WarGames

Bryce Chismire
Apr 12
17 min read

Updated: Apr 14

When we think about what led to the United States and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) to declare war on each other, it all ties back to World War II, when we were on the brink of closing in on Adolf Hitler’s reign until Hitler decided to put himself out of his misery.

As a result, both the United States and the Soviet Union claimed their share of the territory they occupied in Germany after World War II. What began was a four-decade-long Cold War, as both countries lived in fear of one another and attempted to one-up each other at every opportunity.

This conflict led to the blacklisting of Americans suspected of aligning with Communist viewpoints, and it also fueled a heated race to land the first man on the moon. We know the outcome: Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first men to set foot there. However, beyond the space race, much of the tension took on many forms, and the biggest center of attention was on nuclear warfare, with fears of nuclear annihilation reaching an all-time high.

What happens when you look at the Cold War in the eyes of unsuspecting tech-savviness? The answer lies in this film, WarGames.

Never mind the 1980s period details. When you look at exactly what triggered the escalation of events in this movie, you would discover, as I did, the vices of hacking and those of warfare.

With this context in mind, let’s start at the beginning.

In Seattle, a hacker named David Lightman decided to play some video games on his computer. And keep in mind, this was when personal computers were more of a novelty than they are now. And as for the video game he sought out? Being the genius hacker that he was, he tried to gain access to a nearby computer system, ProtoVision, and tap into its upcoming games to play with his girlfriend, Jennifer Mack. Little did they know, however, that what David hacked was the Cheyenne Mountain Complex’s supercomputer, WOPR (War Operation Plan Response, pronounced whopper), which monitored potential Soviet military activity. When David requested to play the game ‘Global Thermonuclear Warfare’, it triggered the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD) missile alarm system. The personnel panicked in response to these signals as they hustled in preparation for battle, all without knowing at first that David’s hacking caused them, for they led them to believe that the Soviet Union was about to launch missiles onto American soil.

Of course, both David and Jennifer caught on to just how drastic the situation was by two things.

One, David eventually caught on to what type of game he was playing, and that he inadvertently caused a ruckus by requesting to play ‘Global Thermonuclear War’ with a supercomputer in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. It was even severe enough to make the news, with David putting two and two together and becoming queasy over the fact that the war scare was of his own doing. And two, it resulted in his arrest for his troubles, with David completely unaware of what was going on or how he had done it. Only then did David, Jennifer, and the NORAD personnel realize how the trouble had come about and how David had indirectly jump-started the alarm system that would have alerted the American personnel to potential warfare from enemy territory.

What’s worse was that even though they attempted to stop it, WOPR began to accelerate the mission on its own, with the likelihood of the US military being prompted under its command to launch America’s missiles into Soviet soil and thus turn the already heated Cold War into a potential World War III.

The only clue and possible solution? David, after breaking out, and Jennifer discovered earlier that WOPR’s real name was Joshua, named after the late son of the computer’s developer, Stephen Falken, in his memory. Suspecting that he wasn’t really dead – especially after David tried out many different phone numbers to deduce his address, location, and even his name – they both tracked down the now-reclusive Stephen Falken in his home in Oregon in the hopes of talking him into renegotiating with the computer system.

Would they have had any chance of stopping WOPR from carrying out its directive? Would David, Jennifer, and Falken have attempted to help NORAD with the computer’s faulty operations? And, in David’s words…

Is this a game, or is it real?

When I think of Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, I always think back to their breakthrough accomplishments in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, both by John Hughes. However, this movie came out a couple of years before John Hughes’ string of Brat Pack films reached their peak. As a result, it gave these two young up-and-coming stars a technical head start.

And it helped that each of these actors played their characters similarly yet differently from how we would eventually recognize them as actors.

Let’s start with Matthew Broderick.

Even though his acting can sound just a tad whiny and impractical, when you look at his character’s background, he barely had any friends and was isolated from his parents – or so the officers picked up on with David – and I honestly believe that it fitted his character.

With his tech-savviness and mischievous methods for getting what he wanted, he established himself as a geeky, socially awkward, but ingenious hacker, pulling off computer tricks the likes of which we would see Mark Zuckerberg pull off in movies like The Social Network. However, his mischievous side faded when he realized exactly what he had tampered with and just how dire the situation he had gotten himself and his girlfriend into had become. With his awkward mannerisms and still committed, if uncertain, motives, Broderick captured the geeky teenager who was oblivious to the trouble he’d caused until it was too late. That ‘crafty teenager’ image, as I see it, also helped him achieve iconic status when he played Ferris Bueller.

Compare that to Ally Sheedy as Jennifer. She was basically the girlfriend from school who was on David’s side and had practically known him for as long as they were around. However, despite her somewhat generic image, her inner commitment and playful banter with David highlighted her instincts as a potential best friend who had David’s back, especially when the going got tough. And considering how outgoing she was, she was definitely a far cry from what she would have mastered as Allison in The Breakfast Club.

Something about WOPR’s digitized voice felt unnerving as it responded to David, Jennifer, and even the rest of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. It sounded like a generic computer voice, at first. But as the stakes got higher and higher, the continuously stagnant tone in the voice only made it sound more unnatural and creepy, like you’re not sure whether that’s just part of its programming or if this program began to develop a mind of its own.

The rest of the actors performed well in their roles. Their performances tied into the predicaments of the situations involving the war effort, the nuclear warheads, and, especially, the convoluted entanglements that David unintentionally jump-started.

Dabney Coleman captured John McKittrick’s more level-headed instincts when confronted with something as severe on a global scale as nuclear warheads being launched either onto America or the Soviet Union. I can tell that he tried to settle this issue as quickly and calmly as possible without escalating it, even as his reliance on WOPR and computer technology was met with uncertainty. And when the rest of his personnel began to lose their minds over the possible damage that could come unless they fixed the system, he was usually the one to try to put some thought into the matter, especially David and Jennifer, once they got involved.

Barry Corbin captured the aspects of Jack Beringer’s position as a General to a T. From what he conveyed through his character, Beringer’s experiences on the battlefield hardened him into being a stiff, committed, and battlefield-ready warrior who knew better than to trust in some gadgets to do a man’s job. Notwithstanding his butting of heads with McKittrick, he prepped himself for battle accordingly, thinking that there really was a potential war on the horizon, even if the rest of his peers began to reevaluate the situation otherwise.

John Wood captured Stephen Falken’s lonely, frustrated, and almost suicidal instincts when you look at just what he designed and how reckless he was in letting it come forth. He had been living a good portion of his life under a cloud of regret and wanted nothing more than to stay out of anyone’s way if it meant not hurting them again. Even when he went into his monologue about the natures of war and even mass extinction and how it can’t be stopped, I can tell that he was trying to tell himself that that was the case when people like David, Jennifer, and even some of the board members didn’t believe so, and that, yes, it could be stopped. Part of his performance took on even more tragic angles when you look at how he named the computer program after his late son. There was clearly some hesitation on his part to fix what he thought couldn’t be fixed, tying into whether it really was too late to change one’s ways and change things for the better. He captured all those inner instincts very well, and I strongly respect him for achieving that.

What’s even better is that he also voiced WOPR, underscoring both the supercomputer’s origins and the technical eeriness of its programming and directives. I could feel the connection between the two when this became more apparent.

But how about the characters? Considering the sophistication of the systems introduced here, what did they convey to lend WarGames such surprise nerves?

Starting with David, he was a proficient hacker, but he’s still a teenager with barely any experience with the real world, let alone with real-world crises. That would’ve shown you just how impractical he really was, aside from what he was most talented at. Heck, even the beginning of the movie introduced him as pretty inept in his schoolwork at the Seattle Public School.

Now, the beginning of the movie would show how David hacked into the school’s computer system so he could change not just his grades, but Jennifer’s too, so that they both would have technically done decently on their assignments rather than failing them.

But if that was tampering with an anthill, what David got himself into without even knowing it was equivalent to messing with a hornet’s nest.

What I also found interesting about Jennifer, David’s flame, was that she, like David, ended up with an F in the same class. So in a way, even though Jennifer generally felt like the more level-headed of the two and would’ve known better than to entangle with matters that could land him in serious trouble, she also had her moments of ineptitude and laziness herself, and not just David.

Of course, while Jennifer felt like the level-headed of the two, David clearly felt like the more impulsive of the two because, as soon as he found the codes he needed to type into the games to play and unknowingly tapped into WOPR’s system, that’s when he fully comprehended how he caused more trouble than it’s worth and how much in a world of hurt David did not anticipate to be in because of that. Of course, David’s breaking out of rooms or into devices as he worked his way through helped him and Jennifer through even their most trying of ordeals, so there’s that.

However, the longer David, Jennifer, and the personnel quickly moved to fix the issue, the more tense and dire the situation became as the countdown to WOPR’s programming initiating the game of Global Thermonuclear War progressed. As the clock ticked on, both David and Jennifer literally had to race against time to track down Stephen Falken and talk him out of being a recluse so he could help them talk some sense into WOPR, if possible.

It emphasized how much of a crapshoot it would be to rely on computer technology to solve your problems for you, especially when it had a hard time discerning what separates a harmless game from actual war.

Even if it was all just a computer’s idea of games, it did not lessen the fact that what they dealt with was a progressively serious matter that could have jump-started World War III without either America or even the Soviet Union knowing about it. Even the very beginning of the movie showed two military officers who got comfortable in their military quarters, only to be tasked to launch a missile, with one of the officers hesitating to pull it off, and the other willing to pull it off, down to pressuring his partner to do so at gunpoint. Later, it was revealed within the Cheyenne Mountain Complex that it had been a test all along. While part of it was the result of the two officers’ hesitation to carry out the directive and launch the missiles, John McKittrick, in his overconfidence, considered laying off the two men in favor of WOPR. Of course, Jack Beringer, who occasionally conversed directly with the US President (probably Ronald Reagan), strongly objected to the reliability of computers to perform the designated tasks and warned McKittrick to watch what he proposed.

What I liked about this was that they both clearly viewed the situation differently, yet I could understand where they were both coming from. McKittrick thought computers like WOPR were flawless in their advances and could perform any necessary tasks, but Beringer knew the risks of relying solely on computers to do the job rather than trained officers. And given the rise of AI and how telling apart fantasy from reality has become less discernible, it’s too easy now to understand why.

Not only that, but I also love how it emphasized how serious the situation was, whether it was WOPR, a supercomputer, getting hacked, or the possibility of WOPR reacting from this hack by responding accordingly and doing something that whoever hacked or meant to use it never meant to initiate in the first place, not just what the odds would’ve been of there being a sudden attack that could have triggered World War III. In addition, how would NORAD, starting with McKittrick, have reacted to the idea of an ‘incoming missile launch’ being the work of an otherwise talented teenage amateur who never meant to stir up such trouble in the first place? And to what extent would this have been as much of a real deal as it looked? This movie tinkered with those questions about how real or illusory it all turned out to be.

And just when I thought the lines between what’s real and what’s not could not possibly get any blurrier, despite it becoming clear that the incoming missiles launched by the Soviet Union against America were a hoax, WOPR, which grew so smart that it decided to act on its own terms, took the initiative to launch the US missiles against the Soviet Union itself, and for real. And in so doing, yes, it went so far as to lock everyone, including Stephen Falken, its own programmer, out. It resulted in one of the most engaging questions this movie asked: whether a computer, for all its knowledge, could ever learn.

Whenever I thought back to this movie, it was easy for me to dismiss the whole predicament as imaginary, even down to the threat levels initiated by DEFCOM, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex’s threat level system. But now that I saw exactly what was initiated from the US side in terms of potentially launching the missiles onto enemy territory, it did raise the question, as David put it, of whether it’s a game or if it’s real. So, whether it related to the Cold War or any war for that matter, this movie asked some engaging questions about the dangers of hacking, of relying on computers to do the work for you, of the purpose of war, and whether it would yield sustainable results.

Of course, the likelihood of there being a potential soul within WOPR wasn’t just suspenseful. When you look at Falken and why he named the program after his late son, I suddenly sensed a little bit of humanity and heart behind it, too. As I mentioned, he named the program Joshua after his son out of remorse over his death when he lost him and his wife to a car accident in the early 70s, and had done so to remember him by. He even wrote himself off as a potential casualty in 1973; he was that remorseful over it. So, Falken’s dilemmas emphasized that, as easy as it would be to run away from problems, despite his likely programming WOPR to solve them, it’s far more important to confront those problems and learn from them, as WOPR would later learn to learn, period.

What I also love with regards to David and Jennifer’s characters was that, while they started as just a couple of slackers who happened to be in deep from David’s hacking – with him being the impulsive one and Jennifer being the more level-headed of the two – they eventually dwindled into being frightened teenagers who had never known until the last moment that they had mistakenly set everyone on high alert in their pursuits for something as harmless as a simple game.

Looking closely, both the movie’s exterior imagery and its hidden value make for the biggest brainteasers this movie would ever have dished out.

As I said, the main focus of this movie was the Cold War, and the computers and technology used to evaluate the systems were clearly in their baby stages. So, look at how the characters used their sets of technology to do whatever, whether it’s to play games, to hack into other systems, or to see whether the Soviet Union had anything up its sleeves in terms of retaliating against the USA’s potential launch of nuclear warfare.

When I look at all of that, it’s clear this was a product of the 1980s, with its Cold War hysteria and rudimentary technology. However, even that’s nothing compared to what it confronted beneath its more periodical details. For example, we’re talking about a hacker who went into a secure computer system in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, tampered with it, and unintentionally triggered a massive alarm that made everyone believe that there was a potential war on the horizon, that someone was attempting to either bomb the USA or that the USA was going to bomb their enemy nations.

Because this was still an ongoing issue even today with the Gulf War, the war against Osama bin Laden, and the war against al-Qaeda, to name a few such wars, it’s safe to say that it painted this as a more haunting and valid war film, even if its method of exploring that was more unusual and avant-garde than you would normally expect within this genre.

Because David hacked into a high-security government computer system by accident and triggered something that could change the course of American history and the wars in which they fought, it did have people questioning exactly what this would have meant for America if it was easy to be hacked by someone who’s nothing more than your everyday high schooler who happened to be good at computer programming. And because we’d never see such warfare being brought forth, nor did the movie answer for us which of the two it was, it almost left the real terrors of the war and the escalation that was to unfold to our imaginations. And because WOPR voluntarily accelerated at a rapid pace, it kept us at the edge of our seats and unsure whether David, Jennifer, or the others would have stopped WOPR in time, and if they didn’t, whether the missiles that the WOPR planned to launch were real missiles or if it was all just part of the game that Matthew unknowingly asked the computer to play with him. It’s a sure sign to watch what you play or access before you end up in an even deeper hole than you bargained for.

Going even further, this could not have come at a better time, because one other film I can think of that dove into the mind of computers was Tron, which came out the year before this film did. But whereas Tron delved into the methodologies of religion, philosophy, and collective thinking within the computer system, WarGames addressed the use of the computer system for war and what would happen when those who hacked it triggered something they did not intend to. That’s where the suspense truly settled in and why this movie made a splash when it first came out, and not just because of its then-relevant message about the Cold War.

Another factor that kicked this movie into high gear was the writing. Like I said, David, Jennifer, John McKittrick, Jack Beringer, Stephen Falken, and even WOPR, each of them as characters functioned most adequately in a web of lies, conspiracies, reality, fantasies, the futility versus the finality of war, and whether any of the situations that could jeopardize our livelihoods were all real or a fantasy. And it got to the point where it wouldn’t matter if it talked specifically about the Cold War. There’s no telling whether this would apply to any war, or even how thoroughly the hacking would resemble the tampering with AI. For something that looked dated on the outside, there were many takeaway messages to unpack from this movie that only got better with age, surprisingly.

Every time I look back on WarGames, I always dismissed it as just another movie centering on the Cold War and how nuclear warfare would be the end of us all. But upon revisiting it, and as I let it sit shortly afterward, who says it has to be just nuclear warfare? Its attention to the finality or futility of war could extend beyond the Cold War, whether it was technologically motivated or not.

Take, for example, the cartoon Peace on Earth. That cartoon was literally about woodland animals reminiscing about humans after they killed each other to extinction in World War I, and this was before nuclear warfare ever came along. So, whether it concerned nuclear warfare or not, what this movie had to say about warfare still carried some weight.

But as a Washingtonian and a Coloradan, another aspect of this movie that I found particularly strong was the scenery.

But let’s start with the general scenery. Some of the shots in the movie helped add to the paranoia bubbling throughout, especially when it focused on WOPR. There’s something about the emphasis, coupled with the suspenseful music, that indicated a potential sentience becoming progressively apparent within it.

But as for what really drew me in about it? Considering this was shot in good old Washington State, there’s bound to be some luscious scenery for me to admire when I wasn’t busy paying attention to the technobabble and the war talk at the forefront. And it’s not just in Seattle or the greenery-studded neighborhoods. When David and Jennifer rode on the ferry together to Stephen Falken’s house, there was something so peaceful and atmospheric about this scene, especially when it’s just the two of them talking to each other about where they went wrong and where they could go right. But my parents and I also got a thrill out of it because we recognized the ferry they hopped onto from Steilacoom, which we remember riding numerous times throughout the Puget Sound when I was younger. Where I live in Ridgway, it is gorgeous, but some things about Washington State will still leave me with a slight homesickness, despite my love for Ridgway.

And speaking of Colorado, the biggest destination for David and Jennifer was Colorado Springs, since it was home to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the obvious subject of muddled war anticipation and negotiations. When the movie hopped over to that neck of the woods, the scenery there was also as atmospheric as could be. With the beautiful mountains and the scattered forests, it captured the old-fashioned yet majestic and glorious feel of the Rocky Mountains.

So it was a real hoot to revisit some of my favorite and most familiar home states through this movie alone.

Of course, in addition to capturing the scenery of both states well, it also captured the movie’s epic scope, emphasizing the gravity of tapping into governmental programs to initiate a potential war, and the necessity of stopping WOPR before anything else befell David, Jennifer, or everyone else. And I found this tremendous, given how dubious the source of the film’s paranoia was.

So, yes, don’t let its rudimentary technology fool you. This movie touched on real-world issues that are still relevant today, with a more retro coating. And in so doing, it taught us a message of war, if not only the Cold War, as well as a message of hacking, sending us a cautionary warning of what happens when we tamper with machinery that is not ours to tamper with and of ending up where we do not belong.

The acting was terrific. The scope was magnificent. The gadgetry was pleasantly old-fashioned. Its message of artificial intelligence is still haunting and needs to be told, despite it being a product of the times. And its vague instincts about warfare, nuclear or not, only make it more terrifying than it normally could have been when considering the technological means to initiate it.

Type away and see if this is the movie for you. I assure you, it’s a blast.