This movie is much stronger when you take it in context of the era it was made. Cold war tensions were at a near all-time high, and for teenagers who grew up at that time this movie was not seen as all that casual. Parts of it were outright terrifying. Looking at this after the collapse of the USSR and about three decades during which the public has lost the emotional connection to MAD definitely softens the impact.
This. I saw this movie in the mid-late 80's while there was still a cold war going on and one has to remember that this kind of thing was an actual fear and possibility for us.
Not to mention 1983 would of been right in the middle of the President Ronald Reagan's escalation of anti-Soviet propaganda, publicly denouncing them as the "Evil Empire", to sell new Cold War military spending to the public after the previous Carter administrations post-Vietnam War military budget cuts.
Younger people don't seem to understand entirely HOW REAL the possibility of global nuclear annihilation was to us. This was not science fiction to us. I get the not getting the whole emotional impact of it, because they were lucky enough to be born later, but there si a certain ignorance about it that is kinda disconcerting.
@Gerald H Do you remember the ads about the little girl that could save her life hiding inside a fridge? I don't think people realize how much Lucas and Spielberg were trolling in Crystal skull.
You're looking at this 40 years later. Back in 1983, this was nail-biting stuff and the humor was for relief of the tension. We were in the cold war and the technology was cutting edge. I sat in the theater watching this completely on edge, and we all cheered at the end. You have to put it in the context of the time. Yes, a summer film, entertainment, but what a ride at the time!
Gen-Xer here and as others have commented, this movie felt much different when it first came out at one of the heights of the Cold War. I was 13 and remember being genuinely terrified that we would all die in a nuclear holocaust at any given moment. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, right next to Elmendorf Airforce Base (now part of JBER) and we all knew that Elmendorf was a primary target in the event of a nuclear war. I saw this movie in the theater and when they said one of the missiles was headed for Elmendorf Airforce Base, everybody in the theater cheered and applauded. We cheered again when it turned out to be a false alarm. Ah, fun during the Cold War.
WarGames: The Dead Code is a 2008 American direct-to-video thriller film written by Randall Badat and Rob Kerchner and directed by Stuart Gillard. It is the sequel to the 1983 film War Games.
@@kylereese4822 Yes and it's a horrible "sequel" but considering it was a direct to video thing - I don't even think of it as a true sequel. Plus any sequel needs to have Broderick in it.
This film is inspired by a couple of true incidents (only one of which was known at the time). On 9th November 1979 NORAD received reports of a Soviet attacjk and prepared a full scale nuclear response. It turned out they had not switched off a war game and everyone thought it was a real attack. A similar thing happened in 1983 in the Soviet Union. The only reason we are still here is because one man, Stanislav Petrov, refused orders to launch a nuclear attack because he thought that the computer information coming in was false.
13:19 --- Shorting the phone receiver to ground USED to work back in the 1950s through the 1970s. But the phone companies first started epoxying the screw pieces on so they wouldn't come off and then switched to what was called "in-band" signaling rather than out-of-band .. Out-of-band, meant that the signals for coins were carried on the other two wires (Black and white) while the normal phone calls were carried on red and green. --- From the mid 80s and on, when you deposited a coin, you would hear the tones in the earpiece.
Wargames is actually a very realistic movie when it comes to the hacking and computer interactions. A lot of the techniques shown are real. The scanning technique of sequential dialing and cataloging of modem access points became know as war-dialing because of this movie. The modern WiFi hunting technique of driving or flying around looking for unsecured WiFi access points is similarly referred to as war-driving and war-flying today. The phone phreaking and touch tone security pad hacks are pretty legitimate. There is also a lot of social engineering in the movie, which is a major element of hacking, particularly when attempting to breach systems or facilities that you do not have privileged access to. The military security stuff is a bit weak, but not quite as far fetched as you might think. The lack of guards at the gates can be explained as the outer defenses being folded back into the facility as it closes up so as not to abandon people to their deaths in the event of an actual nuclear war. Targets like NORAD are over saturation points where multiple warheads are targeted to try and knock out the US ability to respond to attack. The idea with WOPR is that it started life as an academic's tool to study artificial intelligence. Its smarts were then repurposed for military projects. It didn't stop learning. But it was largely re-written to handle military objectives. It had to obey orders, not think for itself. Just like real humans in parts of the military. This is expressly called out in the movie by the beginning sequence with the human operators. But what the military big-whigs and technicians didn't know was that a lot of what made WOPR so good at predicting force interactions and the like was the core programming that made it artificially intelligent and allowed it to learn. When David connects to it using the backdoor referencing Falken's dead son, he inadvertently wakes up long dormant code/memory in the system related to its earliest training. When it is foiled from completing its objective of winning the game, it uses its capacity to learn and think to find ways to continue. It does this throughout the film, from calling David back to attempting to crack the missile codes. Tic-tac-toe is similarly hidden deep in the system's memory. You can see it playing the game with the real Joshua when they are both effectively children. Because WOPR was sort of taken away and "abused" by the military as a "child" its learning about concepts like always playing to a draw is stunted. By bringing up the old game that has deeper connections for it with its early period, it is more effective at getting it to start thinking laterally again. It then makes the intuitive leap from one game to another and concludes that playing a game you can't win is stupid. While that may seem far fetched, things like that happen with neural net AI today (aka machine learning). Sometimes they make really weird leaps in assumptions that come from data sets used in their early training. Which is why a lot of modern ML has to be tossed out on a regular basis and the training started all over. Or why you get supposed ML/AI systems that later get reviewed by humans and the results hand manipulated. We actually have a very bad track record with machine learning in a lot of areas because we don't know all the associations they are making when we stuff them with data. They do great with more black and white or constrained objectives, but get weird and wonky when given broader patterns to analyze. In the end, they are still only as good as the people that wrote them and the data sets that they are fed. This is why research has shown that many systems like facial recognition systems have inadvertently developed biases based on skin color or gender that make them dangerously inaccurate when asked to match the faces of people whose ethnicity and gender do not match the majority of the data they were originally fed. The ideas and technology on display were extremely bleeding edge at the time and very few normal folks were even aware that you could use a computer to call another computer over the telephone. My family were a bunch of geeks and we got our first home computer in 1983. A VIC-20 (predecessor of the famous Commodore 64), it had a tape drive to load "large" applications with and a 3KB memory upgrade cartridge. Even so, it wasn't until the early 90's that I was messing around with the sorts of things you see in Wargames. The internet was a whispered of holy grail that you could only get access to once you started going to college. The world wide web didn't even exist when I first got access to the internet. We used command line applications like archie and gopher to find things online. I once used a dumb terminal in the university lab that literally printed out the screen on a dot matrix printer, line by line. As others have noted, this movie was a lot more terrifying in the era. The idea that we were all going to be wiped out by nuclear war with the USSR was not far fetched, and at times seemed absolutely certain. It would later come out (some of it very recently) that several times during this period, we really did come within minutes of wiping most of humanity from the face of the earth. And no one knew. As humans, we never really learned the lesson from this movie. MAD didn't convince us to stop being stupid and cease nuclear saber rattling. Our primary antagonists (the USSR) backed down because they imploded economically and could no longer support it system of government or military posture. The threats faded, but didn't disappear. And the nuclear saber rattling became less of a concern (though one people still do not it take seriously enough with new countries achieving the capability today and some countries believed to be nuclear capable that are very willing to use that capability to survive the high threat environments they live it). There are probably some former cold war military strategists around today that still think we could have won a nuclear war. At any rate, while the distance from the time period may have lessened the impact of the film, I am glad you still generally enjoyed it. You should really watch Sneakers (1992), Real Genius (1985), and The Manhattan Project (1986) for additional excellent hacker movies that also have some pointed things to say about cold war and just barely post-cold war tensions. I would also highly recommend "The Hunt for Red October" as a more straight thriller from the tail end of that era.
Yeah, the tech stuff in this film is probably more accurate than any other movie portraying computers and hacking that I know. There were little things... like the acoustic coupler that David uses were old tech even by the time this movie came out in 1983... but I can understand why it was used... it was just to show the audience that the computer was calling other computers using the phone line. You have to remember that in 1983 most people didn't understand much about home computers just yet.
The movie spooked the people in government and the politicians and president, it was part of the reason for the US first (possible to harsh): Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
You did such a good job explaining this. I was going to reply myself but you beat me to it and did a much better job. So I will just add that even though David was going to be taken away, they couldn't do manhunt for him since, presumably, the whole thing was highly classified. So David escaping is not that big a "plot hole". There used to be a SEAL team called Red Team (I believe) and they would infiltrate highly guarded areas, and they found it to be incredibly simple to enter and leave (which led to tighter security, the whole point of this team). Some of their escapes and infiltrations were shockingly easy, even absurdly unrealistic except for the fact that it was true. Sometimes reality is unreal. Also, when they were returning to the base, it is clear from the military jeep driving them to the base to the assistant awaiting them, that they had called ahead somehow and were expected at the base. So that is definitely close to a "plot-hole". Not everything needs to be spelled out and show, reasonable implications are also good shortcuts. As for the AI, Falken admitted to David that he could never teach Joshua futility. However David realizes, ironically from Falken's own example, that tic tac toe is a great way to teach futility. They literally inspired each other to make a breakthrough in how to teach Joshua about futility. Joshua uses this new found knowledge in the still running game. I also like how they both seem to understand each other as soon as David announces "games!". Their thinking is quite similar. I will also add, the USSR would later get Gorbachev, who also thought the whole MAD scenario absurd and he and Reagan would, from treaties signed by both of them, collectively get rid of almost 50,000 nuclear weapons. It is the one thing the US banks on with Russia even today, (despite Russia's frankly irresponsible nuclear threats it makes today, that I believe to be largely empty... but still) the not wanting more nuclear proliferation. Anyway, I didn't find this movie had any real plot-holes. Some of the characterizations are not the greatest (David playing with his yo-yo just before he sees the news to show his "innocence" is the only one that come to mind right now). but I overall disagree with this reactor's opinions.
First off, that was a great analysis of the movie and the situation in the 70s and early 80s. I would argue that nuclear saber-rattling only ever got us close to war once, the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was an actual staredown between the nuclear powers. The other times when we may have been close to war were due to mistakes, typically human error. While it's true the NORAD defenses would've been folded into the facility for their own protection (good description of NORAD being a target multiple times over), you could never access it so easily. Otherwise a strike team could hit it at this most crucial time and penetrate the facility to attempt to disrupt the entire nuclear response. The Hunt for Red October ... read the book. It is WAY better than the movie. And a better movie that gets into the stress of a potential nuclear launch situation is Crimson Tide, which is also wildly inaccurate in some ways, but the stress would be real.
I was in elementary school when this, "Red Dawn" and a TV mini-series called "The Day After" were made - as people have commented below, the 80's were fraught with nuclear tension! It was very scary to this little kid!
I was born and raised in a small town not too far away from Lawrence Kansas where The Day After was filmed. It terrified me as a child, and still brings tears to this old man's eyes when I watch it, even now, although it's a lot cheesier than I remember.
I was in high school during that time and it was the same thing for us as older kids. I remember in our World History class we had to write a paper over our thoughts of the cold war and the threat of nuclear war. Nuclear War was a topic of discussion quite a bit in the 80s. As everyone has mentioned younger people born after the fall of the Soviet Union won't quite "get" the tension we felt.
12:35 'feeding it different sounds' is how you used to hack over the phone, it was an analog system so if you could mimic the correct sound it would take that input as if it were the data it was supposed to receive, if that makes sense. They used to call it Phreaking.
When I was a child, my family was on a vacation road trip in CO. My father, a former Marine aviator, pointed out Cheyenne Mountain to us, then proceeded to drive down a dirt road toward the place. Shortly after, a white truck pulled us over, and my dad asked it they gave tours like in the movie. :) LOL we got sent back to the highway. This could be the very first hacker movie
21:35 - To be fair, they were closing down the mountain in preparation for nuclear war, and they did know they were coming. I assumed they had recalled the guards instead of letting them suffer a nuclear strike unprotected since I'm sure NORAD was a primary target. Besides, it is a movie.
Granted, the ENTIRE exchange between those two as a good bit of dialogue. I think MY favorite was, "You aren't afraid of death because you are already dead!" A good retort, that was also pretty deep. Though, as a Gen Xer, my LEAST favorite now was, "He WAS old! He was like 44!" "44? Yeah, that's pretty old!" :(
Not to mention it doesn't do that annoying key mashing hacking garbage that Hackers made into a troupe. Matty B had to use his brain and do research to find was into the system. Hacking wasn't some superpower because someone had autism.
Yes, that was a young genuine Michael Madsen, not a “discount,” lol. Ally Sheedy also starred in the classic Short Circuit. A must-watch. The tone used to escape from the locked door may have been inspired by what Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak did with the telephone dial tone, which allowed him to make pranks and free international calls.
If the panel for a door lock did indeed work on DTMF recognition, it would be very possible to do that. The scenarios in this movie are pretty far-fetched, but the tech on display is fairly realistic.
You could hack the analogue telephone networks back in the day by sending various audio frequencies, By re-creating these tones, phreaks could switch calls from the phone handset, allowing free calls to be made around the world. To ease the creation of these tones, electronic tone generators known as blue boxes became a staple of the phreaker community. This community included future Apple Inc. cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
I remember someone showing me a hack to make free long distance calls. Since I really didn’t have anyone to call long distance, it didn’t seem worth the risk. But I do recall (though I don’t remember how) knowing how to do something similar to make free calls from a pay phone.
@@3DJapan As far as I recall, the story goes that that is what started the whole phreaking movement, and was the inspiration for the Blue Box in the first place.
One of the things I like about Wargames and Tron the year before is that they didn't simplify too much. It treated things more or less how they really are. The film Hackers (and so many others) treat computers in the 80's like they're magic. Wargames used real terms (like Back Door) and using pay phone hacks (which were absolutely real). Tron took science fiction liberties (lasers changing matter into data), but used the fantasy elements to represent real world things (programs, input/output communication).
Yeah, but that was because computers back then felt like magic, a bit. They were filled with possibilities. We knew most of what movies portrayed was nonsense, but we liked it because it was imaginative. Compared to today, my first PC back then was less than a children's toy, but it felt like a magicians box. And my printer sounded like an aircrafts machine gun... It was easy to let your imagination go. Nowadays they are as common as your shoes.
Oh, come on! Those of us who were technologically literate in the early 80s knew that the computerese and hacking in WarGames and Tron were clearly Hollywood nonsense. There were a few elements of reality sprinkled in, but overall the tech was very much simplified, naive and implausible.
Hackers is a 90s movie, but for all its glorious, guilty-pleasure, 90s cheesiness and presentation, some of the low level stuff is actually pretty high up on the reality meter. So much of that movie revolves around social engineering, not "computer magic" at all which is streets ahead of most movies that deal with hacking and information security.
This movie felt terrifyingly real to me as a teenager in the '80s, when there were always stories going around about nuclear war almost breaking out because of some computerized radar system mistaking the moon or a flock of geese for an enemy missile attack. It seems that more than a few times global destruction was only avoided because humans in the launch procedure refused to follow orders. The last decade of the Cold War nuclear arms race was a weird time to grow up.
the sad part is, this is still the case, just nobody seems to be aware of it anymore. Watching this after the 2nd biggest nuclear power invaded a country in Europe and their president discusses openly using atom bombs. We are just one bad day away from total annihilation, it's just that people seem to be more interested in useless discussions on Twitter.
I'm a professional programmer, and I was even when this movie came out. Two things I'd like to highlight: first, David's (Broderick's character) home kit was already obsolete when the movie came out (8 inch floppies, acoustic couplers). I used to think this was a flaw until I listened to the director's commentary: as a kid David had no money to buy his stuff, so it was all what the pro guys were throwing in the dumpster back then. The timing in that case works out about right. Second, Shan thought it was remarkable that the story imagined an AI computer back in the early 1980s. This isn't all that remarkable: AI started being taken seriously back in the late '40s (Turing et al), and like fusion power, true AI is always about 30 years in the future. The stuff they call AI now is not AI - the term is just used as a buzzword to sell shit and get grants. I'm not aware that any "AI" is yet close to passing the Turing test. The IBM "Watson" program that plays Jeopardy is the most impressive program I know of, but AFAIK it's only speech recognition coupled to a search engine, not really an AI. Since we're movie buffs I would suggest the movie "Ex Machina". There's a movie that isn't at all confused by what AI means, and you'll see we're nowhere close. Maybe in 30 years...
This came out when I was a kid and was one of things that got me interested in computers and set me on the path to a job in IT. Back then computers were new and very few people even had them. The possibilities that this movie showed about our future really excited me back then.
This was also the era when phones went from rotary to pushbutton dialing, using DTFM - Dual-Tone Frequency Modulation, with one tone indicating the column and a second tone indicating the row. It was widely used in all manner of devices, though there usually wasn't any means to actually hear the tones. The security pad for the infirmary most certainly wouldn't have been audible (mainly made so for the sake of exposition) but the trick with the tape recorder would have indeed worked. Those old payphones would produce Morse-like signals to register coins being inserted - one 'dit' for a nickel, two 'dit's for a dime, and a 'dah' for a quarter. It was something of an open secret for years among the hackers and phreaks of the era that you could fake the 'dah' by shorting the microphone against the phone's ground. This movie is precisely why phone companies were quick to retrofit payphones with completely-sealed handsets while they worked to redesign the circuitry so this particular trick would no longer work.
All else being equal, yours are my favorite film reactions (and I follow at least 100, and I also support you on Patreon when I do so for few others). That needs to be said up front before I offer some critical feedback. I saw this flick in the cinema when it was released. I was in my twenties and had been enlisted in the "Cold War" USAF for 4 years. The unrealistic aspect of the film are insubstantial as the story is entirely about, as you put it well, M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction). The story of Broderick and Sheedy was the veneer of a mainstream plot used to smuggle a heavy-hitting message about the ACTUAL story, which was the unmercifully heavy threat of global thermonuclear war. Machine learning and A.I. were also secondary to the point the director was sliding surreptitiously into our hearts from the first frames. It is fair enough for critics and reviewers to address how well older films have aged. Sadly, that is an obvious issue, as the mediocre aging of the tech in this movie impacted your otherwise sound reaction and review. The director was not making a film for today. Many "classic" films are intended to last for all time, but War Games was not intended to be such a show. The story of my viewing of this work in the cinema on release illustrates the critical point I want to make, and which I feel you missed. Where the movie seemed playful and you expected more seriousness, the director was cutting the audience a lot of slack because we all, at the time, suffered under a leaden black cloud of genuine existential dread. This extreme community stress showed up poignantly when I watched the show in a medium-large cinema with a close-to-capacity crowd. We chuckled at the fun parts and cruised happily along with the lighthearted teen antics, and many of us looked askance at the predictive technology as being rather fantastic (as it was in that precise moment, but would become reality much later on). We understood that the tech was speculative and did not mind because we, as denizens of those days, clearly saw the true story of global thermonuclear war in our daily news. Toward the end of the film (SPOILERS, of course), when WOPR says the only winning move is not to play, half the live audience around me jumped to their feet and roared approval. Roared. Applauded. I had tears in my eyes then, and do again now remembering how relieve I was for a film to speak a clear truth into an unclear tomorrow. It is hard to imagine a live cinema audience of today jumping up, applauding or cheering for anything, but in 1984 we were on an emotional hair trigger as, so it seemed, the world turned on the most fragile of pins. There are no perfect reviews or perfect reviewers. Your works are so overwhelmingly interesting and entertaining that I hesitate to share this treatise with you (and wish I had a more-direct way that would not involve "calling you out" openly as this comment will seem to do). But this movie was not made for you, and to judge it for such is to neglect the all-important role of seeing the actual audience intended. War Games was a message to all English-speaking audience, particularly in the nuclear U.S. The point was clear: 'Stop the M.A.D.-ness and step back from the brink. Stop electing war mongers. Start electing reasonable people. If you are an elected official or anyone in the chain of nuclear command, calm down and lower the figurative cover on the launch buttons.' Broderick and Sheedy were set dressing to get butts into seats and eyeballs to the screen where the world died a fiery end over and over in eye-searing horror until all went quiet, and the small, childlike voice told us our salvation: The only winning move is not to play. It will be tempting to think my own subjective viewing of the film in its day has colored my perception against reality. My claim is that my subjective viewing was dead center of the environment when the work was conceived, executed and delivered. We may never know which senators or scientists or military officials may have seen the film and woke up to their true responsibilities and changed their minds more toward the preservation of human life over human ideology. War Games was subjective, aimed at a profoundly (perhaps unimaginably) subjective demographic. Audiences jumped, roared, applauded ... and some wept. Few films since have been able to claim such an impact. Cheers for all the good work you do. I look forward to your next offering.
After this one Badham directed the best helicopter movie ever made, Blue Thunder with Roy Scheider and Malcom McDowell, a masterpiece of action with no CGI... And i just realized Brodderick changed the grades on the computer like in... Ferris Bueller !
@@Dacre1000 i get that because each season of Airwof got progressively worse. 1st season was fantastic with cold war/international storylines.. belisario left and seasons went downhill with more domestic stories
When this movie came out I was a young boy, and the best way to describe what it felt like back then would be to ask you to remember a year ago how the fear of covid hung over everyone and no one knew where the future was going, that this thing could kill all of us. That is how Americans felt about possible nuclear war at that time. So this movie was, yes a little bit of typical 80s fair to reach and entertain the populace, but I have to say that those scenes of simulated detonations did strike a nerve with people at that time.
I was in high school at the time this movie was made (hail Galaga!) and this movie was made to make a very distinct point in the political context of the times. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was years away. Glasnost (openness) as a political philosophy in the USSR was not even conceived of. Russian occupation of Afghanistan was still ongoing (oh irony). The US under Reagan was revamping and deploying new ICBM systems and promoting the strategic defense initiative. There were national labor strikes in Poland that were causing tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. Massive protests in western Europe (Germany in particular) about the US deploying new medium range nuclear weapons systems in NATO countries to put more of the USSR in range of potential nuclear attack. MADD was the acronym of the day and this was all being shown as part of the national news each day/week. The cloud of potential nuclear conflict was very perceptible. A double feature of Dr. Strangelove and WarGames would be a good bookend pairing on highlighting the futility and potential danger of nuclear war, with The Day After thrown in the mix as well. There are still enough deployed nuclear weapons in the US, Russia, China, and other countries to destroy the world as we know it.
I was 18 at that time, the fear of nuclear war was everywhere so much so that very popular Dutch pop group 'Doe Maar' had a no. one hit called 'Voor Als De Bom Valt' ('When the Bomb Falls') and I was absolutely CONVINCED I would not live until 23. I gave the world five years. And yet here we are, almost forty years later :) While this was never a favorite movie of mine, it's very much a product of its time.
I think you have to live through the ‘70s - ‘80s and have seen it at that time to fully appreciate the film. Cold War movies don’t seem to age as well as Vietnam, WWII, and other war films.
Idk I feel like there’s so much that’s relevant to today! But maybe you need to know the history, and it depends on where you grew up too. (I’m not halfway through this video yet, but he seems to be appreciating this as well?)
This movie is inspired by two different real events: "The 3 A.M. Phone Call" of 1979 and the early 1980's hacking on the DoD network by two teenagers that lead them to NORAD briefly and forced the DoD to re-design the whole network. The movie is a mix of these two real events. The booth phone hack was usual in the 70's-80's but only a few people knew how to do it right. The hack of the NORAD detention's room is possible in theory, because the door system "hears" sound tones coming from the keyboard and David analogically recorded those tones and reproduced them back in the system line where it "hears" the input signals.
This movie is absolutely loaded with nostalgia for me! The arcade (Galaga!); "PC" tech of the day; general naivety of the decade; the feeling of latent cold war tension; and just Broderic and Sheedy. I love it.
The fake NORAD was just made up with the imagination of what it looked like, because they weren’t allowed in. Apparently NROAD could only dream of having such a command center as was portrayed in the movie.
I was in junior high school when this movie came out and it was very popular with the computer and tech geek crowd, i'm not sure if this was the one of the first or maybe the first hacker movie but a lot of people tried to hack stuff with their home computers after this movie came out, i still have the ColecoVision game cartridge based on this movie, it played a lot like Missile Command.
The climax where WOPR is running the attack simulations on the big screens was incredible in a theater. As others have said, when the film was released, we were in a Cold War with Russia and an all out nuclear war seemed able to break out at any time. The fear was real.
I was 8 when War Games was released. A couple of close friends and I, having only recently been introduced to computers, saw it at a Saturday matinee. We became obsessed with technology and hacking. We didn't do much in the way of hacking, but we did have lots of fun times playing games and creating our own programs. It's pretty astonishing to see how far mankind has come regarding technology...for good and ill. Love your channel, man! You're the kind of person I enjoy watching movies with. Keep up the great work!
To me this has always been one of those underrated super gems, together with 13th warrior and Top Secret. It may be hard to see the thrill of connecting to other computers now, but back then in the commodore 64 era it was an amazing thought, which added to the excitement.
Even the sun was outshone by Michelle Pfeiffer in that movie. What a woman. But I agree: one of Dick Donner´s best. And to those who say that the modern score doesn't fit I say: NONSENSE!
Another good military, nuclear war themed movie with Matthew Broderick that gets very little notice is *Project X* from 1987. Has a little bit of a more serious feel to it for me, not that global nuclear war isn't serious. In *Project X,* Broderick plays a US Air Force Airman, so none of the teenage high school aspect to distract from the seriousness. Brings on some emotions too.
that's the monkey one right... in '87 The Manhattan Project (1986) was the other one I was thinking about. Build a nuke for the science fair, accidentally using stuff to potent to test.
Everything in the early to mid 80s was about the Cold War, which was incredibly scary for everyone, especially kids. Remember all the songs we had about it? Sting did Russians, and Elton John had Nikita, then there was the TV film The Day After, and Testament. Everywhere we turned, people were getting nuked lol. I remember something at the time about the filmmakers sending the film over to the Soviet Union and asking Kruschev to watch it? Everybody in the arts communities were trying to send messages to the governments of the world, that's how serious it was.
Love the fact that you understand the technology and the history. You had much more context than most reviewers. I was so excited that you spoke my language. 🤓♥️♥️♥️
I just watched this movie with my husband who would never seen it a couple of weeks ago. One of my absolute favorite. It's funny now cuz my husband's in the military and were stationed in Colorado. If I look out the window right now I can see the Cheyenne Mountain. Great reaction as always!
Fail safe and Dr Strangelove we’re both concepts taken from the same original material, the book Failsafe.. Both movies debuted in 1964, and both are fantastic..
@@jacobjones5269 Kubrik destroyed 'Failsafe' by demanding 'Dr Strangelove' be released first. After the public saw the parody, there was little interest in seeing the story played straight a few months later.
I think the ABC television film, The Day After, which also came out in ‘83 (and, coincidentally, was filmed in my hometown of Lawrence, KS), scared people quite a bit more than this film did. It was seen by 100 million people & was one of the highest viewed non-sporting television broadcasts for many years. It’s where the idea of a post war nuclear winter was really planted into the minds of the American people. A cool fact I just found out-It was also broadcast on the USSR’s state television in 1987.
I think you missed a couple of things Shan... 1. They were closing the mountain (cutting off all outside influence... electric, water, air, etc)... there were no guards because they were all inside. 2. The reason nothing happened to them was they were with 2 people the NORAD staff knew (Dr. Falcon and the Woman Staff member of NORAD) and were in communication with NORAD during the travel there, so they were expected. Had these two conditions not existed they would have been shot on sight and would be dead long before reaching the door.
If you enjoyed that old font, you should check out another 80s Cold War era war response oriented fun sci film about AI, SHORT CIRCUIT with Johnny 5, and well, the sequel is debateable, but has a fun "Holding Out for a Hero" montage.
I took A.I. courses at UCSD in 1975. Some very smart people have been thinking about machine learning since the advent of computers. This movie was seminal in imagining the dangers of A.I.
Another great "hacker" movie from the 80s is "Real Genius". And yes, that Michael Madsen lookalike was Michael Madsen. And the threat of nuclear war was pretty much looming all over the 80s up until 89.
Love how his computer sends and receives calls to and from other computers, computers, communicating which is, essentially, what the internet will eventually become.
"This was a pretty casual film" I can't stress enough what a complicated process it was to make a mainstream scifi film/books/etc. back in the 80's. There were so many very strong biases against staple elements of the genre, and very little vision or appetite for things that weren't recognizably cookie cutter. You invariably had to walk a tightrope in taking any solid scifi premise, and then immediately start finding ways to inject popular elements into it, in order to make it generally acceptable. To dumb it down, strip it down, add in gimmicks, add in popular cliches, etc. That's a very complex balancing act. And one that often met with mangled works, or pieces that the mainstream rejected (sooner or later).
"Shall we play a game" is 1 of the most iconic & reproduce line of all time. You can even see its influence in the Saw Movies 😉 Edit btw D.A.R.Y.L. & Short Circuit are great A.I. movie from the same times.
The predictions are based on fears. That computers would start to learn on their own and turn against their inventors and people who built them is a fear just like other human fears through history.
The last shot of the opening montage of Tom Cruise's Edge of Tomorrow used a shot of the war room from this movie as a backdrop. BTW, if you haven't seen it Edge of Tomorrow is GREAT!
One of my favorite movies ever made. It's not a cinematic masterpiece or anything and the story isn't complicated or anything - but it's just a well done cold war era movie. And as a computer nerd even back then I loved this stuff.
My wife and I saw this at a theater when it came out. I still watch it from time to time. It's very entertaining. He must have done a lot of hacking to afford such high-tech equipment. I think only business systems used 8" floppy discs. Us normal folks could only afford the 5-1/4" variety.
A relatively minor thing here, but... Dialing a whole bunch of numbers trying to find computers to connect to was very much a real practice. After this movie came out, the term "war dialing" was coined. That should give a hint as to how culturally influential it was.
Oh, and to add on to that, I just remembered: when Wi-fi started to take off, some people started trying to map the locations of networks, by driving around with a laptop in the car that records their signals along with GPS coordinates. Guess what this is called? Yup, "wardriving". Similar terms exist depending on the mode of transport.
At the time, this was a pretty amazing film. Remember, when this movie was made, the US and the Soviet Union were in the depths of the cold war. We won because we massively out spent the Soviets on defense. Reagan's greatest accomplishment. The war room set was great. Seeing it in the theater was pretty great with the huge screens flashing and the music.
Yes. The Soviet Union bankrupted itself trying to counter the Strategic Defense Initiative and our overall capabilities. This, combined with Gorbachev trusting that Reagan wouldn't commit a first strike after they met helped end the Cold War.
It's still one of the more realistic hacking movies. I.E. how to figure out a password. WOPR was a learning machine from the beginning, but it was limited. It was the one thing Falcon could not teach him. Only after noting that you can't win Tic-Tac-Toe it compared it to another situation and even then it had to re-check all the results of the previous simulations, probably adding some so ridiculous that no one had thought of it before. I compare it to the fallacy of IQ rating. Every IQ test depends on some basic knowledge. If you don't have it, the test result is flawed. It also does not cover talents. Someone with a good ear for music may end up as a genious componist or performer, but they probably won't be as good as a straightforward scientist. Or for an extreme example, take Forest Gump. As for the rest of the movie? It is a product of it's time. A little humorous one, given. But what does that mean? Try to imagine that you know that the world could end in 15 minutes an alarm is given. Consider the alarm could come 24/7 for years. And now consider you have to live with this knowledge in the back of your mind for decades. Personally, sometome between 10 and 15 I decided that when this alarm came, I would move as closely as possible to a certain US base nearby, because I knew it would be a main target. A 10 to 15 year old came to the decision that he did not wish to survive a nuclear war and wanted to ensure it was over as quickly as possible. You might understand why the slightly humorous tone of this movie was appreciated. If not? Try the following movies: 'The day after' (1983), 'When the wind blows' (1986), 'Grave of the Fireflies' (1988) and 'Barfoot Gen' (1983). Yes, three of them are animated. That does not make them less horrible. Neither of them is for the faint of heart. And yes, this is a warning.
Pay phones: There was a hole under the key pad. And a center hole in the mic part of the phone. Paper clip. Make the connection between the two. Free phone call.
yes, That payphone's circuit is called a 'ground start' number, you can see him ground out one of the terminals in the headset to the phone case itself, which will give you dial tone.
And then he grounds out the mic on the phone to get a dial tone to dial out without dropping any coins. heh Stuff that used to genuinely work once upon. :-)
As sad as it might seem, this movie is *still* one of the most realistic depictions of how a hacker works and the technology around it. Even today. Ninety percent social "hacks" (stealing real-world passwords from people who keep them out in the open and drive the computer department nuts), the rest just automated programs doing the physical work for them, etcetera. While WOPR the self-learning human-intelligence computer is complete nonsense even today, the rest of everything is actual computer lingo and technology, some of which is still in use today.
AUTO LIKE!!! Shan, I always watch your videos when it's a movie I'm familiar with. Something I want you to understand, with this movie, is that I lived through this time period and I was 16 when this movie came out. I was using a Commodore 64 computer, I had a 5 1/4" disk drive(stored 177kb), a tape drive(stored data slow as shit on a normal cassette tape), and WANTED to get my first modem(they were either 300 bps or 1200 bps(that's BYTES PER SECOND). Compared to today's technology, we're transferring data at thousands of times that speed. When my grandmother saw this movie(she was going to get me a 300 baud(bps) modem)... but this movie pushed that back a full year, and I had to promise not to hack the school's computer. At the time(a year after this movie came out), modems had jumped up to a max of 2400 baud(BPS). Still, the 300 baud modem I got was $100. I used it for several years before I could afford a 2400 baud modem. 300 bps showed up on your screen(I used an old TV, as monitors were well over $1000 at the time) so slow you could read it as it was scrolling. When I finally got a 2400 baud modem, text scrolled by a lot faster, but I learned to "speed read" because of that. Technology continued to advance, and because I wasn't "upper middle class", I was a bit behind the curve. I used my Commodore 64 well into the 1990s, but I did get a Commodore Amiga 500 in 1989. Still no Hard Drive, but I could afford a monitor at that point(computer, external secondary disk drive, extra memory module and monitor was $1200 bundled together). The Amiga was an Amazing machine, and I suggest you look into it, as it literally changed computer technology for the better. Right.... enough of my personal history... on with the reaction: 4:45 - I *SO* identified with Lightman in this movie. While I wasn't a hacker, nor did I have a hot chick as a close friend... I was the class "smartass". 5:57 - He used 8" disks, while 5 1/4" disks were actually more common on other platforms. However, what this does tell you is that he's had that computer system for a long time. It actually didn't take long before 3.5" disks(880kb/1.0mb, depending) were common. Yes... again, I lived it. I was an 80s nerd.... sue me. :p 6:14 - We called it "auto-dialing". Your computer would literally dial every number possible, in sequential order, looking for another computer's tone. This was actually a common practice back in the mid 80s. It wasn't illegal, either. Unless, of course, you were using stolen credit cards to make "long distance" calls. That was illegal. 6:23 - He was right, though. At the time, if you were under 18, you couldn't be charged with "adult" crimes. I knew a few people who used those methods, but I won't detail how they did it. 7:06 - OH SHIT! I forgot about this scene! Paused before your actual reaction to say this: The guy who knocked on the window and said "Hi, Lightman!" is Eddie Deezen. While he's not an A-List star, he's one helluva nice guy. I have him on my friends list on Facebook, have met him in real life, and I can't talk well enough about him. An extremely nice guy who was in a few movies back then, and has done some voiceover work in movies that might surprise you. He actually had a major role in another 80s movie titled "Midnight Madness", which I highly recommend(and never saw anyone react to it). Set a trend, Shan... react to that movie. I swear you won't regret it if you like 80s movies! 7:41 - Well, you have to do more than enter it wrong more than 3 times for them to come after you... but the 3 times is usually what locks the account out from access until you actually go prove it was you that screwed up. Ask me how I know.... ;) 8:20 - Yeah.... that line hurt. 41 is "old".... I'm 54 now.... I must be "ancient" by their standards.... :( 8:30 - Backdoors usually were pretty simple. Hell, even these days, passwords can be REALLY simple, *IF* the person creating it has no clue how easy it is to hack accounts. I keep this in mind every time I create a new password. I also want to state clearly; that I haven't hacked into a computer system illegally EVER. The only times I've ever accessed someone else's account, I was authorized to do so. However, this goes back to my comment at 7:41.... I mistyped my wife's password 3 times, and got her online account locked out. So, that's how I know. She slapped me for that, but I deserved it. 8:39 - OH, yeah... that "voice box" wasn't a really widely distributed accessory. Computers back then really didn't have a "text to voice" option for the home consumer. While someone of David's dedication MAY have had one, it wasn't available for every home at a reasonable price. Not until the Amiga days, when you didn't need one, as the "voice" would come right out of the computer's speakers. 10:18 - Oh, dude.... you don't know... even back then.... teenage girls wanted to call their friends and tell them the wild stories of shit they wouldn't believe. LMAO! 10:45 - A smaller budget with big ideas.... but it was done absolutely perfectly. As you noted, the "NORAD" set was believable(though, I doubt accurate), as were all of those actors cast as the high ranking officials. You also have to understand, that this took place during the "cold war" between the US and USSR. We literally lived with the thought that nuclear missiles would rain down upon us at any minute. Speaking of which, "Red Dawn"(1984) is a good follow up to this. Much different story and setting.... but in the same time period. Excellent watch! I heard the remake is garbage. 12:39 - Oh, boy.... how much to I tell you... Okay... fine... Yes, back then, you COULD use the recorded sounds to simulate codes. As I understand it; one COULD also use the same technique to simulate someone else's phone number. In other words, if you wanted to dial "long distance"(which cost extra back then, and was very expensive), you could "fool" the phone company into believing the call originated from whatever phone number you entered into the program, while it actually originated from yours. To put it simply, IF you had the right software, you could enter anyone's phone number into the program, and bill them for your long distance call. While I didn't actually do this(I was over 18 when I had heard of it), I remember a few people detailing to me exactly HOW to do it. Because I was "of age", and this would be considered "fraud".... and I didn't want to go to jail/prison... I never tried that stuff. But the details of HOW it worked sounded legit. Also, I was shown the software required to do it. Phone companies have since done away with "long distance" calling charges, so that's moot. But consider it much like today's "Proxy" technology.... You can change your internet connection to whatever country you choose, to access certain content that's only allowed in that country. That's where this idea started. 13:16 - That one I can't vouch for. While I was with someone who tried it, it didn't work at the time. BUT... one thing that WAS done back then was to dial the operator(press 0 and wait a minute), and tell them that you were just on a call and got disconnected. They would "reconnect" you to the number you gave them. So, I think this scene was cut short a bit for timing purposes. 14:30 - Listen carefully to what Dr. Falcon is saying. He's NOT wrong. Sometimes, Nature does just "give up" and starts again. Look around today's world.... 15:30 - Ally Sheedy was hotter than Hell back then. Another movie she was involved in was "Bad Boys". Not the newer version.... which is completely unrelated, but the one starring Sean Penn and Reni Santini. Another great 80s movie I can recommend to you. 17:05 - You got it! The old "Brute Force" technique. Takes time, but it works. 18:45 - "The only winning move is NOT to play." - Ah, dammit.... gotta recommend "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". Classic Stanly Cuberick movie! During your review: 19:20 - Again, you have to remember the time in which is was released. The USSR(Russia) was perceived as a major threat to world peace. This movie really played on that, as well as the blossoming home computer industry. Setting is everything. Much like Red Dawn(mentioned above), it's a product of it's time. David in the arcade, using a primitive home computer, accidentally hacking into a government super-computer.... all of these things were on the minds of people during that time. Not so much, nowadays. While hacking a system COULD disrupt things(look at the oil pipeline recently on the East Coast), it wasn't really common, but the technology to do so was so new, people didn't know what to make of it. If you read all of this, I really appreciate you for doing so. I hope it gave you an insight into how things actually were back then.
The concept of hacking was very new then, I don't think the term was even actually learned. That was part of the coolness of this film. WOPR was scary to us as kids.
Just want to say I really appreciate your style of reactions: honest, well thought-out and even critical. I'm a huge fan of this film since I watched it on replay growing up As I've gotten older, though, I've acknowledged many of the flaws which you pointed out. I don't appreciate the film any less for it, and your reaction proved that. Both your reaction and the film were, indeed, enjoyable. Thanks for your work!
I have fond memories of Blue Thunder, the politics of the movie (re: militarization of police & surveillance state) from what's ostensibly a cop movie is quite the contrast with today & makes an interesting comparison. An underappreciated (because practically nobody saw it) Badham movie that I liked was Nick of Time (1995) which was probably the first "real time" movie or TV show I remember seeing, a decade-ish before 24. Interestingly it seems the last ~20 years Badham had only directed television series, including several that I watched regularly (Psych, Supernatural, and others).
I am surprised you did not see the seeds of SKYNET in this film. Clearly, the idea of giving a computer control of the nukes was the same as in Terminator.
This movie likely prevented an actual nuclear war. “As author Fred Kaplan explains in his book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, Reagan had recently viewed the movie WarGames and “he couldn’t get that movie out of his mind. At one point, he put down his index cards and asked if anyone had seen it. Nobody had… so he launched into a detailed summary of its plot.” As Reagan recounted the film, the room full of defense experts sat uncomfortably, suppressing smirks, as the leader of the free world described to them the plot of a Matthew Broderick movie about a teenager who hacks into NORAD, thinking it’s a computer game, nearly kicking off World War III. At the conclusion of his synopsis, Reagan turned to General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and asked if such a thing were possible. Unsure, Vessey promised to look into it. A week later, when Vessey returned, Reagan got his answer. Vessey said, “Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.” “Yes, you read that right, the dawn of the U.S. government taking cybersecurity seriously across its entire enterprise, and especially its sprawling strategic command and control infrastructure, was largely born out of the movie War Games.” Also: Wargames coincidentally opened exactly 3 years to the day after this actually incident at NORAD in 1980: “On June 3, 1980 at 2:26am, a 46¢ microchip in a NORAD computer failed, warning of 2, then 220, then 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles and causing US nuclear forces to move to a higher state of alert. It took 3 minutes to determine there was no attack underway. It failed again on June 6.”
Imagine the press today, but back in 1983, and they find out the Republican president asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs if the plot to a movie involving our nuclear response was plausible. The press would immediately ridicule that president for his ignorance and stupidity in asking such a question and they would use that continuously for years. That's exactly what would happen, and yet Reagan's simple question led to major changes in how seriously cybersecurity was handled by the military. So when Trump asks his experts what many consider to be dumb questions, maybe we should just be glad he asked the questions. "Can a nuclear bomb be used against a hurricane?" "Can disinfectants be introduced into the human body to battle COVID?" "Could our defense systems be hacked in this manner?" Stupid questions? No. They come from a place of ignorance and there's nothing wrong with that if you recognize your own ignorance. These presidents asked questions of experts. Isn't that what we want from our presidents?
This movie is much stronger when you take it in context of the era it was made. Cold war tensions were at a near all-time high, and for teenagers who grew up at that time this movie was not seen as all that casual. Parts of it were outright terrifying. Looking at this after the collapse of the USSR and about three decades during which the public has lost the emotional connection to MAD definitely softens the impact.
This. I saw this movie in the mid-late 80's while there was still a cold war going on and one has to remember that this kind of thing was an actual fear and possibility for us.
Not to mention 1983 would of been right in the middle of the President Ronald Reagan's escalation of anti-Soviet propaganda, publicly denouncing them as the "Evil Empire", to sell new Cold War military spending to the public after the previous Carter administrations post-Vietnam War military budget cuts.
Well.. the coldwar had start sofening it up by that point
Younger people don't seem to understand entirely HOW REAL the possibility of global nuclear annihilation was to us. This was not science fiction to us. I get the not getting the whole emotional impact of it, because they were lucky enough to be born later, but there si a certain ignorance about it that is kinda disconcerting.
@Gerald H Do you remember the ads about the little girl that could save her life hiding inside a fridge? I don't think people realize how much Lucas and Spielberg were trolling in Crystal skull.
You're looking at this 40 years later. Back in 1983, this was nail-biting stuff and the humor was for relief of the tension. We were in the cold war and the technology was cutting edge. I sat in the theater watching this completely on edge, and we all cheered at the end. You have to put it in the context of the time. Yes, a summer film, entertainment, but what a ride at the time!
"Discount Michael Madsen". That's a good one, made me smile. Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest.
I was going there, too. Nice pick up.
Cinema Sins: "Discount Michael Madsen." (ding)
Bingo.
Was about to make the same comment 😆 👍
Not discount, but a young Michael Madsen.
Gen-Xer here and as others have commented, this movie felt much different when it first came out at one of the heights of the Cold War. I was 13 and remember being genuinely terrified that we would all die in a nuclear holocaust at any given moment.
I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, right next to Elmendorf Airforce Base (now part of JBER) and we all knew that Elmendorf was a primary target in the event of a nuclear war. I saw this movie in the theater and when they said one of the missiles was headed for Elmendorf Airforce Base, everybody in the theater cheered and applauded. We cheered again when it turned out to be a false alarm. Ah, fun during the Cold War.
"The only winning move is not to play.". Here endeth the lesson for every 80's child on the futility of global thermonuclear war.
And Monopoly.
WarGames: The Dead Code is a 2008 American direct-to-video thriller film written by Randall Badat and Rob Kerchner and directed by Stuart Gillard. It is the sequel to the 1983 film War Games.
@@kylereese4822 Yes and it's a horrible "sequel" but considering it was a direct to video thing - I don't even think of it as a true sequel. Plus any sequel needs to have Broderick in it.
Now we have a Pandemic.
This film is inspired by a couple of true incidents (only one of which was known at the time). On 9th November 1979 NORAD received reports of a Soviet attacjk and prepared a full scale nuclear response. It turned out they had not switched off a war game and everyone thought it was a real attack. A similar thing happened in 1983 in the Soviet Union. The only reason we are still here is because one man, Stanislav Petrov, refused orders to launch a nuclear attack because he thought that the computer information coming in was false.
“I know what he is doing! He’s cold calling!” No, he’s wardialing - a term that came from this movie.
13:19 --- Shorting the phone receiver to ground USED to work back in the 1950s through the 1970s. But the phone companies first started epoxying the screw pieces on so they wouldn't come off and then switched to what was called "in-band" signaling rather than out-of-band .. Out-of-band, meant that the signals for coins were carried on the other two wires (Black and white) while the normal phone calls were carried on red and green. --- From the mid 80s and on, when you deposited a coin, you would hear the tones in the earpiece.
"Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room!"
Ah, yes. It would be cool if Shan reacted to 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb'
I love that “somebody could get hurt!” The irony is amazing.
Wargames is actually a very realistic movie when it comes to the hacking and computer interactions. A lot of the techniques shown are real. The scanning technique of sequential dialing and cataloging of modem access points became know as war-dialing because of this movie. The modern WiFi hunting technique of driving or flying around looking for unsecured WiFi access points is similarly referred to as war-driving and war-flying today. The phone phreaking and touch tone security pad hacks are pretty legitimate. There is also a lot of social engineering in the movie, which is a major element of hacking, particularly when attempting to breach systems or facilities that you do not have privileged access to.
The military security stuff is a bit weak, but not quite as far fetched as you might think. The lack of guards at the gates can be explained as the outer defenses being folded back into the facility as it closes up so as not to abandon people to their deaths in the event of an actual nuclear war. Targets like NORAD are over saturation points where multiple warheads are targeted to try and knock out the US ability to respond to attack.
The idea with WOPR is that it started life as an academic's tool to study artificial intelligence. Its smarts were then repurposed for military projects. It didn't stop learning. But it was largely re-written to handle military objectives. It had to obey orders, not think for itself. Just like real humans in parts of the military. This is expressly called out in the movie by the beginning sequence with the human operators. But what the military big-whigs and technicians didn't know was that a lot of what made WOPR so good at predicting force interactions and the like was the core programming that made it artificially intelligent and allowed it to learn. When David connects to it using the backdoor referencing Falken's dead son, he inadvertently wakes up long dormant code/memory in the system related to its earliest training. When it is foiled from completing its objective of winning the game, it uses its capacity to learn and think to find ways to continue. It does this throughout the film, from calling David back to attempting to crack the missile codes. Tic-tac-toe is similarly hidden deep in the system's memory. You can see it playing the game with the real Joshua when they are both effectively children. Because WOPR was sort of taken away and "abused" by the military as a "child" its learning about concepts like always playing to a draw is stunted. By bringing up the old game that has deeper connections for it with its early period, it is more effective at getting it to start thinking laterally again. It then makes the intuitive leap from one game to another and concludes that playing a game you can't win is stupid.
While that may seem far fetched, things like that happen with neural net AI today (aka machine learning). Sometimes they make really weird leaps in assumptions that come from data sets used in their early training. Which is why a lot of modern ML has to be tossed out on a regular basis and the training started all over. Or why you get supposed ML/AI systems that later get reviewed by humans and the results hand manipulated. We actually have a very bad track record with machine learning in a lot of areas because we don't know all the associations they are making when we stuff them with data. They do great with more black and white or constrained objectives, but get weird and wonky when given broader patterns to analyze. In the end, they are still only as good as the people that wrote them and the data sets that they are fed. This is why research has shown that many systems like facial recognition systems have inadvertently developed biases based on skin color or gender that make them dangerously inaccurate when asked to match the faces of people whose ethnicity and gender do not match the majority of the data they were originally fed.
The ideas and technology on display were extremely bleeding edge at the time and very few normal folks were even aware that you could use a computer to call another computer over the telephone. My family were a bunch of geeks and we got our first home computer in 1983. A VIC-20 (predecessor of the famous Commodore 64), it had a tape drive to load "large" applications with and a 3KB memory upgrade cartridge. Even so, it wasn't until the early 90's that I was messing around with the sorts of things you see in Wargames. The internet was a whispered of holy grail that you could only get access to once you started going to college. The world wide web didn't even exist when I first got access to the internet. We used command line applications like archie and gopher to find things online. I once used a dumb terminal in the university lab that literally printed out the screen on a dot matrix printer, line by line.
As others have noted, this movie was a lot more terrifying in the era. The idea that we were all going to be wiped out by nuclear war with the USSR was not far fetched, and at times seemed absolutely certain. It would later come out (some of it very recently) that several times during this period, we really did come within minutes of wiping most of humanity from the face of the earth. And no one knew. As humans, we never really learned the lesson from this movie. MAD didn't convince us to stop being stupid and cease nuclear saber rattling. Our primary antagonists (the USSR) backed down because they imploded economically and could no longer support it system of government or military posture. The threats faded, but didn't disappear. And the nuclear saber rattling became less of a concern (though one people still do not it take seriously enough with new countries achieving the capability today and some countries believed to be nuclear capable that are very willing to use that capability to survive the high threat environments they live it). There are probably some former cold war military strategists around today that still think we could have won a nuclear war.
At any rate, while the distance from the time period may have lessened the impact of the film, I am glad you still generally enjoyed it. You should really watch Sneakers (1992), Real Genius (1985), and The Manhattan Project (1986) for additional excellent hacker movies that also have some pointed things to say about cold war and just barely post-cold war tensions. I would also highly recommend "The Hunt for Red October" as a more straight thriller from the tail end of that era.
Yeah, the tech stuff in this film is probably more accurate than any other movie portraying computers and hacking that I know. There were little things... like the acoustic coupler that David uses were old tech even by the time this movie came out in 1983... but I can understand why it was used... it was just to show the audience that the computer was calling other computers using the phone line. You have to remember that in 1983 most people didn't understand much about home computers just yet.
The movie spooked the people in government and the politicians and president, it was part of the reason for the US first (possible to harsh): Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
You did such a good job explaining this. I was going to reply myself but you beat me to it and did a much better job. So I will just add that even though David was going to be taken away, they couldn't do manhunt for him since, presumably, the whole thing was highly classified. So David escaping is not that big a "plot hole". There used to be a SEAL team called Red Team (I believe) and they would infiltrate highly guarded areas, and they found it to be incredibly simple to enter and leave (which led to tighter security, the whole point of this team). Some of their escapes and infiltrations were shockingly easy, even absurdly unrealistic except for the fact that it was true. Sometimes reality is unreal. Also, when they were returning to the base, it is clear from the military jeep driving them to the base to the assistant awaiting them, that they had called ahead somehow and were expected at the base. So that is definitely close to a "plot-hole". Not everything needs to be spelled out and show, reasonable implications are also good shortcuts.
As for the AI, Falken admitted to David that he could never teach Joshua futility. However David realizes, ironically from Falken's own example, that tic tac toe is a great way to teach futility. They literally inspired each other to make a breakthrough in how to teach Joshua about futility. Joshua uses this new found knowledge in the still running game. I also like how they both seem to understand each other as soon as David announces "games!". Their thinking is quite similar.
I will also add, the USSR would later get Gorbachev, who also thought the whole MAD scenario absurd and he and Reagan would, from treaties signed by both of them, collectively get rid of almost 50,000 nuclear weapons. It is the one thing the US banks on with Russia even today, (despite Russia's frankly irresponsible nuclear threats it makes today, that I believe to be largely empty... but still) the not wanting more nuclear proliferation.
Anyway, I didn't find this movie had any real plot-holes. Some of the characterizations are not the greatest (David playing with his yo-yo just before he sees the news to show his "innocence" is the only one that come to mind right now). but I overall disagree with this reactor's opinions.
lol good luck if the NSA visited you yet. I'm a OG nerd and I feel abit upset haha
First off, that was a great analysis of the movie and the situation in the 70s and early 80s. I would argue that nuclear saber-rattling only ever got us close to war once, the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was an actual staredown between the nuclear powers. The other times when we may have been close to war were due to mistakes, typically human error.
While it's true the NORAD defenses would've been folded into the facility for their own protection (good description of NORAD being a target multiple times over), you could never access it so easily. Otherwise a strike team could hit it at this most crucial time and penetrate the facility to attempt to disrupt the entire nuclear response.
The Hunt for Red October ... read the book. It is WAY better than the movie. And a better movie that gets into the stress of a potential nuclear launch situation is Crimson Tide, which is also wildly inaccurate in some ways, but the stress would be real.
I was in elementary school when this, "Red Dawn" and a TV mini-series called "The Day After" were made - as people have commented below, the 80's were fraught with nuclear tension! It was very scary to this little kid!
"The Day After" is kind of tame compared to "Threads", tbh.
I was born and raised in a small town not too far away from Lawrence Kansas where The Day After was filmed. It terrified me as a child, and still brings tears to this old man's eyes when I watch it, even now, although it's a lot cheesier than I remember.
I was in high school during that time and it was the same thing for us as older kids. I remember in our World History class we had to write a paper over our thoughts of the cold war and the threat of nuclear war. Nuclear War was a topic of discussion quite a bit in the 80s. As everyone has mentioned younger people born after the fall of the Soviet Union won't quite "get" the tension we felt.
@@f0rth3l0v30fchr15t It's sure relevant again now, though.
Thank god Rocky saved us from all of that in Rocky 4!
The movie means much more if you grew up during The Cold War.
You should check out Red Dawn 1984. This is the ultimate Cold War movie.
Having registered with the Selective Service in 1984, *Red Dawn* was an uncomfortable watch.
Red Dawn is like 80’s Cold War fears distilled!
@@goldenageofdinosaurs7192 There are so many better John Milius movies out there...
That movie scared me far worse than this one.
Great film alright, but "By Dawns Early Light (1990)" was better..
12:35 'feeding it different sounds' is how you used to hack over the phone, it was an analog system so if you could mimic the correct sound it would take that input as if it were the data it was supposed to receive, if that makes sense. They used to call it Phreaking.
When I was a child, my family was on a vacation road trip in CO. My father, a former Marine aviator, pointed out Cheyenne Mountain to us, then proceeded to drive down a dirt road toward the place. Shortly after, a white truck pulled us over, and my dad asked it they gave tours like in the movie. :) LOL we got sent back to the highway. This could be the very first hacker movie
Bad plan! Nobody likes having automatic weapons trained on them.
Tours in NORAD are real. However, you can't just drive up and ask for a tour. You have to arrange it. It is after all top security location.
Perhaps the first hacker movie, IMO of those that I've seen still the best hacker movie.
Superman III was in '83 also. That sort of counts as a hacker movie. lol
@@okccuster and it also inspired the hack in Office Space too!
21:35 - To be fair, they were closing down the mountain in preparation for nuclear war, and they did know they were coming.
I assumed they had recalled the guards instead of letting them suffer a nuclear strike unprotected since I'm sure NORAD was a primary target.
Besides, it is a movie.
My favorite line: "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration, I've come to the conclusion your new defense system sucks."
Dabney Coleman's McKittrick response was even better imo lol "I don't have to take that, you pig-eyed sack of shit."
Granted, the ENTIRE exchange between those two as a good bit of dialogue.
I think MY favorite was, "You aren't afraid of death because you are already dead!" A good retort, that was also pretty deep.
Though, as a Gen Xer, my LEAST favorite now was, "He WAS old! He was like 44!" "44? Yeah, that's pretty old!" :(
"After careful consideration, I've deiced NOT to endorse your park.." (Jurassic Park.. 10 years after Wargames came out.)
"I'd piss on a spark plug if ittud do any gud!"
As a 13 year old kid, in 1983, this was an amazing movie. I still enjoy watching it to this day, because it keeps everything simple and easy to watch.
Not to mention it doesn't do that annoying key mashing hacking garbage that Hackers made into a troupe. Matty B had to use his brain and do research to find was into the system. Hacking wasn't some superpower because someone had autism.
It’s explained early in the film that “Joshua” was unique in that it was capable of learning.
Yes, that was a young genuine Michael Madsen, not a “discount,” lol.
Ally Sheedy also starred in the classic Short Circuit. A must-watch.
The tone used to escape from the locked door may have been inspired by what Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak did with the telephone dial tone, which allowed him to make pranks and free international calls.
I think Shan reacting to "Short Circuit" might be..... interesting.
If the panel for a door lock did indeed work on DTMF recognition, it would be very possible to do that. The scenarios in this movie are pretty far-fetched, but the tech on display is fairly realistic.
@@davidkulmaczewski4911 Haha, yes. Some unfortunate casting there...
It's not discount Michael , it's just that well aged Michael costs more.
And the other actor in the missile silo was John Spencer - best known as Leo on The West Wing.
You could hack the analogue telephone networks back in the day by sending various audio frequencies, By re-creating these tones, phreaks could switch calls from the phone handset, allowing free calls to be made around the world. To ease the creation of these tones, electronic tone generators known as blue boxes became a staple of the phreaker community. This community included future Apple Inc. cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
I remember someone showing me a hack to make free long distance calls. Since I really didn’t have anyone to call long distance, it didn’t seem worth the risk. But I do recall (though I don’t remember how) knowing how to do something similar to make free calls from a pay phone.
Not to mention the Cap'n Crunch whistle.
@@3DJapan As far as I recall, the story goes that that is what started the whole phreaking movement, and was the inspiration for the Blue Box in the first place.
@@3DJapan Ha! I still have one of those Captain Crunch 2600 Hz bosun whistles... I think they are collectible today.
@@goldenageofdinosaurs7192 yeah, sounds of fake dimes, nickles and quarters.
One of the things I like about Wargames and Tron the year before is that they didn't simplify too much. It treated things more or less how they really are. The film Hackers (and so many others) treat computers in the 80's like they're magic. Wargames used real terms (like Back Door) and using pay phone hacks (which were absolutely real). Tron took science fiction liberties (lasers changing matter into data), but used the fantasy elements to represent real world things (programs, input/output communication).
Yeah, but that was because computers back then felt like magic, a bit. They were filled with possibilities. We knew most of what movies portrayed was nonsense, but we liked it because it was imaginative. Compared to today, my first PC back then was less than a children's toy, but it felt like a magicians box. And my printer sounded like an aircrafts machine gun... It was easy to let your imagination go. Nowadays they are as common as your shoes.
Oh, come on! Those of us who were technologically literate in the early 80s knew that the computerese and hacking in WarGames and Tron were clearly Hollywood nonsense. There were a few elements of reality sprinkled in, but overall the tech was very much simplified, naive and implausible.
Hackers is a 90s movie, but for all its glorious, guilty-pleasure, 90s cheesiness and presentation, some of the low level stuff is actually pretty high up on the reality meter. So much of that movie revolves around social engineering, not "computer magic" at all which is streets ahead of most movies that deal with hacking and information security.
The movie was nominated for Academ Awards in three categories: Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Sound.
GTFO! Wargames? Really?!
"Die Hard" is the upper level of good.
That Michael Madsen joke had me in tears.
poor michael its him an he called him budget lmao
This movie felt terrifyingly real to me as a teenager in the '80s, when there were always stories going around about nuclear war almost breaking out because of some computerized radar system mistaking the moon or a flock of geese for an enemy missile attack. It seems that more than a few times global destruction was only avoided because humans in the launch procedure refused to follow orders. The last decade of the Cold War nuclear arms race was a weird time to grow up.
Yes. Nowadays it feels more like a footnote in 80s nostalgia, unfortunately.
@@Dacre1000 Always wonder whatever happened to all those weapons. They all still pointing at the same spots?
the sad part is, this is still the case, just nobody seems to be aware of it anymore. Watching this after the 2nd biggest nuclear power invaded a country in Europe and their president discusses openly using atom bombs. We are just one bad day away from total annihilation, it's just that people seem to be more interested in useless discussions on Twitter.
Shan, Wargames is the perfect warm-up to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, one of the greatest dark satire films ever made over a similar subject.
I'm a professional programmer, and I was even when this movie came out. Two things I'd like to highlight: first, David's (Broderick's character) home kit was already obsolete when the movie came out (8 inch floppies, acoustic couplers). I used to think this was a flaw until I listened to the director's commentary: as a kid David had no money to buy his stuff, so it was all what the pro guys were throwing in the dumpster back then. The timing in that case works out about right. Second, Shan thought it was remarkable that the story imagined an AI computer back in the early 1980s. This isn't all that remarkable: AI started being taken seriously back in the late '40s (Turing et al), and like fusion power, true AI is always about 30 years in the future. The stuff they call AI now is not AI - the term is just used as a buzzword to sell shit and get grants. I'm not aware that any "AI" is yet close to passing the Turing test. The IBM "Watson" program that plays Jeopardy is the most impressive program I know of, but AFAIK it's only speech recognition coupled to a search engine, not really an AI. Since we're movie buffs I would suggest the movie "Ex Machina". There's a movie that isn't at all confused by what AI means, and you'll see we're nowhere close. Maybe in 30 years...
Shan: It's a good idea to take humans out of the equation.
SKYNET has now entered chat.
This came out when I was a kid and was one of things that got me interested in computers and set me on the path to a job in IT. Back then computers were new and very few people even had them. The possibilities that this movie showed about our future really excited me back then.
This was also the era when phones went from rotary to pushbutton dialing, using DTFM - Dual-Tone Frequency Modulation, with one tone indicating the column and a second tone indicating the row. It was widely used in all manner of devices, though there usually wasn't any means to actually hear the tones. The security pad for the infirmary most certainly wouldn't have been audible (mainly made so for the sake of exposition) but the trick with the tape recorder would have indeed worked.
Those old payphones would produce Morse-like signals to register coins being inserted - one 'dit' for a nickel, two 'dit's for a dime, and a 'dah' for a quarter. It was something of an open secret for years among the hackers and phreaks of the era that you could fake the 'dah' by shorting the microphone against the phone's ground. This movie is precisely why phone companies were quick to retrofit payphones with completely-sealed handsets while they worked to redesign the circuitry so this particular trick would no longer work.
"Shall we play a game?"
I want that retro-voice for Cortana/Alexa.
If I remember correctly, Joshua's voice was done by John Wood who played Stephen Falken using a vocoder.
I suggest "Short Circuit" (1986)! Also with Ally Sheedy and one of my favorite childhood movies !
No disassemble.
Need input
Stat.! What does that mean, anyway? I don’t know!
Great film! Sadly it's marred by casual racism.
It doesn't appear that he reads any of the comments
All else being equal, yours are my favorite film reactions (and I follow at least 100, and I also support you on Patreon when I do so for few others). That needs to be said up front before I offer some critical feedback.
I saw this flick in the cinema when it was released. I was in my twenties and had been enlisted in the "Cold War" USAF for 4 years. The unrealistic aspect of the film are insubstantial as the story is entirely about, as you put it well, M.A.D. (mutually assured destruction). The story of Broderick and Sheedy was the veneer of a mainstream plot used to smuggle a heavy-hitting message about the ACTUAL story, which was the unmercifully heavy threat of global thermonuclear war. Machine learning and A.I. were also secondary to the point the director was sliding surreptitiously into our hearts from the first frames.
It is fair enough for critics and reviewers to address how well older films have aged. Sadly, that is an obvious issue, as the mediocre aging of the tech in this movie impacted your otherwise sound reaction and review. The director was not making a film for today. Many "classic" films are intended to last for all time, but War Games was not intended to be such a show.
The story of my viewing of this work in the cinema on release illustrates the critical point I want to make, and which I feel you missed. Where the movie seemed playful and you expected more seriousness, the director was cutting the audience a lot of slack because we all, at the time, suffered under a leaden black cloud of genuine existential dread. This extreme community stress showed up poignantly when I watched the show in a medium-large cinema with a close-to-capacity crowd. We chuckled at the fun parts and cruised happily along with the lighthearted teen antics, and many of us looked askance at the predictive technology as being rather fantastic (as it was in that precise moment, but would become reality much later on). We understood that the tech was speculative and did not mind because we, as denizens of those days, clearly saw the true story of global thermonuclear war in our daily news.
Toward the end of the film (SPOILERS, of course), when WOPR says the only winning move is not to play, half the live audience around me jumped to their feet and roared approval. Roared. Applauded. I had tears in my eyes then, and do again now remembering how relieve I was for a film to speak a clear truth into an unclear tomorrow. It is hard to imagine a live cinema audience of today jumping up, applauding or cheering for anything, but in 1984 we were on an emotional hair trigger as, so it seemed, the world turned on the most fragile of pins.
There are no perfect reviews or perfect reviewers. Your works are so overwhelmingly interesting and entertaining that I hesitate to share this treatise with you (and wish I had a more-direct way that would not involve "calling you out" openly as this comment will seem to do). But this movie was not made for you, and to judge it for such is to neglect the all-important role of seeing the actual audience intended. War Games was a message to all English-speaking audience, particularly in the nuclear U.S. The point was clear: 'Stop the M.A.D.-ness and step back from the brink. Stop electing war mongers. Start electing reasonable people. If you are an elected official or anyone in the chain of nuclear command, calm down and lower the figurative cover on the launch buttons.'
Broderick and Sheedy were set dressing to get butts into seats and eyeballs to the screen where the world died a fiery end over and over in eye-searing horror until all went quiet, and the small, childlike voice told us our salvation: The only winning move is not to play. It will be tempting to think my own subjective viewing of the film in its day has colored my perception against reality. My claim is that my subjective viewing was dead center of the environment when the work was conceived, executed and delivered. We may never know which senators or scientists or military officials may have seen the film and woke up to their true responsibilities and changed their minds more toward the preservation of human life over human ideology. War Games was subjective, aimed at a profoundly (perhaps unimaginably) subjective demographic.
Audiences jumped, roared, applauded ... and some wept. Few films since have been able to claim such an impact. Cheers for all the good work you do. I look forward to your next offering.
Very VERY well put... and I hope he reads it.
@@kimwatchesstuff agreed
Seeing Dabney Coleman made me realize that you need to watch "9 To 5" if you haven't seen it.
I’d recommend ‘cloak and dagger’ (1984)
It doesn't appear that he reads any of the comments
...and then Black Widow goes and quotes the movie... "Shall we play a game?"
So cool. Love this flick, and Ally Sheedy's "oh... that's old."
After this one Badham directed the best helicopter movie ever made, Blue Thunder with Roy Scheider and Malcom McDowell, a masterpiece of action with no CGI... And i just realized Brodderick changed the grades on the computer like in... Ferris Bueller !
Blue Thunder was fantastic. Just a great movie
I am not sure I would call it a masterpiece, but it is a great underrated movie.
Lol, later came Air Wolf.
@ back then I used to love the Airwolf audio dramas more than the series itself for some reason.
@@Dacre1000 i get that because each season of Airwof got progressively worse. 1st season was fantastic with cold war/international storylines.. belisario left and seasons went downhill with more domestic stories
When this movie came out I was a young boy, and the best way to describe what it felt like back then would be to ask you to remember a year ago how the fear of covid hung over everyone and no one knew where the future was going, that this thing could kill all of us. That is how Americans felt about possible nuclear war at that time. So this movie was, yes a little bit of typical 80s fair to reach and entertain the populace, but I have to say that those scenes of simulated detonations did strike a nerve with people at that time.
Well said.
I was in high school at the time this movie was made (hail Galaga!) and this movie was made to make a very distinct point in the political context of the times. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was years away. Glasnost (openness) as a political philosophy in the USSR was not even conceived of. Russian occupation of Afghanistan was still ongoing (oh irony). The US under Reagan was revamping and deploying new ICBM systems and promoting the strategic defense initiative. There were national labor strikes in Poland that were causing tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. Massive protests in western Europe (Germany in particular) about the US deploying new medium range nuclear weapons systems in NATO countries to put more of the USSR in range of potential nuclear attack. MADD was the acronym of the day and this was all being shown as part of the national news each day/week. The cloud of potential nuclear conflict was very perceptible. A double feature of Dr. Strangelove and WarGames would be a good bookend pairing on highlighting the futility and potential danger of nuclear war, with The Day After thrown in the mix as well. There are still enough deployed nuclear weapons in the US, Russia, China, and other countries to destroy the world as we know it.
I was 18 at that time, the fear of nuclear war was everywhere so much so that very popular Dutch pop group 'Doe Maar' had a no. one hit called 'Voor Als De Bom Valt' ('When the Bomb Falls') and I was absolutely CONVINCED I would not live until 23. I gave the world five years. And yet here we are, almost forty years later :)
While this was never a favorite movie of mine, it's very much a product of its time.
I think you have to live through the ‘70s - ‘80s and have seen it at that time to fully appreciate the film. Cold War movies don’t seem to age as well as Vietnam, WWII, and other war films.
Idk I feel like there’s so much that’s relevant to today! But maybe you need to know the history, and it depends on where you grew up too.
(I’m not halfway through this video yet, but he seems to be appreciating this as well?)
This movie is inspired by two different real events: "The 3 A.M. Phone Call" of 1979 and the early 1980's hacking on the DoD network by two teenagers that lead them to NORAD briefly and forced the DoD to re-design the whole network. The movie is a mix of these two real events.
The booth phone hack was usual in the 70's-80's but only a few people knew how to do it right. The hack of the NORAD detention's room is possible in theory, because the door system "hears" sound tones coming from the keyboard and David analogically recorded those tones and reproduced them back in the system line where it "hears" the input signals.
This movie is absolutely loaded with nostalgia for me! The arcade (Galaga!); "PC" tech of the day; general naivety of the decade; the feeling of latent cold war tension; and just Broderic and Sheedy. I love it.
Galaga? GALAXIAN
The fake NORAD was just made up with the imagination of what it looked like, because they weren’t allowed in. Apparently NROAD could only dream of having such a command center as was portrayed in the movie.
The "War Room" displays were controlled by a technical consultant, inside the "Joshua/WOPR" box, with an Apple IIc.
I was in junior high school when this movie came out and it was very popular with the computer and tech geek crowd, i'm not sure if this was the one of the first or maybe the first hacker movie but a lot of people tried to hack stuff with their home computers after this movie came out, i still have the ColecoVision game cartridge based on this movie, it played a lot like Missile Command.
The climax where WOPR is running the attack simulations on the big screens was incredible in a theater. As others have said, when the film was released, we were in a Cold War with Russia and an all out nuclear war seemed able to break out at any time. The fear was real.
I was 8 when War Games was released. A couple of close friends and I, having only recently been introduced to computers, saw it at a Saturday matinee. We became obsessed with technology and hacking. We didn't do much in the way of hacking, but we did have lots of fun times playing games and creating our own programs. It's pretty astonishing to see how far mankind has come regarding technology...for good and ill. Love your channel, man! You're the kind of person I enjoy watching movies with. Keep up the great work!
To me this has always been one of those underrated super gems, together with 13th warrior and Top Secret. It may be hard to see the thrill of connecting to other computers now, but back then in the commodore 64 era it was an amazing thought, which added to the excitement.
How about giving 'Ladyhawk' a go? Matthew Broderick is outshone by Michelle Pfeifer and Rutger Hauer, but it's a forgotten GEM. Go! Go watch it! :)
Even the sun was outshone by Michelle Pfeiffer in that movie. What a woman. But I agree: one of Dick Donner´s best. And to those who say that the modern score doesn't fit I say: NONSENSE!
Also starring the Dr from this movie.
I preferred THE NAME OF THE ROSE for my mid-80s medieval movie fix.
Love "Ladyhawk"! Great suggestion
YES, LADYHAWKE!
Another good military, nuclear war themed movie with Matthew Broderick that gets very little notice is *Project X* from 1987.
Has a little bit of a more serious feel to it for me, not that global nuclear war isn't serious.
In *Project X,* Broderick plays a US Air Force Airman, so none of the teenage high school aspect to distract from the seriousness. Brings on some emotions too.
that's the monkey one right... in '87
The Manhattan Project (1986) was the other one I was thinking about. Build a nuke for the science fair, accidentally using stuff to potent to test.
Everything in the early to mid 80s was about the Cold War, which was incredibly scary for everyone, especially kids. Remember all the songs we had about it? Sting did Russians, and Elton John had Nikita, then there was the TV film The Day After, and Testament. Everywhere we turned, people were getting nuked lol. I remember something at the time about the filmmakers sending the film over to the Soviet Union and asking Kruschev to watch it? Everybody in the arts communities were trying to send messages to the governments of the world, that's how serious it was.
This movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.
You need to see _Threads_
Love the fact that you understand the technology and the history. You had much more context than most reviewers. I was so excited that you spoke my language. 🤓♥️♥️♥️
I just watched this movie with my husband who would never seen it a couple of weeks ago. One of my absolute favorite. It's funny now cuz my husband's in the military and were stationed in Colorado. If I look out the window right now I can see the Cheyenne Mountain. Great reaction as always!
A much more serious film about this subject us “Failsafe” with Henry Fonda truly frightening film excellent! Thanks Shan!
"Deterence" with Kevin Pollak is great too :)
Agreed, Fail-Safe is an intense movie
Fail safe and Dr Strangelove we’re both concepts taken from the same original material, the book Failsafe.. Both movies debuted in 1964, and both are fantastic..
@@jacobjones5269 it’s amazing how they came out the same year it would be like Airport and Airplane coming out at same time! thanks for the info
@@jacobjones5269 Kubrik destroyed 'Failsafe' by demanding 'Dr Strangelove' be released first. After the public saw the parody, there was little interest in seeing the story played straight a few months later.
This was a powerful movie for me as a kid growing up under the cold war of the 80s. “The only winning move is not to play”.
This movie scared America when it came out.
Shan didn't grow up during The Cold War. He doesn't understand.
I think the ABC television film, The Day After, which also came out in ‘83 (and, coincidentally, was filmed in my hometown of Lawrence, KS), scared people quite a bit more than this film did.
It was seen by 100 million people & was one of the highest viewed non-sporting television broadcasts for many years. It’s where the idea of a post war nuclear winter was really planted into the minds of the American people. A cool fact I just found out-It was also broadcast on the USSR’s state television in 1987.
@@goldenageofdinosaurs7192 President Ronald Reagan watched The Day After and it convinced him to pursue arms reduction talks with the USSR!
@@goldenageofdinosaurs7192 The Day After was terrifying.
Matthew Broderick's emo sideburns still terrify me.
I think you missed a couple of things Shan...
1. They were closing the mountain (cutting off all outside influence... electric, water, air, etc)... there were no guards because they were all inside.
2. The reason nothing happened to them was they were with 2 people the NORAD staff knew (Dr. Falcon and the Woman Staff member of NORAD) and were in communication with NORAD during the travel there, so they were expected.
Had these two conditions not existed they would have been shot on sight and would be dead long before reaching the door.
If you enjoyed that old font, you should check out another 80s Cold War era war response oriented fun sci film about AI, SHORT CIRCUIT with Johnny 5, and well, the sequel is debateable, but has a fun "Holding Out for a Hero" montage.
Back in the day, this was pretty damn good. And Arcades...man I miss arcades. So many good times there.
when I saw this, the entire theater cheered at the end. The idea and fear of nuclear war during this time was real.
My buddy and I tried to explain to his teenaged son about the early 80s and the Cold War. He didn't quite believe us.
John Badham's sister Mary played main character "Scout" in "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962).
Love that movie. She was great in it.
I took A.I. courses at UCSD in 1975. Some very smart people have been thinking about machine learning since the advent of computers.
This movie was seminal in imagining the dangers of A.I.
Another great "hacker" movie from the 80s is "Real Genius". And yes, that Michael Madsen lookalike was Michael Madsen. And the threat of nuclear war was pretty much looming all over the 80s up until 89.
Love how his computer sends and receives calls to and from other computers, computers, communicating which is, essentially, what the internet will eventually become.
You can look up e-mail chats online that date to 1980.
"This was a pretty casual film"
I can't stress enough what a complicated process it was to make a mainstream scifi film/books/etc. back in the 80's. There were so many very strong biases against staple elements of the genre, and very little vision or appetite for things that weren't recognizably cookie cutter.
You invariably had to walk a tightrope in taking any solid scifi premise, and then immediately start finding ways to inject popular elements into it, in order to make it generally acceptable. To dumb it down, strip it down, add in gimmicks, add in popular cliches, etc.
That's a very complex balancing act. And one that often met with mangled works, or pieces that the mainstream rejected (sooner or later).
Another John Badham classic is Blue Thunder, with Roy Scheider, one of the best action movies of the 1980s. You should try watching that.
It doesn't appear that he reads any of the comments
"Shall we play a game" is 1 of the most iconic & reproduce line of all time.
You can even see its influence in the Saw Movies 😉
Edit btw D.A.R.Y.L. & Short Circuit are great A.I. movie from the same times.
The predictions are based on fears. That computers would start to learn on their own and turn against their inventors and people who built them is a fear just like other human fears through history.
lol discount Michael Madsen...uhh...that IS Michael Madsen.
Also a discount John Spencer.
Hahahaha
To be fair hiring Michael Madsen back then was probably much more affordable than today. So he’s kind of right.
Oh my, I can see this joke running for months 😂
Roflmao
If you look, you'll see that the woper has a face.
the way the lights were placed and the processor wave on the bottom makes a digital face.
This movie was great when it came out, that and getting cable TV, we watched it a bunch of times... Great pic!
The last shot of the opening montage of Tom Cruise's Edge of Tomorrow used a shot of the war room from this movie as a backdrop. BTW, if you haven't seen it Edge of Tomorrow is GREAT!
It doesn't appear that he reads any of the comments
Falken is T. Stark,
Joshua is Ultron,
Tic Tac Toe is...Jarvis!
One of my favorite movies ever made. It's not a cinematic masterpiece or anything and the story isn't complicated or anything - but it's just a well done cold war era movie. And as a computer nerd even back then I loved this stuff.
My wife and I saw this at a theater when it came out. I still watch it from time to time. It's very entertaining. He must have done a lot of hacking to afford such high-tech equipment. I think only business systems used 8" floppy discs. Us normal folks could only afford the 5-1/4" variety.
A relatively minor thing here, but... Dialing a whole bunch of numbers trying to find computers to connect to was very much a real practice. After this movie came out, the term "war dialing" was coined. That should give a hint as to how culturally influential it was.
Oh, and to add on to that, I just remembered: when Wi-fi started to take off, some people started trying to map the locations of networks, by driving around with a laptop in the car that records their signals along with GPS coordinates. Guess what this is called? Yup, "wardriving". Similar terms exist depending on the mode of transport.
That is Michael Madsen at the beginning in the ICBM silo
80's logic is "The only winning move is not to play" combined with “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
mexican standoff, long as nobody shoots humanity lives another day
Love this movie. It was more impactful seeing it during the cold war as a kid. Thanks for the review.
At the time, this was a pretty amazing film. Remember, when this movie was made, the US and the Soviet Union were in the depths of the cold war. We won because we massively out spent the Soviets on defense. Reagan's greatest accomplishment. The war room set was great. Seeing it in the theater was pretty great with the huge screens flashing and the music.
Yes. The Soviet Union bankrupted itself trying to counter the Strategic Defense Initiative and our overall capabilities. This, combined with Gorbachev trusting that Reagan wouldn't commit a first strike after they met helped end the Cold War.
"Want to play a game" was said by Black Widow in Captain America the Winter Soldier.
Which came decades later.
The only winning move is to like and subscribe.
It's still one of the more realistic hacking movies. I.E. how to figure out a password.
WOPR was a learning machine from the beginning, but it was limited. It was the one thing Falcon could not teach him. Only after noting that you can't win Tic-Tac-Toe it compared it to another situation and even then it had to re-check all the results of the previous simulations, probably adding some so ridiculous that no one had thought of it before.
I compare it to the fallacy of IQ rating. Every IQ test depends on some basic knowledge. If you don't have it, the test result is flawed. It also does not cover talents. Someone with a good ear for music may end up as a genious componist or performer, but they probably won't be as good as a straightforward scientist. Or for an extreme example, take Forest Gump.
As for the rest of the movie? It is a product of it's time. A little humorous one, given. But what does that mean?
Try to imagine that you know that the world could end in 15 minutes an alarm is given. Consider the alarm could come 24/7 for years. And now consider you have to live with this knowledge in the back of your mind for decades. Personally, sometome between 10 and 15 I decided that when this alarm came, I would move as closely as possible to a certain US base nearby, because I knew it would be a main target. A 10 to 15 year old came to the decision that he did not wish to survive a nuclear war and wanted to ensure it was over as quickly as possible.
You might understand why the slightly humorous tone of this movie was appreciated.
If not?
Try the following movies: 'The day after' (1983), 'When the wind blows' (1986), 'Grave of the Fireflies' (1988) and 'Barfoot Gen' (1983). Yes, three of them are animated. That does not make them less horrible. Neither of them is for the faint of heart. And yes, this is a warning.
The discount Madsen is Michael Madsen.
I remember renting this on Betamax and being in awe of the technology.
NORAD people who saw this film said, "gee, we wish we had a control room like that."
Pay phones:
There was a hole under the key pad. And a center hole in the mic part of the phone.
Paper clip. Make the connection between the two. Free phone call.
yes, That payphone's circuit is called a 'ground start' number, you can see him ground out one of the terminals in the headset to the phone case itself, which will give you dial tone.
He used simple DTMF to get out of the security room. That's an old "Phreaking" trick used on pay / home phones.
And then he grounds out the mic on the phone to get a dial tone to dial out without dropping any coins. heh Stuff that used to genuinely work once upon. :-)
The thing about this film and the time period, we all lived under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation every day.
As sad as it might seem, this movie is *still* one of the most realistic depictions of how a hacker works and the technology around it. Even today. Ninety percent social "hacks" (stealing real-world passwords from people who keep them out in the open and drive the computer department nuts), the rest just automated programs doing the physical work for them, etcetera.
While WOPR the self-learning human-intelligence computer is complete nonsense even today, the rest of everything is actual computer lingo and technology, some of which is still in use today.
AUTO LIKE!!!
Shan, I always watch your videos when it's a movie I'm familiar with. Something I want you to understand, with this movie, is that I lived through this time period and I was 16 when this movie came out. I was using a Commodore 64 computer, I had a 5 1/4" disk drive(stored 177kb), a tape drive(stored data slow as shit on a normal cassette tape), and WANTED to get my first modem(they were either 300 bps or 1200 bps(that's BYTES PER SECOND). Compared to today's technology, we're transferring data at thousands of times that speed. When my grandmother saw this movie(she was going to get me a 300 baud(bps) modem)... but this movie pushed that back a full year, and I had to promise not to hack the school's computer. At the time(a year after this movie came out), modems had jumped up to a max of 2400 baud(BPS). Still, the 300 baud modem I got was $100. I used it for several years before I could afford a 2400 baud modem. 300 bps showed up on your screen(I used an old TV, as monitors were well over $1000 at the time) so slow you could read it as it was scrolling. When I finally got a 2400 baud modem, text scrolled by a lot faster, but I learned to "speed read" because of that. Technology continued to advance, and because I wasn't "upper middle class", I was a bit behind the curve. I used my Commodore 64 well into the 1990s, but I did get a Commodore Amiga 500 in 1989. Still no Hard Drive, but I could afford a monitor at that point(computer, external secondary disk drive, extra memory module and monitor was $1200 bundled together). The Amiga was an Amazing machine, and I suggest you look into it, as it literally changed computer technology for the better.
Right.... enough of my personal history... on with the reaction:
4:45 - I *SO* identified with Lightman in this movie. While I wasn't a hacker, nor did I have a hot chick as a close friend... I was the class "smartass".
5:57 - He used 8" disks, while 5 1/4" disks were actually more common on other platforms. However, what this does tell you is that he's had that computer system for a long time. It actually didn't take long before 3.5" disks(880kb/1.0mb, depending) were common. Yes... again, I lived it. I was an 80s nerd.... sue me. :p
6:14 - We called it "auto-dialing". Your computer would literally dial every number possible, in sequential order, looking for another computer's tone. This was actually a common practice back in the mid 80s. It wasn't illegal, either. Unless, of course, you were using stolen credit cards to make "long distance" calls. That was illegal.
6:23 - He was right, though. At the time, if you were under 18, you couldn't be charged with "adult" crimes. I knew a few people who used those methods, but I won't detail how they did it.
7:06 - OH SHIT! I forgot about this scene! Paused before your actual reaction to say this: The guy who knocked on the window and said "Hi, Lightman!" is Eddie Deezen. While he's not an A-List star, he's one helluva nice guy. I have him on my friends list on Facebook, have met him in real life, and I can't talk well enough about him. An extremely nice guy who was in a few movies back then, and has done some voiceover work in movies that might surprise you. He actually had a major role in another 80s movie titled "Midnight Madness", which I highly recommend(and never saw anyone react to it). Set a trend, Shan... react to that movie. I swear you won't regret it if you like 80s movies!
7:41 - Well, you have to do more than enter it wrong more than 3 times for them to come after you... but the 3 times is usually what locks the account out from access until you actually go prove it was you that screwed up. Ask me how I know.... ;)
8:20 - Yeah.... that line hurt. 41 is "old".... I'm 54 now.... I must be "ancient" by their standards.... :(
8:30 - Backdoors usually were pretty simple. Hell, even these days, passwords can be REALLY simple, *IF* the person creating it has no clue how easy it is to hack accounts. I keep this in mind every time I create a new password. I also want to state clearly; that I haven't hacked into a computer system illegally EVER. The only times I've ever accessed someone else's account, I was authorized to do so. However, this goes back to my comment at 7:41.... I mistyped my wife's password 3 times, and got her online account locked out. So, that's how I know. She slapped me for that, but I deserved it.
8:39 - OH, yeah... that "voice box" wasn't a really widely distributed accessory. Computers back then really didn't have a "text to voice" option for the home consumer. While someone of David's dedication MAY have had one, it wasn't available for every home at a reasonable price. Not until the Amiga days, when you didn't need one, as the "voice" would come right out of the computer's speakers.
10:18 - Oh, dude.... you don't know... even back then.... teenage girls wanted to call their friends and tell them the wild stories of shit they wouldn't believe. LMAO!
10:45 - A smaller budget with big ideas.... but it was done absolutely perfectly. As you noted, the "NORAD" set was believable(though, I doubt accurate), as were all of those actors cast as the high ranking officials. You also have to understand, that this took place during the "cold war" between the US and USSR. We literally lived with the thought that nuclear missiles would rain down upon us at any minute. Speaking of which, "Red Dawn"(1984) is a good follow up to this. Much different story and setting.... but in the same time period. Excellent watch! I heard the remake is garbage.
12:39 - Oh, boy.... how much to I tell you... Okay... fine... Yes, back then, you COULD use the recorded sounds to simulate codes. As I understand it; one COULD also use the same technique to simulate someone else's phone number. In other words, if you wanted to dial "long distance"(which cost extra back then, and was very expensive), you could "fool" the phone company into believing the call originated from whatever phone number you entered into the program, while it actually originated from yours. To put it simply, IF you had the right software, you could enter anyone's phone number into the program, and bill them for your long distance call. While I didn't actually do this(I was over 18 when I had heard of it), I remember a few people detailing to me exactly HOW to do it. Because I was "of age", and this would be considered "fraud".... and I didn't want to go to jail/prison... I never tried that stuff. But the details of HOW it worked sounded legit. Also, I was shown the software required to do it. Phone companies have since done away with "long distance" calling charges, so that's moot. But consider it much like today's "Proxy" technology.... You can change your internet connection to whatever country you choose, to access certain content that's only allowed in that country. That's where this idea started.
13:16 - That one I can't vouch for. While I was with someone who tried it, it didn't work at the time. BUT... one thing that WAS done back then was to dial the operator(press 0 and wait a minute), and tell them that you were just on a call and got disconnected. They would "reconnect" you to the number you gave them. So, I think this scene was cut short a bit for timing purposes.
14:30 - Listen carefully to what Dr. Falcon is saying. He's NOT wrong. Sometimes, Nature does just "give up" and starts again. Look around today's world....
15:30 - Ally Sheedy was hotter than Hell back then. Another movie she was involved in was "Bad Boys". Not the newer version.... which is completely unrelated, but the one starring Sean Penn and Reni Santini. Another great 80s movie I can recommend to you.
17:05 - You got it! The old "Brute Force" technique. Takes time, but it works.
18:45 - "The only winning move is NOT to play." - Ah, dammit.... gotta recommend "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love the Bomb". Classic Stanly Cuberick movie!
During your review:
19:20 - Again, you have to remember the time in which is was released. The USSR(Russia) was perceived as a major threat to world peace. This movie really played on that, as well as the blossoming home computer industry. Setting is everything. Much like Red Dawn(mentioned above), it's a product of it's time. David in the arcade, using a primitive home computer, accidentally hacking into a government super-computer.... all of these things were on the minds of people during that time. Not so much, nowadays. While hacking a system COULD disrupt things(look at the oil pipeline recently on the East Coast), it wasn't really common, but the technology to do so was so new, people didn't know what to make of it.
If you read all of this, I really appreciate you for doing so. I hope it gave you an insight into how things actually were back then.
The concept of hacking was very new then, I don't think the term was even actually learned. That was part of the coolness of this film. WOPR was scary to us as kids.
I guess it is a little bit predictable to us now in 2021, but back when I was a kid and saw this in the theatre, it absolutely blew my mind.
Just want to say I really appreciate your style of reactions: honest, well thought-out and even critical. I'm a huge fan of this film since I watched it on replay growing up As I've gotten older, though, I've acknowledged many of the flaws which you pointed out. I don't appreciate the film any less for it, and your reaction proved that. Both your reaction and the film were, indeed, enjoyable.
Thanks for your work!
I hope you will continue the J.Badham movies with "Blue Thunder".
I have fond memories of Blue Thunder, the politics of the movie (re: militarization of police & surveillance state) from what's ostensibly a cop movie is quite the contrast with today & makes an interesting comparison.
An underappreciated (because practically nobody saw it) Badham movie that I liked was Nick of Time (1995) which was probably the first "real time" movie or TV show I remember seeing, a decade-ish before 24.
Interestingly it seems the last ~20 years Badham had only directed television series, including several that I watched regularly (Psych, Supernatural, and others).
It doesn't appear that he reads any of the comments
I like how you included Madsen’s credit at the end there :)
At least he didn’t cut the guy’s ear off.
This is gonna be AWESOME
Definitely watch Crimson Tide.
"It's cold calling" - Also referred to as a War dialer.
I am surprised you did not see the seeds of SKYNET in this film. Clearly, the idea of giving a computer control of the nukes was the same as in Terminator.
"List your primary targets."
"Las Vegas!"
Heartaches by the number... Troubles by the score...
I think I saw this movie in theaters at least three times when I was a kid. Almost as much as I saw Tron.
This movie likely prevented an actual nuclear war.
“As author Fred Kaplan explains in his book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, Reagan had recently viewed the movie WarGames and “he couldn’t get that movie out of his mind. At one point, he put down his index cards and asked if anyone had seen it. Nobody had… so he launched into a detailed summary of its plot.”
As Reagan recounted the film, the room full of defense experts sat uncomfortably, suppressing smirks, as the leader of the free world described to them the plot of a Matthew Broderick movie about a teenager who hacks into NORAD, thinking it’s a computer game, nearly kicking off World War III. At the conclusion of his synopsis, Reagan turned to General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and asked if such a thing were possible. Unsure, Vessey promised to look into it.
A week later, when Vessey returned, Reagan got his answer. Vessey said, “Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.”
“Yes, you read that right, the dawn of the U.S. government taking cybersecurity seriously across its entire enterprise, and especially its sprawling strategic command and control infrastructure, was largely born out of the movie War Games.”
Also: Wargames coincidentally opened exactly 3 years to the day after this actually incident at NORAD in 1980:
“On June 3, 1980 at 2:26am, a 46¢ microchip in a NORAD computer failed, warning of 2, then 220, then 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles and causing US nuclear forces to move to a higher state of alert. It took 3 minutes to determine there was no attack underway. It failed again on June 6.”
Imagine the press today, but back in 1983, and they find out the Republican president asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs if the plot to a movie involving our nuclear response was plausible. The press would immediately ridicule that president for his ignorance and stupidity in asking such a question and they would use that continuously for years. That's exactly what would happen, and yet Reagan's simple question led to major changes in how seriously cybersecurity was handled by the military. So when Trump asks his experts what many consider to be dumb questions, maybe we should just be glad he asked the questions. "Can a nuclear bomb be used against a hurricane?" "Can disinfectants be introduced into the human body to battle COVID?" "Could our defense systems be hacked in this manner?" Stupid questions? No. They come from a place of ignorance and there's nothing wrong with that if you recognize your own ignorance. These presidents asked questions of experts. Isn't that what we want from our presidents?