WarGames (1983)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

WarGames (1983) – J. Badham

No doubt this film is making the rounds of the streaming services now to remind us that Artificial Intelligence is hardly new (although the accessibility of Gen AI programs surely is bringing on the next industrial revolution).  I suppose I must have seen this in the cinema back then (since this was the time in high school when we didn’t have a VCR) but I hadn’t thought much about it since then.  Matthew Broderick is the computer whiz with the complete set-up in his bedroom (including 12 bps modem) which, when he isn’t playing Galaga down at the local arcade, he uses to hack into his high school’s computer to change his failing grades.  (Did our high school even have a computer in 1983?  That was contactable via phone lines?) Reality constraints aside, it is probably true that NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) would have had some honking big IBM machine hooked up to nuclear missile launchers, as in the film. But would said computer play anything more complicated than chess? In this film, it is ready to play global thermonuclear war with Broderick, featuring the USA vs. the Soviet Union. (The Day After was shown on TV this same year, featuring the consequences of such a war).  Director John Badham avoids dwelling on any consequences and seems to be channeling E.T.-era Spielberg here, as the film slowly morphs from small-town family/school life (with Ally Sheedy as sidekick/girlfriend material) to a sort of PG action-adventure when Broderick is arrested by the FBI (oops, spoiler) and needs to track down the computer scientist who created the AI computer (called Joshua) in the first place (on an island off the coast of the Pacific NW). It all comes down to retraining the computer using a series of games of tic-tac-toe. If only averting the end of the world were so easy.  Less than 20 years later, filmmakers were already positive that sentient machines would be treating humans as batteries instead (solving two problems at once).