The Beloved Film of My Youth that I’ve Recently Discovered Has Complete Disregard for the Bounds of Reality
by Ian F. King
My recent joining of Netflix has led to something of a small renaissance in my life, as it enables me to watch obscure old movies of questionable merit at any time. Because of such a miracle of modern life, this weekend I was able to spend dinner with a long-forgotten friend from my youth: WarGames.
If you don’t know it, the film is an anti-nuke/anti-artificial intelligence gem from the tail end of the Cold War, starring just enough of the Brat Pack (Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick—a Hughes School grad but 
not actually a BPer) to give it some level of kitsch value. The premise is that young Broderick, way too boyishly handsome to be the outcast computer nerd he’s playing, accidentally breaks into NORAD’s extremely secret and secure nuclear missile launch computer system while trying to steal videogames from a pre-Nintendo company called Protovision. He then decides he wants to play one of the games the system lists, “Global Thermonuclear War,” even though it sounds way duller than, say, Asteroids.
I’m sure you can guess the rest from here: the “game” turns out to be “real” somehow, and Matthew Broderick has 36 hours to save the world from complete nuclear wipeout by trying to convince an underground bunker full of morons (who don’t follow any other cues aside from what the computer tells them) to not listen to the computer. What wasn’t apparent to me as a child, but which is all too clear in the harsh light of not being a child, is that WarGames might actually be the least realistic movie ever made. Even less realistic than, say, Leprechaun 4: In Space, at least because it’s supposed to be plausible.
The disregard for reality starts small, with the aforementioned NORAD breach, surely possible on some level, but not likely so easy. Broderick has a room full of 1983’s most advanced technology, even a little speaker that projects what the computer says to him in a funny robot voice. Oh yeah, and the computer system (named WOPR, pronounced, yes, “whopper”) that Broderick breaks into can think for itself. A day after Broderick starts up a game of “Global Thermonuclear War,” the computer system contacts him. That’s when the absurdity hits its stride and never looks back.
Broderick and Sheedy live in Seattle, a metropolitan city. When the Feds come to arrest Broderick for hooking up with HAL Jr., he’s inexplicably walking out of a 7-11 that’s clearly off the side of a small forest highway, nowhere near a city. Within seconds he’s whisked away to NORAD’s headquarters in Colorado, as opposed to say, detained in Seattle. He soon escapes custody and calls Sheedy to ask her to send money so he can fly from Grand Junction, Colorado, to Goose Island, Oregon, where Dr. Falken (the dude who invented the WOPR) lives in hiding under a fake name, for no real reason. He’s at the airport when Sheedy surprises him by showing up, cheerfully informing him that the drive only took three hours. Grand Junction is over 1000 miles away from Seattle, so Sheedy was apparently driving 339 miles an hour. Forget disregard; this is serious contempt for reality. Broderick and Sheedy have apparently found a way to transcend the bounds of time and geography as they crisscross the American West.
IMDB cites nearly sixty “goofs” in WarGames, though many of those goofs have to do with sound and visual editing in one scene where Broderick’s playing Galaga in his local arcade—the kind of thing only a level-ten nerd would catch. They do, however, also catch the ferry scene where the two lovebirds-who-never-kiss-even-just-once, going to find Dr. Falken, get on the ferry in the middle of the day; the ferry takes off at sunset, and then they get to the island, just a mile away, back in the middle of the day again.
The increasing continuity failures might all be in there on purpose to wear the viewer down in preparation for the climactic scene. Dr. Falken has now taken the kids all one thousand miles back to NORAD in his private helicopter, and they must convince the WOPR, which is running a war simulation it runs all the time—and is programmed to know is a simulation but now somehow thinks is real—that nuclear war is futile. They do so by having it play tic-tac-toe against itself until sparks start to fly out of the computers in the bunker and the whole system has to reboot. When the lights come back on in the room, the WOPR talks to everyone around it, marveling at the fact that the only way to win the war is not to play, just like Tic Tac Toe. That’s right, we hit that height of ridiculousness, and credits roll without any offer to explain how any of it would actually be possible. Personally, I’ve lost at tic-tac-toe many a times in my youth, but that’s another, much more sad, story.
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