WarGames
High school student David Lightman unwittingly hacks into a military supercomputer while searching for new video games, which initiates a confrontation of global proportions World War III!
27 December 1950, Harlem, New York City, New York, USA
25 September 1946, Buffalo, New York, USA
1925
31 July 1921, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
17 July 1952, San Francisco, California, USA
20 December 1946, New York City, New York, USA
5 July 1930, Derbyshire, England, UK
22 March 1950, New Mexico, USA
15 June 1933, USA
July 30, 2013
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.
July 30, 2013
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.
March 26, 2009
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.
July 30, 2013
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.
January 26, 2006
The first half has a sardonic edge to it, but the more seriously the movie takes itself the sillier it gets.
April 30, 2009
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.
October 23, 2004
As a premise for a thriller, this is a masterstroke.
March 14, 2008
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.
July 30, 2013
Slick and suspenseful, though a little heavy-handed.
July 30, 2013
Classic humanist-didactic filmmaking, effectively presented as a thriller.
July 30, 2013
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.
