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Today, WarGames is a nerd’s time capsule, possibly the biggest of them all, a celluloid equivalent of that box you have in your basement with obsolete technology kept out of misplaced sense of attachment, or maybe just because recycling electronics is hard and annoying.
Shall we even try to count it all? Eight-inch floppy disks, early VCRs, microfichés, paper library catalogs, dot matrix printers, galvanic modems, video game arcades with 8-bit shoot ’em ups, first hobbyist microcomputers, ASCII graphics (or…
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It’s difficult to look back on a childhood favourite with fresh eyes, and not romanticise one’s memory of what it was like to watch first time round (and second… and third…). I watched the hell out of this in the years following its release, and while its politics, technology and production values have dated, the pace and youthful energy still hold up.
Broderick and Sheedy have great chemistry, largely because they don’t play quite to type: he’s more aloof and…
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I swear the general in this heavily inspired the general from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. Anyway, I digress, let's actually talk about WarGames.
This film is a nerd's dream. The sets are fantastic, there's always something to look at, whether it be large, retro computers, HUGE floppy disks or Matthew Broderick's awful hair cut. It helps keep you glued to the screen. The story does, obviously too.
Broderick plays a kid who's name I don't remember, he's just Matthew…
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Carphones, George H.W. Bush posters, and dated Windows screens aside, Sneakers aged relatively well. WarGames, put together nine years before by the same pair of writers, is almost a polar opposite. Its allegiances to 1980s are obvious and immediate: disco music, John Hughes-esque teen romance, Cold War paranoia. On its surface, the movie seems like a relic.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Being engulfed by nostalgia is nothing if not wonderful. This is the movie with the young…
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This was one of my favourite movies as a kid growing up. The Commodore 64 had been released the year before and armed with a fistful of floppies I was a wannabe hacker. Unfortunately I lacked a modem and the skill to actually hack so I just played games. Still the thought that hacking into military computers called WOPR was just so exciting.
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Had not seen this in years. Perfectly captures the war tension of the 80s. A neat snap shot of 80s America in general. Arcades, 7 11 stores and massive computers. Film works really great as an unoffcial Terminator prequel :) very likeable cast. Gorgeous Ally Sheedy and Ferris Buller did good too.
The opening scene had Argo like Tension! -
(I will preface this by addressing the recent overload of 80's movie-watching by saying... I don't know why, but it is fun)
The movie started off interestingly, but slightly boring. I cannot tell whether or not the fact that I was more invested in whether or not Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy would kiss or not was my problem, or the writer's (or both.) Either way, I enjoyed watching their scenes more than the military stuff.
The plot was obviously…