It is the story of that student who made a big noise. The events began when David Layman, a high school student, accidentally penetrated a military supercomputer while searching for new video games. Perhaps it will be very disastrous at those moments when a confrontation of global dimensions begins World War III at a difficult time.
John Badham solders the pieces into a terrifically exciting story charged by an irresistible idea: an extra-smart kid can get the world into a whole lot of trouble that it also takes the same extra-smart kid to rescue it from.
It's far too simplistic for comfort -- and downright dangerous if it makes anyone think today's self-destructive forces will bow jovially out of sight as soon as we grown-ups loosen up a little.
What keeps it remarkably fresh is an unpatronising approach to what is ostensibly a kids' thriller, and a set of ideas (remember when Hollywood used them?) that rightly consign all the cradle modems and dot-matrix printers to the margins.
To me, the most enjoyable aspect of WarGames is when David is at work on his computer system. There's something wonderfully nostalgic about watching a guy play with such antiquated machinery and recognize that it was [once] considered state-of-the-art.
Time might not have been kind to the look of WarGames, but with nuclear war still a very real threat, the picture's ability to manufacture suspense remains undimmed.
This inventive nail-biter is very much a product of its time -- blending the arms-race unease of the early 1980s with the beginning of the home-computer revolution -- but it still manages to both grip and entertain.
As tense and effective now as it was 25 years ago. The worry back then was more about Soviet missiles than about credit card identity theft, but good filmmaking techniques haven't changed.
