I hadn’t seen Wargames since we watched it on SuperChoice one weekend when I was a kid. I remember thinking it was okay, and fun, and man I wished I had a computer (did you see the size of those floppy discs?) and I figured it was definitely time to check this one out again.

Despite a score that doesn’t always serve the story, the film is very much an anti-war film, and also makes the argument that the human element shouldn’t be removed in safeguarding our world, especially when a computer program (that seems on the verge of being AI) decides that there’s no real difference between a game and reality.

David (Matthew Broderick) is a smart kid with oblivious parents who obviously buy him everything; he has his own phone line, a computer, disk drives, sound equipment, everything he needs to hack (something that wasn’t illegal until 1984) into any other computer on the planet. Oh, the days before online security.

He’s mainly interested in making sure his grades are good enough or changed so that he doesn’t end up in summer school and finding new games to play. He’s also intrigued by Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) and fixes her grades as well.

When he goes looking for a games company in California to hack into to try their new product he actually ends up plugging into NORAD and interacting with a supercomputer programmed for war simulation, a computer programmed to win a nuclear engagement.

Or at least that’s the way Falken (John Wood) programmed it.

When David tries a program entitled Global Thermonuclear War he and Jennifer think it’s just a game, but it’s actually bringing the world to the brink of war as Falken and McKittrick’s (Dabney Coleman) supercomputer continues to play the game, triggering U.S. defenses with the possible threat of launched Russian missiles.

With time ticking out on the clock and the world, the government tries to get David to admit who he is working for, but the young man and Jennifer have to find Falken so that they can all confront the supercomputer (WOPR) together.

Hearing some of the stories now about how close we came to nuclear annihilation in the 80s this one is a little more frightening even if the lack of security on the computers is laughable, not to mention seeing these old models and remembering when they were top of the line.

It’s fun, and it’s interesting to see how lots of things have changed since then, including learning how the dinosaurs became extinct. It’s enjoyable and Badham has always been a good director, a journeyman director that has never seemed to have a superhit but has always made solid and entertaining films.