I remember that this was one of my favourite movies when I was growing up (and looking back its at least partially responsible for my long-standing interest in computers, nuclear weapons and the Cold War) but I haven’t seen it for almost two decades. Having picked up the DVD cheap I decided to give it a spin today and with the fear that it wouldn’t stand up to my rose-tinted memories in mind I was very pleasantly surprised. Bearing in mind the era in which it was made and the technology available it stands up really well.
It has a tight, fast-moving plot, no major logical inconsistencies (that I could see), likably ordinary characters and a tense resolution with one of the few instances where “the bad guy coming back from the dead” actually makes sense (WOPR/Joshua trying to get the launch codes to continue ‘the game’ after everyone thinks the crisis has passed).
Some people have described it as anti-military but I didn’t get that sense from it at all, the military characters were all depicted as honourable people, just caught up in a situation beyond their experience and resulting from a series of poor decisions and misunderstandings…the apocalypse as accident rather than maliciousness.
No real reason for this thread other to laud a movie from my childhood that is also perfectly watchable as an adult! And just wondering what other peoples opinions of it are.
Yeah, the military were all fine. The closest thing to a bad guy was Dabney Coleman’s character, a self-important bureaucrat who took over someone else’s work and couldn’t think his way out of a paper hat.
I caught this on cable a couple of weeks ago, and I agree that it does stand up really well. I love it when he sticks the telephone handset into the modem to connect to - it wasn’t the internet yet, was it? What was he connecting to?
Anyway, I just hope that we would never be/are not so stupid as to put that much control in the hands of any computer. That’s the only thing in the plot that ever bothered me. They covered this point very well, but I still resist the possibility.
Roddy
I saw it at the drive-in! I was already a computer geek and I was surprised at how reasonably accurate it was. A few (to me) glaring errors were:
[ul][li]The voice synthesizer was too advanced sounding, and there’s absolutely no reason it would sound the same on the two different computers.[/li][li]There’s no way ‘Joshua’ could have called Broderick back, phone tracing was a tedious and completely manual process back then.[/li][li]If the WOPR tried to random, brute-force crack the launch code it could not get it one number at a time, it would have to be all at once (which would have taken forever).[/li][li]No tour groups of *any *kind would be allowed into the war room.[/li][/ul]Of course, all of these are just dramaturgical compromises, and compared to other films rather small ones. Interesting facts: The war room set cost nearly a quarter of the film’s budget. Also, I visited the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona and they used the audio from the opening, missile-launch scene as part of the tour!
Main thing I remember about it though was how absolutely luscious teenage Ally Sheedy was!
You could connect to mainframes, bulletin board systems, or networks that existed in the 80s - like Arpanet, Bitnet BITNET - Wikipedia, etc.
When I was in college, I babysat for a professor’s kids, and after they were asleep, I used the professor’s remote terminal to reach the school’s mainframe to do some homework - it was basically an electric typewriter, with a cradle to put a telephone in - 300 baud of pure communication power (display screen - what’s that? The typewriter typed the output onto paper).
The term “wardialing” itself is derived from War Games.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The popular name for this technique originated in the 1983 film WarGames. In the film, the protagonist programmed his computer to dial every telephone number in Sunnyvale, California to find other computer systems. Prior to the movie’s release, this technique was known as “hammer dialing” or “demon dialing”. ‘WarGames Dialer’ programs became common on bulletin board systems of the time, with file names often truncated to wardial.exe and the like due to length restrictions of 8 characters on such systems. Eventually, the etymology of the name fell behind as “war dialing” gained its own currency within computing culture.
Well, the way David escapes from Cheyenne strikes me as a tad improbable. He’s imprisoned in an infirmary examination room (one of the most secure locations on Earth doesn’t have a secure holding area?), casually slips in with a tour group (being walked through NORAD a few days after a major alert) and manages to leave with them (no head count having been taken or guest passes handed out).
Beyond that, I liked it, though I knew even then that it was technologically unfeasible.
My favorite line from the movie was when the girl turns to David, as the helicopters are chasing them and circling overhead, and demands “Is this about my grades?” (He’d hacked into the school system to change one of the grades in a class she took)
Loved this movie. Watched it with my 14 yo son a while back. Of course I had to explain a few things to him, but I was surprised by how much he already knew about both the older technology and the Cold War. It’s now one of his favorite movies.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
The voice synthesizer was too advanced sounding, and there’s absolutely no reason it would sound the same on the two different computers.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure about that. The TI TMS5100 came out in 1978, and was wildly famous (well, at least as far as chips go) as the voice of the Speak & Spell toys, which had gone through several updates and enhancements by the time WarGames came out.
Other than Bell Labs’ Voder, there weren’t too many speech synthesis options in the early 80s, and Voder was more like a musical instrument played by a human, rather than something controlled by a computer.
I wouldn’t really expect the real NORAD to have a speech synthesis system, but given the small pool of available hardware options, it doesn’t surprise me that their movie version might have the same core hardware as a home enthusiast.
What I like is that a lot of the hacking techniques are reasonably close to authentic. He gets the password to the school’s computer by looking at the paper note the principal has in his desk drawer, and the password for WOPR by reading up on the programmer and guessing what would have been important to him. Both are time-honored and oft-used techniques.
OK, so WOPR cracking the launch codes was hogwash, but done for understandable dramatic purposes.
One thing I always wondered about was that sort of monologue that Professor Falken gave where he said something along the lines of “One day nature will start over again - this time with the bees”. Is this actually a theory or just in the movie?
One of my favorites! My brother first introduced me to this movie, since it’s one of his favorites (and more his generation, than mine). That’s actually saying a lot right there, if you know my brother - I can think of maybe 3 or 4 movies this guy ever liked enough to watch all the way through, let alone more than once! He’s just not a “fiction” guy, most of the time.
[list][li]The voice synthesizer was too advanced sounding, and there’s absolutely no reason it would sound the same on the two different computers.[/li][/QUOTE]
To build on what gotpasswords said, the speech synthesizer biz was going nuts in the 70s and 80s. Around the same time as WarGames I was working for an aluminum extruder making the cases for the VotraxType ‘n Talk, which hooked up to the serial port of your, oh, whatever you had that had a serial port, which was most anything. Here is a contemporary synthesizer on an ISA card for your IBM PC; the interesting part for me is that the “terminal” he is using is a highly-portable Epson HX-20. I have one of them with an add-on synthesizer with amp and speaker that still works, even though it got a bit wet when we flooded last week. But back then you could get speech synths for anycrappycomputer. And a damned good one. Computer, that is. The Speech/Sound cartridge sucked. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have one!
I saw that movie recently and I think it has held up pretty well.
I think it was a very realistic extrapolation of the current technology of the time. IMO about the only part that was way off (in hindsight) was that artificial intelligence would work given just a bit of work and some serious computer power (which obviously the top military systems would have).
So, IMO, about the only thing technologically seriously wrong about this thing was a thing a good fraction of experts were also wrong about.
I love WarGames, but seeing it now as an adult (I was about 12-13 when it came out), it does have some corny dialogue.
There’s one scene in the big NORAD room where (I think) David and Jennifer come running in and the general stops them with “Whoa, whoa, you can’t run in here! Somebody could get hurt!” Makes me chuckle every time.
Also, the woman counting down at the end: “FIVE! He’s got half the code!” (and all the rest of her countdown leading up to that) totally annoys me for some reason.
To the points raised about the voice synthesizer: David has a voice box on his home computer. He shows it to Jennifer when he asks her “Do you want to hear it talk?” It’s a pretty big inconsistency that Dabney Coleman’s office at NORAD would have the same voice synthesizer. Yeah, I know it’s just to make “Joshua” familiar to the audience, but still.
Also, watching as an adult, it does strike me how dumb most of the adults in the movie are.
But, hey, I still love it. It’s a fun movie. I’ll stop and watch anytime I see it’s on TV.
I looked at that, and it is unreferenced. Only the second reference mentions it, and it doesn’t actually establish anything:
I’m sure I encountered the term before WarGames came out. Sadly, the archives of Boardwatch magazine were deleted in one of the many times it changed hands. I know that’s what we used to call it, and I think claiming it came from WarGames is a retcon.
I would be interested to hear from other contemporaries of that time. I won’t say I was big into that area of “the scene”, but I was on the periphery, and “wardialers” became commonly referenced after the movie. It was memorable because, after the movie, you heard the term “wardialer” and it was one of those things you’d just make the logical leap on and understand.
Maybe I was just too much on the periphery, but from my experience, I’m leaning towards the “wardialer” term being adopted after WarGames. Plus, I ask you, why use “WAR” in “wardialer” without WarGames? Demondialing or hammerdialing sounds more like a name they’d reach for. Perhaps this is an issue for the Straight Dope and it’s regulars.
I once wrote one and incorporated it into the terminal software I wrote for my c-64, just to see if I could. Wasn’t rocket science as it turned out, as evidenced by my doing it
