In 1983 I was going through a strange phase — I liked sitting in the front row at movies.
I guess I figured that if the screen filled my entire field of vision, that meant I was getting some kind of IMAX experience. The only one of my friends who shared this insane idea was my old Boy Scout buddy Zant Burdine. To think we were the first in line for the very first showing of Return of the Jedi at the Stamm theater, and when they opened the doors we headed straight for the front row. Yeah, good thing we got there early for those primo seats!
One of those 1983 front-row-center experiences was WarGames. Up to that point, director John Badham was best known for directing Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Blue Thunder, which opened about a month prior to WarGames. He went on to do the highly entertaining Stakeout (1987) in addition to some not-so-great stuff like Bird on a Wire (1990). At some point his films started using the vanity credit “A John Badham Movie,” as opposed to “A John Badham Film”; it made me wonder if he was making the statement that movies are meant to be fun entertainment while films are potentially more pretentious. (Directors Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson routinely use the word “picture” in their vanity credits.)
For me, WarGames is Badham’s best movie. It’s certainly both fun and entertaining, but also quite intelligent as well, thanks to a superb screenplay by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, who went on to write another great movie together, 1992’s Sneakers. (After that Parkes turned exclusively to producing, often working with Steven Spielberg.) The riveting opening scene features Michael Madsen and John Spencer as two U.S. Air Force officers in a missile silo who receive a launch order. Both are required to turn each of their keys at the same time to launch the missile, but at the last minute Spencer can’t do it, leaving Madsen to pull a gun on his partner: “Turn your key, sir!”
Brilliantly, the scene turns out to be a drill — a test to see just how many people would actually be willing to launch a nuclear missile with only an order from a computer and no telephone confirmation. This scene establishes early on the conflict within the military: Dr. McKittrick (Dabney Coleman), the man behind NORAD’s WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) supercomputer, believes all officers should be taken out of the loop, while General Beringer (Barry Corbin) is extremely uncomfortable with the idea of leaving mankind’s fate in the hands of computers.
