- there's this, which is part of a group
https://www.amazon.com/Ian-Charleson-Tribute-McKellen/dp/0094702500/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521147702&sr=1-9&keywords=ian+mckellen
and his Shakespeare on Stage Lear book
https://www.amazon.com/Ian-McKellen-Macbeth-Shakespeare-Stage-ebook/dp/B00CNVQSR8/ref=sr_1_13?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521147735&sr=1-13&keywords=ian+mckellen
Oh yeah, you know he narrated the Odyssey right? Were you the one who told me that?
https://www.amazon.com/Homer-Odyssey/dp/014086430X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521147702&sr=1-1&keywords=ian+mckellen
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It rewards revisiting. I had thought it would, but I was still so glad.
Neither my mother nor I understood why it was so thinly attended on Monday, unless it was the impending storm. It's WarGames: we expected to have to fight off fans and newbies with a stick. At least we got to see it.
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I got my first computer in 1982, and my first modem a year later. (This was only a few years after I'd taken a BASIC programming course that involved using acoustic coupler modems and printing terminals to dial in to the computer.)
The ferry and island scenes were filmed very near where I was living at the time. (My parents later retired there, and you can see the ferry dock from their back deck.) When I saw the movie in a theater not too far away, there were cheers when that scene came up. The guy on the boat was an actual ferry crewmember, too. (Though I still don't know how they went from running down the boat launch ramp to being on the ferry dock; short range teleportation?)
Heck, even the back cover ad from the computer magazine David was reading was for Elephant brand floppy disks, which I bought at the time. :-D
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Nice! I was once in a theater where the scenery got a standing ovation. (The movie was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), so that was definitely the best part of the experience.) Are your parents on Anderson Island itself?
Heck, even the back cover ad from the computer magazine David was reading was for Elephant brand floppy disks, which I bought at the time.
That is a wonderful set of reasons. Thank you for sharing them with me.
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No, they're on the mainland up the hill from the dock.
Their view:
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That's lovely.
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Thank you!
I'd like to see it again, but I sort of wish I'd seen it a second time during the years when it would have seemed less relevant.
It was somewhat more of a period piece in 2008.
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You're welcome! I was pleased to have the opportunity.
I was an early computer nerd and spent a fair bit of that decade panicked that yes, we were all going to die because we had a completely incompetent President who liked to joke about nuking our opponent. Plus ca change...
See reply above to
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You're welcome!
I saw this movie on VHS, a few years after it’s debut. At the time I was working with talking Apple I software, so it was a kick when they turned on the speech synthesizer!
Oh, that's wonderful. I did not know that was your field.
(I couldn't remember if I ever noticed before that Joshua's voice is an electronically modified version of Falken's, but it leapt out at me this time—and could be confirmed on IMDb—and it works perfectly.)
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You're welcome!
I know I did not see the movie for the first time in theaters; I have actually no idea how I did. I suspect either it played on TV or my parents rented it (or taped it off the TV, like most of the movies of my childhood). After that it just kept turning up.
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This particular near-miss with Armageddon maybe couldn't happen anymore, but it still looks like it could have happened then.
"Madam Secretary" had an episode where this near-miss almost happened, and it was due to a simulation. It was perhaps an homage to this movie; and it seemed to make the point that very little has changed. Afterwards, the Secretary advocates getting the US and Russia off of the hair-trigger system.
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Thank you!
"Madam Secretary" had an episode where this near-miss almost happened, and it was due to a simulation. It was perhaps an homage to this movie; and it seemed to make the point that very little has changed.
I'd have thought of WarGames, too, with a computer simulation of a nuclear first strike mistaken for the real thing. That's neat. (And, yes, too relevant.)
Afterwards, the Secretary advocates getting the US and Russia off of the hair-trigger system.
It's a good idea! Dammit.