WarGames (1983) Revisited: Sci-Fi Film Review

Last Updated on January 29, 2025

Anyone who has seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is well aware that Matthew Broderick can be a very cool guy. He’s actually so cool that he even had the internet in 1983. And if you think the internet is dangerous now, that’s nothing compared to how dangerous it was back then. Just by tapping some keys in his bedroom, Broderick nearly kicked off a global thermonuclear war. At least, that’s what happens in the 1983 release WarGames, which we’re looking at in this episode of Revisited.

SET-UP: The story of WarGames begins four years before the movie’s release, 1979. That’s when college friends and aspiring screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes discovered that they were each writing separate scripts about genius. They were both taking a different approach to the concept; inspired by the story of physicist Stephen Hawking and his battle with ALS, Lasker was writing about a terminally ill genius who wanted to pass on his legacy. Parkes was working on a script about a teenager whose genius wasn’t understood by those around him, leading him to get into trouble. Lasker and Parkes decided to combine their ideas and write a script titled The Genius, in which the dying older genius would reach out to a juvenile delinquent genius and pass his legacy on to him. This could have been a great character drama – but over the course of months of research, the writers became aware of modern computer technologies. They heard about computers being able to connect to each other over phone lines, and tech-minded young people who were the first wave of hackers. They learned about advances being made in video games, and that the Stanford Research Institute was running computerized war games for the military. Now they could see how a young man’s genius could get him into trouble: he could hack into the wrong computer system. Once they latched onto that idea, The Genius went into a different, more thrilling direction. WarGames was born.

After meeting with hackers and visiting NORAD headquarters in Colorado, Lasker and Parkes had the full story in place. They wrote about a teenager named David Lightman, who has cobbled together a computer system he can use to hack other computers. We first see him hack into his high school’s computer to change his grades and the grades of a friend. Then he jokingly makes an international flight reservation on his computer, something unthinkable at the time. The trouble starts when he goes searching for a video game company’s system because he’s too impatient to wait for them to officially announce their new games, he wants to play them now. Instead of finding the video game company, he accidentally hacks into a U.S. military system – but there are games listed in there, too. Checkers, Chess, Black Jack, Global Thermonuclear War. Of course, David chooses to play that last option, and decides to play as Russia, launching nukes at the United States. David is completely unaware that the game he is playing shows up on the screens in the NORAD war room, convincing the people working there that the U.S. is really under attack. They’re baffled when the nightmare scenario disappears from their screens as soon as it showed up. That’s because David had to cut the game short when his mom called him away from the computer.

When the news reports what happened in the NORAD war room, David realizes he’s in serious trouble. But he’s not just going to be arrested for hacking the military and making them believe the country was being attacked. It’s worse than that: the computer system liked playing Global Thermonuclear War with David. It wants to continue playing the game to completion – including actually launching nukes. The military considers David to be a terrorist, not listening to him when he tells them their computer has gone haywire. So he has to solve this problem himself, going on the run to find the man who created the computer system. The character who was inspired by Stephen Hawking, and you can tell by his name: Stephen Falken. So the idea of a young genius and an older genius interacting is still there in WarGames, just in a very different way than Lasker and Parkes originally imagined.

The writers tried to make their script as close to reality as possible, and worried that the audience wouldn’t be able to buy the idea of a teenager making NORAD think nukes had been launched. Then their idea was legitimized by actual news reports. In November of ’79, NORAD mistakenly believed the Soviet Union had launched over a thousand ICBMs at targets in the U.S…. then they realized they were just watching a simulation. NORAD computers then malfunctioned three times in June of 1980, due to a faulty microchip. Now it would be very easy for the public to believe WarGames could actually happen – despite denials from the military.

With executive producer Leonard Goldberg attached to the project, search for a studio began… But most of them were not ready at that time to tell a story that dealt so heavily with computers and hacking. This was a baffling science fiction to them. WarGames was set up at Universal for a while, but ran into budgetary issues there, as Universal wasn’t willing to put more than eight million dollars into it. So Goldberg took WarGames over to United Artists, which would end up giving the film a budget of twelve million.

The director chosen to bring WarGames to the screen was Martin Brest,, whose career was on the rise due to his 1979 film Going in Style. Unfortunately for Lasker and Parkes, Brest wanted significant rewrites done, and he didn’t want the original writers to do them. Since Goldberg had given Lasker and Parkes co-producer status, they were able to sit in on the script meetings, but any attempt they made to handle revisions themselves got rejected. They could only observe as Brest considered aging up the lead character, making him a college student, and possibly having an ending where nuclear war really would break out. They were eventually banned from the script meetings and had their co-producer status revoked. They were off the project while Brest reworked the script with Walon Green, Oscar-nominated co-writer of The Wild Bunch.

Brest went on to assemble a cast led by two actors who were just starting out. Matthew Broderick was cast as David Lightman. Ally Sheedy was chosen to play Jennifer, a classmate David befriends and offers to change her grades for her. Beyond them, we get some great character actors, with Maury Chaykin and Eddie Deezen appearing as computer experts David associates with. Dabney Coleman plays McKittrick, head of the NORAD computer system, who is the most intense about punishing David for his offenses. Barry Corbin plays General Beringer, who’s based at NORAD and doesn’t trust the computer as much as McKittrick does. Lasker and Parkes wrote the role of Stephen Falken with John Lennon in mind and wanted him to play the role… but sadly, the legendary musician was killed when the film was still in development. So instead of John Lennon, Falken was played by John Wood. The writers had also imagined Falken as having ALS and being in a wheelchair like Hawking, but Brest vetoed that idea. Falken ends up in the NORAD war room, helping David try to end the dangerous war game, and Brest felt that having a character in a wheelchair inside the war room would be distracting, too reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove.

WarGames began filming, and when United Artists saw the footage that was coming in, they weren’t impressed. Brest was taking a much darker approach to the material than they wanted. Two weeks into production, he was removed from the project. For a replacement, the studio turned to John Badham, the director of Saturday Night Fever and Blue Thunder. As he prepared to take the helm, Badham saw what the issues were with the production: there were script problems, and Brest had the actors playing the scenes too seriously. Even when David and Jennifer are hacking into the school computer and changing grades, he had Broderick and Sheedy acting like they were on a life or death mission. Badham would allow the actors to lighten up a bit – and he also had Lasker and Parkes brought back to fix the script.

The final shooting script ended up being a mixture of the original script, fresh revisions, and some Walon Green contributions. Tom Mankiewicz, who had written Superman and multiple James Bond films, was brought in to add one scene along the way. And Lasker and Parkes continued doing rewrites throughout filming, including expanding Sheedy’s role as they went. Jennifer had been meant to be a small part, but the chemistry between Broderick and Sheedy was so strong they had to keep her around. Jennifer was added into scenes she had been missing from before, and more attention was paid to the developing relationship between her and David.

REVIEW: While the finished film isn’t as dark as what Martin Brest was going for, that isn’t to say that it doesn’t take the material seriously. The stakes are clear in the opening sequence, in which two missile commanders – one of them Michael Madsen in a very early role – are led to believe that they’ve been ordered to launch the nuclear missile under their control. When one starts questioning the order, the other pulls a gun on him in an effort to force him to do his job and launch. It’s very intense and a great way to get things started. These men don’t know this is just a test, and that the one who fails to launch is part of the twenty-two percent of missile commanders who prove to be psychologically incapable of letting their nukes fly. Then we’re introduced to McKittrick and Beringer at NORAD. There’s an extended debate over whether or not the human element should be removed from the equation; McKittrick wants the computer system to be in charge of launching the nuclear missiles, since a human’s conscience can get in the way. This is an important scene, because it sets up the fact that the computer system will be able to start a nuclear war on its own if it wants to, but decades later you can imagine this scene being trimmed. Studio execs these days would probably want this information to be condensed and delivered faster so the film can get to its young lead.

We’re about fifteen minutes into WarGames by the time David appears on screen, but it’s his movie from that point on. Broderick did a terrific job of playing the character, and while David knows some of the same tricks as Ferris Bueller, there is no hint of Ferris in this performance. David is an awkward troublemaker, but it’s easy to care about him and root for him when he gets in way over his head. With a lesser or less likeable actor the movie wouldn’t have worked, because Broderick carries most of the film on his shoulders. He has a great supporting cast, sure, but they couldn’t have saved the film if the actor playing David was lacking.

Broderick and Sheedy are really good together, so it makes sense that Sheedy was given more screen time than expected. McKittrick is a well-written antagonist who is also well played by Coleman. The writers were smart not to make his character too villainous or over-the-top; he thinks he’s making the right choices, he just happens to be wrong most of the time. Corbin is fun in the moments he has as Beringer, and one of his best lines – one about pissing on a sparkplug – was an ad lib.

The most popular line in the film doesn’t come from any of the human characters, it’s delivered by the military computer system – which is also known as the WOPR, or the War Operations Planned Response. Badham came up with that acronym and the writers weren’t sure about it, but it beat out the alternative – and the one that was used in real life – SIOP. Single Integrated Operational Plan. Badham thought SIOP sounded boring. When David hacks into the WOPR, he turns on a speaker that’s hooked to his computer so we can hear the voice of the system he’s interacting with. The computerized delivery of the line “Shall we play a game?” may be one of the most iconic lines of the 1980s. The voice of the WOPR was provided by the actor who plays its creator, John Wood. To give an unusual tone to his lines even before it was computerized, Badham had Wood read the words of sentences in reverse order. So when he read that famous line, he would have actually said “game a play we shall”.

Badham shows David turning on his own computer speaker, but when he interacts with the WOPR on other computers later in the film, we still hear that voice without a speaker being established. Some movie trickery that we’re not supposed to think about.

Given that the older genius was very important to Lasker and Parkes’ original idea, it’s kind of surprising that there’s so little of Falken in WarGames. For most of the running time, we’re told he’s dead. He actually faked his death and went into seclusion, and when David and Jennifer locate him Wood is really only given one scene to let us get to know who this man is. With the character’s health issues removed, Falken is just disenchanted in the movie. He lost his wife and young son Joshua, who he named the WOPR operating system after, and he’s broken down by humanity’s insistence on destroying itself. Wood brought a lot of depth to the character, and it would have been nice to get more dramatic scenes with him. But by the time he enters the picture, nuclear war appears to be imminent, so the characters are kind of busy.

Viewers will probably never believe that Badham is going to actually let the WOPR-slash-Joshua computer bomb the world, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to watch David struggle to prevent that outcome. WarGames is a thrilling, fun movie, and given the behind-the-scenes issues, the script-writing mess and the replacement of a director, it’s stunning that it turned out as well as it did.

LEGACY/NOW: All the tinkering with the script really worked out in the end, because Lasker and Parkes ended up receiving an Academy Award nomination. Best Screenplay was one of three Oscars WarGames was up for; William A. Fraker was also nominated for his cinematography, and the film was nominated in the Best Sound category.

In addition to being well-received by critics and being honored by the Academy, WarGames was also a financial success when it was released on June 3, 1983. United Artists was rewarded for the twelve million dollars they put into the production when it earned eighty million at the domestic box office, becoming the fifth highest grossing movie of the year in North America. International box office added another forty-five million into the mix. Audience members were reportedly so into the film that they would applaud at the final lines.

One of the film’s fans was then-President Ronald Reagan, who took in a special screening at Camp David. Reagan sidetracked a meeting with members of Congress by giving them a rave review of WarGames, but also had the Joint Chiefs of Staff look into how realistic the story was. When it was found that this movie served as an early warning about cybersecurity issues, he signed a directive focused on the security of Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems.

That wasn’t the only impact WarGames made on the world; it was also an important film to the real people out there who were as interested in computer systems as David was. When a hacker convention was founded in the ‘90s, it was named DEFCON, in reference to David’s antics causing the military’s DEFCON threat levels to increase. Google hosted a twenty-fifth anniversary screening of the film, with the company’s co-founder calling it “a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing.”

But whether you’re into computing or not, this is a movie that will stick with you. Once you watch it, you’ll never forget the computer’s voice asking, “Shall we play a game?”