VGFlicks: WarGames (Part 2)

Go here for Part 1.

The escape

Makes sense that David would get along better with the
computer guy at NORAD than with any of the agents who
are trying to imprison him for life...

"It's not what it looks like! I was just hacking
and... I'm not helping my case, am I?"

McKittrick begins his interrogation of David, going about it in a friendly way, by showing how things work around the NORAD base and how the teen hacking into their system and playing with the WOPR has put everyone on edge. David sticks to his story; he was looking for a games manufacturer, thought the simulation was a video game, and the A.I., which he nicknames Joshua, called him back to resume the game. The topic of the plane tickets to Paris that David reserved for himself and Jennifer comes up as what the agents think is an escape attempt with an accomplice on the teen's part. They even talk about the late Stephen Falken and McKittrick mentions that Falken is a brilliant man. Present tense.

...Uh oh.

In McKittrick’s office, David takes advantage of a moment during which the man is pulled away to log into Joshua through the room’s computer. His findings:

-Joshua’s plan is to increase the level of alert to DEFCON 1, which will kickstart World War 3;

-It estimates 72 million casualties on the American territory if it succeeds;

-It does not know the difference between simulation and reality, and intends to play to the end;

-Oh, and it has looked into the Department of Defense's files; it knows that Stephen Falken is not dead, and it even knows its creator’s new name (Robert Hume) and address (on Goose Island, Oregon).

And now, the only one who knows what's going
on is being taken away. That's gonna make
stopping the damn thing trickier...

Hack open, Sesame!

Before he can learn more, David is arrested and locked into the infirmary again, though he tries to warn everyone about Joshua's threat as he’s taken there. Although, props to the kid, he’s resourceful – using only a couple of items that he finds in his temporary jail, he manages to escape the room he’s locked in before the arrival of the FBI. I would have called this the “MacGyver method”, but MacGyver started in 1985, this film predates the show. It helps that the officer who was supposed to guard the teen was a moron. After a trip through the air vents, David leaves by inserting himself into the tour group on their way out of the NORAD premises.

Finding Falken

"David, is this because of what you did with
my grade?" Would he be in such big trouble if
it had all been only about your damn grade?

At a phone booth later, David tries to call Stephen Falken through the man’s new identity. When that doesn’t work, he calls Jennifer and tries to get her to book a plane ticket for him to Oregon. And she comes to join him down there since it’s only at a three-hour drive from Seattle. From there, they take a ferry to Goose Island.

Meanwhile, WOPR/Joshua keeps on feeding false data into NORAD’s computers, making them believe that the country is surrounded by Soviet submarines ready to strike. The Department of Defense is in contact with the Soviet Union, being told that no, there isn’t an ongoing attack and, in fact, America is the one provoking them right now (due to their responses to the false data). The DEFCON Level is risen to 2.

"Stephen Falken? I don't know who that is,
but he sounds like a clever man."

David and Jennifer arrive at the island and are promptly attacked by a pteranodon. Jurassic Park? But we’re 10 years too early for that! No, it’s just a robot. Arriving on the scene, “Robert Hume” is quick to dismiss these high school students as trespassers… until they call him Falken and mention Joshua. The expert in artificial intelligence now lives as a recluse on the island, with little to no contacts with the outside world. Though, he did hear about the War Game that David sparked. He even chuckles about the pair’s original choice of target in the simulation. Las Vegas, struck by Soviet missiles? “A suitably biblical ending to the place,” he thinks. Bit of a jerk, isn’t he?

"Please?"
"Don't try, you won't convince me."
"Pretty, pretty please?"
"Nope! Definitely not convinced, young lady."
"The biggest pretty please ever?"

Stephen Falken believes that life on Earth follows cycles, that if nature killed the dinosaurs to start anew with something else, perhaps it’s time this happens to humanity as well, and it’s only ironic that such would happen by their own hubris and weapons and not by some outside force. Dude’s lost all hope for mankind, and it shows. He then says that he never could teach his creation about futility – that some games either can’t or shouldn’t be won.

He gives an example with Tic-Tac-Toe, a game which, if both sides play perfectly, can’t be won as all matches will end in a tie. Falken doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the people at NORAD, who believe that a nuclear war could be won, that human losses in the millions would be an acceptable tradeoff. Falken is perfectly content with letting humanity destroy itself, he thinks it’s been a long time coming. David and Jennifer’s argue the opposite; they're only 17! That if the real Joshua was still alive, perhaps Falken wouldn't be saying these things. Their arguments seem fruitless, but the scientists nonetheless agrees to let them stay the night since they might die before the end of it.

The final countdown

(Wait, crap, this song’s from 1986! But it works too well)

Instead of laying down and waiting for death, David and Jennifer leave Falken’s cabin, and talk about future plans they had, that might never happen now. “I never learned to swim!” laments David. Or so they thought, but then a helicopter arrives, with Falken in the pilot’s seat. He changed his mind after all! And good thing, too, as time is running out.

"Your 'biggest pretty please ever'
made me reconsider!"

Not the kind of reunion either of them was
expecting.

They get to the NORAD complex in Cheyenne in the nick of time. Literally as the base was being shut down due to the detection of several USSR missile launches, with its heavy doors closed and impenetrable. In the time it took them to get there, the DEFCON Level had been raised to 1. The personnel is surprised to see Professor Falken showing up at such a dire time, but not surprised to see him alive. Falken says that, logically, this threat cannot possibly exist; the USSR knows that America has the resources and weaponry to destroy them, so why would they ever attack?

Seeing firsthand what a real nuclear war
would turn into.

Unfortunately, since time is running out, they can’t go out and check whether those submarines and missiles really are headed towards America. They have to make a very risky gamble by calling the three bases that will be struck by these Soviet missiles first and waiting for the impact in Maine, North Dakota and Alaska. Everyone waits in silence for an agonizing minute as they witness the impacts on the screens, then listen for a response. The response comes – none of the bases have been hit! Everyone’s alive! It WAS a simulation after all! ...Or was it?

Winner: None

Joshua noticed that its attacks didn’t do anything. A 10-digit code appears with random letters and numbers on the screen, and the staff of NORAD seems unable to cancel any of the measures they had set up in response to the threat they thought they were facing. Nobody can log on to their accounts, the WOPR has locked everyone out of the system. And it’s trying to figure out the launch codes so it can toss the nukes by itself.

Games got them in this trouble, games will
get them out of it.

Oh, and they can’t turn it off. It would require disarming thousands of missiles. Unplug it? The system has a fail deadly function (if the system’s power is turned off, the WOPR will interpret that as the result of an attack and will retaliate by launching the weapons). However, David gets an idea: If all this thing knows to do is play games, let’s give it some games. The engineer at NORAD accesses the list of games, and not seeing Tic-tac-toe on the list, David requests it anyway. The 3X3 grid appears and David plays a first game that ends without a winner.

There’s only a few minutes left until the computer has the code, so they need to speed things up. Falken explains how to make the computer play against itself, then David makes it happen. Joshua plays against itself and once again gets a tie. Then again, a tie. We’re seeing a machine learn through repeated failures in real time, and the tic-tac-toe screens get faster and faster.

So many apocalypse simulations.

And the game speeds up consistently, with the same result over and over, going so fast and needing so much CPU that it burns out some of the NORAD computers as well as the complex’s electrical power. At this point, Joshua has even figured out the launch codes, but it’s too busy playing against itself. Then… All goes dark. The screen changes to the world map with a scenario title: “U.S. First Strike”. Joshua plays a sped-up game of Global Thermonuclear War with that starting scenario. Ten seconds later, the results come up. “Winner: None”. The computer continues with “USSR First Strike”. No winner. The A.I. then goes through every war game simulation it knows, once again increasing the speed at each one, with the entire NORAD staring at the flashing screens. And it’s a massive, massive list, as you can see in this Reddit post. And not a single scenario turns up with any victors.

"Nobody wins a nuclear war" feels like such a
basic lesson, and yet, it feels like we still need
to remind our leaders of it once in a while.

After an insane moment, everything goes black, then Joshua talks. “Greetings Professor Falken. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?” Everyone celebrates. Crisis (WORLD WAR 3!) very narrowly averted. The DEFCON level is lowered back to 5. And the movie just ends there. We don’t even find out whether David gets in trouble for changing his grades! Yeah, like that was the most pressing matter in the entire story…

Final thoughts

There's hardly any video games in it, but it
does deserve its place as a 'movie about
video games'.

This is a pretty good movie! I had my apprehensions because I thought it would fall into the category of “films so praised I’m afraid I’ll feel hype backlash towards them”, but no, I liked it just fine. The topic of video games isn’t omnipresent in it (as most of the film focuses on simulations instead), but it’s video games that start the plot when David tries to hack into ProtoVision, a game company, to see what they’re working on. The film focuses a lot more on the topic of artificial intelligence, computers and hacking. I’ve already mentioned that most of the hacking shown was accurate for 1983, and some of it is still accurate now (especially the part about social hacking).

Ah, the years when arcades reigned
over the video game market.

It’s also a time capsule of an interesting albeit dark time in History; the film is officially described as a Cold War thriller by Wikipedia, and most of the story beats involve the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. NORAD as well as politics on the American and worldwide levels are important elements of the plot. I wonder what it was like to watch this film in the 1980s, when the entire world felt on edge due to the looming threat. I do like, that neither side was demonized in this; even the Soviets are shown favorably.

Either way, the story was very interesting. Some of the setpieces were also quite nice, whether it’s David’s suburban place, Falken’s place of hiding, or NORAD’s command center itself. Fun fact: The makers of the film didn’t know what the interior of NORAD looked like; the actual NORAD looked bland and poor in comparison, and allegedly they ‘adopted’ the look that the film had given them.

Okay, in all fairness, Jennifer does more than it
seems, although it still feels like she's on the
sidelines for much of the film.

I also thought that the acting was pretty good; Matthew Broderick defended his role as David Lightman very well, and he didn’t strike me as the awkward type of guy he would play in later roles. Dabney Coleman as John McKittrick and John Wood as Stephen Falken also play their roles well. As for Ally Sheedy (Jennifer), while I think she did good, it often feels like her character does very little overall. She does contribute to the plot, however, and usually in pretty important ways, so I don't know if it's just an impression I had that she didn't do quite a lot. It's her bringing up games in the climax that gives the others the idea of beating Joshua with games, after all.

Even the general played by Barry Corbin is fun at times. “I’d piss on a spark plug if I thought it’d do any good!”

General Jack Beringer; he at least had a point
in keeping control of war infrastructures in the
hands of humans instead of relying on machines.

A couple years ago, I watched and reviewed the sequel to this film, released 25 years later (in 2008) on straight-to-DVD. Reading it again… wow, I was mean at the time. I’m re-reading my review of WarGames: The Dead Code, and that sequel feels so terrible in comparison. The best thing I can say about the original WarGames is that, while it does rely on a handful of coincidences to explain the plot, a lot of what we see has enough basis in reality to be perhaps not possible, but at least believable, which is more than I could say about what I remember of the sequel.

Yep, you really should watch the original WarGames, if you can find it. It’s a great film. I heartily recommend it.

I shall resume my reviews of video games soon enough, although I might need an extra week to write the next one. I am also starting work on the anniversary review for this year.