WarGames (1983)

A young man finds a back door into a military central computer in which reality is confused with game-playing, possibly starting World War III.

Director:

John Badham

Writers:

Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes

Stars:

Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, John Wood

Nominated for 3 Oscars. Another 4 wins & 11 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Matthew Broderick	...	David
Dabney Coleman	...	McKittrick
John Wood	...	Falken
Ally Sheedy	...	Jennifer
Barry Corbin	...	General Beringer
Juanin Clay	...	Pat Healy
Kent Williams	...	Cabot
Dennis Lipscomb	...	Watson
Joe Dorsey	...	Conley
Irving Metzman	...	Richter
Michael Ensign	...	Beringer's Aide
William Bogert	...	Mr. Lightman
Susan Davis	...	Mrs. Lightman
James Tolkan	...	Wigan
David Clover	...	Stockman

Storyline

A young computer whiz kid accidentally connects into a top secret super-computer which has complete control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It challenges him to a game between America and Russia, and he innocently starts the countdown to World War 3. Can he convince the computer he wanted to play a game and not the real thing ?

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Plot Keywords:

teenager | hacker | cold war | paranoia | game | 

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Taglines:

To David Lightman, "Global Thermonuclear War" will just be one hell of a game. To everybody else, it will be hell waiting to happen.

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Genres:

Sci-Fi | Thriller

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Certificate:

PG

Details

Official Sites:

MGM

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

3 June 1983 (USA)

Also Known As:

War Games

Filming Locations:

Culver City, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$12,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$6,227,804, 5 June 1983, Wide Release

Gross USA:

$79,568,000

Company Credits

Production Co:

United Artists,Sherwood Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

114 min

Sound Mix:

70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints) Dolby (35 mm prints)

Color:

Color (Metrocolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The writers based General Beringer on General James Hartinger. Hartinger was the Commander in Chief of NORAD in the early 1980s.

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Goofs

In the 1980s it was not permitted for any Department of Defense computer with classified information on it to be connected to external communication equipment. It would therefore be impossible to dial in as shown. However, during a scene, the military technician exclaims that the phone company "screwed them", implying an external contractor allowed the connection against request and policy.

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Quotes

Stephen Falken: I loved it when you nuked Las Vegas. Suitably biblical ending to the place, don't you think?

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Alternate Versions

In the premiere telecast version of the film, in the scene where the female airmen is counting down to Impact, there is more background music that plays than in the theatrical version and home video releases containing English language versions. However, the extra background music plays in foreign versions of the movie. Also, the extra BGM has not played in subsequent TV airings since that first telecast, as far as I am aware.

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Connections

Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Ways Humans May Cause Their Own Extinction (2017)

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Soundtracks

Edge Of The World
Performed by Yvonne Elliman
Music by Arthur B. Rubinstein
Lyrics by Cynthia Morrow

User Reviews

A movie of its time, mandatory viewing for hackers

One important piece of reality in this movie is when David Lightman looks for the computer game company, and stumbles across WOPR, by using a program that automatically calls every number in an area looking for a carrier. Such a program was called, after this movie came out, a "Wargames dialer" or a "Wardialer". And today, as well as old fashioned wardialing, we have wardriving, warstrolling, warchalking... war everything else, because of this movie. And have you heard of the annual hacker convention, held in Las Vegas, called.... Defcon? There are, of course, factual problems with this movie, some of which one just accepts as necessary to the ploy. When David plugs the speech synthesizer into his computer, he explains that the computer isn't really speaking, just interpreting the text that's coming in. We can't have an entire movie just looking at a video screen, so we accept that. But then at the end, Joshua speaks the climactic lines of the movie in the same voice, which makes no sense at all. The way that Joshua could find one character at a time of the password never did wash. And the paper clip method could only make a local call.

The nuclear freeze movement was certainly quite strong in the '80s, more so than many today realize. I hope you understand what "freeze" means, because it's not the same as disarmament. It means: lets just stop throwing money down this black hole by stopping the nuclear arms race where it is. Who cares if they can reduce us fine powder and we can only reduce them to sand. Ronald Reagan outmaneuvered the freeze movement with all that SDI nonsense, which was just another excuse to waste money and extend the arms race into space. With Reagan, it's hard to tell, of course: maybe he really thought it was a "purely defensive" system, that could "make nuclear weapons obsolete". When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, there was talk of a "peace dividend", in which the obscene amount of money previously spent on the arms race could actually help people at home. There ain't too much talk about that now, with the "War on Terror", which is a war about as much as the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty, and just about as successful.