© 2006 William Ahearn

When “WarGames” was released there was a rumor making the rounds that it was based on an exploit of America’s best-known hacker, Kevin Mitnick. While the story isn’t true, it lent some outlaw credibility to a movie that didn’t really need it. At its heart, “WarGames” turns the possibility of thermonuclear war into a fluffy moral about mutually assured destruction and the idiocies of the Cold War.

What makes “WarGames” such a good movie is that most of the characters are played against type and it doesn’t reduce the narrative drama into a struggle of good versus evil. David Lightman, who breaks into NORAD while trying to hack into a computer game maker’s server, isn’t played as a sinister thief or a maladjusted teen but as a curious kid who wants the latest game before anyone else gets one. Even the first scene — in which two US Air Force officers are in a missile silo discussing growing sensimilla and then one refuses to turn his key to launch the missiles when ordered to do so — violates the image of the cold-hearted military. It becomes interesting later on in the movie when you find out that some 22% of the missile commanders refused to launch the missiles and that the marijuana had nothing to do with the decision. It’s an odd choice in a story that doesn’t bog itself down in side road explorations of ethics or legalities and that is another aspect of “WarGames” that makes it so entertaining: the explanations and expositions are entwined into a narrative that keeps moving.

What “WarGames” plays on isn’t the notion that the computer will take jobs from people who can do them (as in “Desk Set”) but it will do the job that any rational individual might not do, like launch a civilization-killing thermonuclear war (as the Doomsday Machine would in “Strangelove”). The fluffy moral is that the computer, WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), has been programmed to learn from war game simulations having been created by the maudlin and disaffected Dr. Stephen Falken whose backdoor password is the name of his dead son, Joshua. Once again, we have voice interaction between the computer and the hero. The computer learns that neither side can win in a nuclear holocaust and calls off an actual missile response to the simulated attack. Not exactly a deep concept but the film doesn’t get lost in self-importance.

While there are numerous minor glitches — for the most part — the representations of computers are credible and aren’t jazzed up with images of electro-urban landscapes (“Tron,” “Hackers”) or ridiculously lush graphics on what is actually an 8-bit video system. David Lightman works with a command line interface and doesn’t clog the dialog with computer gibberish. That Lightman couldn’t have hacked into NORAD isn’t a major suspension of disbelief considering how humorously the film takes itself.

Lightman is using an IMSAI 8080 and for an explanation of how it and the peripherals were cast in the film, go here.

WarGames is a geek classic and deserves the distinction.