Chazography

A movie that I’d never seen before came on TBS the other day which in and of itself is not really all that amazing. Afterall, there are plenty of movies that I haven’t seen, but my nerdier nature allowed me to derive particular enjoyment from this film. A little bit of added irony is that the movie was released the year I was born (that’s 1983 for those of you who didn’t know). The name of the film was Wargames. The film featured a young Matthew Broderick as David Lightman, a young computer “whiz-kid” who gets himself into a bit of a bind after accidentally hacking into NORAD. When I say accidentally, I mean he actually did not realize that he was hacking into NORAD but, rather, thought he was hacking into game company. I guess this is a valid mistake since the computer listed a number of common games such as checkers and chess, but he’s really interested in the game called “Thermonuclear War”. Who wouldn’t be? However, he needs to gain full access to the system in order to play the games so he discovers the backdoor password after doing a little research on the system’s creator Dr. Stephen Falken.

However, everything goes wrong when this supposed game starts running thermonuclear war simulations on the NORAD system sparking those in control to fear that the Russians are launching nuclear missiles at the USA. David gets brought into federal custody and is initially believed to be involved in some sort of Russian espionage plot. So he must escape and find the system’s creator in order to restore order to the NORAD defense system, and he calls on the help of a high school friend with whom a relationship seems to blossom (isn’t that always the case?). After finding the creator, they race back to NORAD and alert everyone that it is simply a simulation that is running which becomes apparent when all the nuclear missiles supposedly detonate but nobody dies. That’s usually a pretty good indicator that there weren’t any nuclear weapons in the mix. Yet, it’s not over there because the computer proceeds to systematically brute force discover the launch codes (which it does extremely quickly I might add) for 10 nuclear missiles which it is actually going to launch.

David saves the day, however, when he has the computer play tic tac toe against itself because the computer learns that there is no winning outcome. It then proceeds to run the thermonuclear war simulation against itself only to realize that once again the same outcome holds true. Somewhat of a political statement I would think but also quite true. Afterall, nobody wins if everyone is dead. While it is rather cheesy, I still thoroughly enjoyed it, and I must admit I derived a great deal of satisfaction at looking at those ancient relics they liked to call computers. If you’re a geek like me, you might find it worth watching, and I can officially say that this movie has been Chaz approved. So why are you still reading this? Go and watch it!