“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Justin’s rating: I have yet to hack the Gibson

Justin’s review: My early teen crush on Ally Sheedy aside, WarGames stands significant in movie history for obsoleting itself, not once, but twice. And, yes, I’m fairly aware that “obsoleting” is probably not a verb, nor was ever meant to be outside of a doublespeak interrogation room in The Ministry of Love.

For its era, WarGames was a popular flick and probably remains as one of the essential ’80s teen movies in many a nostalgic mind. For newcomers, you’re likely to be bored, wander off from the tour, and probably fall into a well and die. They don’t teach survival skills in school any more.

A young Matthew Broderick is David, a cutting-edge computer hacker (well, cutting-edge for 1983) and phone phreak whose boredom leads him to hacking into NORAD’s main computer and challenging the artificial intelligence there to a “game.” David thinks it’s nothing more than a weird war game simulating World War III, but the computer — which has the actual nuclear launch codes — doesn’t differentiate so much between real and fantasy. Where’s Captain Kirk to be found when a computer needs smashing so that the society can go back to the Industrial Ages? Thus, David unwittingly starts a seemingly-inevitable countdown to a worldwide nuclear holocaust and becoming the most violent video game killer ever.

This era of on-the-brink atomic destruction, mostly between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., is the first thing that really dates the flick. Yes, there are still nukes in the world today and evil people who wish to use them, but we’ve long since passed from the Cold War period where it was a fact of life that, if one of our countries got grumpy at each other, we could all be dead before finishing breakfast. And I needed my Kix to get going in the morning! Also, come to think of it, probably a lot of Mutant Reviewers readers weren’t even alive when the Cold War ended. Wild.

No matter what your nuclear politics are — yes, Superman thinks they are bad — they were part of what kept the world relatively safe and stable throughout the eighties. To really “get” WarGames, you had to know this time period and the sheer fear that people had (rightly so) of mutually assured destruction. However, that’s not the era in which we live now, and decades later, it’s quickly passing into the history books.

The second way WarGames became obsolete is the same as any other hacker-style movie: the technology evolved. It’s always a quaint trip down happy lane to watch people use computers in ’80s flicks. Heck, back then we were gaga over the novelty and potential of computers. Computers and robots back then seemed to have the potential to do just about anything, including the ability to create a fully-formed fantasy woman. Probably the first people to see WarGames were in awe of all the hacking and lingo and gigantic floppy disc drives present.

This was also one of the first hacker movies ever, a spiritual predecessor to flicks like Sneakers and Hackers. Yet time has not been kind to old technology, and I severely doubt you will be impressed with a 1200-baud computer modem that requires you to put a phone receiver onto a little cradle when you have a smartphone that has far more computing power than probably all of the computers from 1983 combined.

Other than these two points of dated interest, WarGames doesn’t offer a lot. The characters fill their roles but say nothing too memorable; the NORAD room is impressive, but nothing that a James Bond lair hasn’t seen; and the climax is essentially a “stop the bomb from ticking before it reaches zero on the clock” with some padding. No, not pudding, padding. It’s enough to see once for the novelty and star power, I suppose.