Thank you for writing this! It went past on my network page because someone I know reads your DW, and it caught my attention because I always liked WarGames too. So I comment partly to say thank you and mostly to save a copy in my email archive. :-)
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'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.)