it 's a fact that a good thriller or action movie does n't need violence to be good or worth watching .
all it takes is potential violence to make the audience bite their nails .
and what kind of violence could be more efficient than a global thermo - nuclear war ? and potential violence is the premiss wargames is built upon .
a computer whiz - kid , david , is usually contended with hacking into the school computer to change his grades .
but after having read an advertisment for an upcoming computer game , he wants to be the first to play it .
instead of getting into the computer at protovision software he accidentally comes to the frontgate of norad .
with the help of jennifer , a girl in his biology class , he starts to play a nice game of nuclear war with wopr , war operation plan response ( a top - notch computer at the time , but now hardly faster than my own computer )
i remember being 12 and watching this at the cinema .
it was very efficent at giving you a scare in those days and that has n't changed .
of course , a nuclear war seemed to be much more of something that could actually happen back in 1983 .
i would n't be surprised if this gave people nightmares .
i hope it still does since you still hear about school kids hacking into the computers at pentagon .
broderick and sheedy are just fine as the young teenagers ( although her interest in david remains a mystery ) .
but the rest of the actors are , by no fault of their own , restricted by the script to play one - dimensional grownups .
david 's parents are the same kind of parents that populate all these college comedies from the 1980s , movies like secret admirer , porky 's or zapped and the norad general beringer is straight out of dr .
strangelove .
if for no other reason , you should see this movie to enjoy how far the computer technology has gone since those days .
david uses the same telephone for calling friends as calling other computers .
the modem is some kind of device that he puts the headset on .
far from any 56k modem my guess is that it 's some kind of 2400 bps modem , the kind of technology you now find at your local technical museum .
the big computer at norad has a lot of flashing lights ( just like those you see on star trek or any old sf - movie ) but it 's hardly impressing compared with what you can get today .
what are the lessons we can learn from wargames ?
1 . make sure there are no secret backdoors into military computers .
2 .
thank you , whoever it was , for giving us a graphical user interface when we use our computers !
you should see this movie to enjoy are just fine