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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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)