tic-tac-global thermonuclear war

The '80s were obsessed with nuclear warfare. I think we were pretty much all convinced that it was going to happen. Even the dumbest song of all time "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" by Wang Chung dedicated a whole bridge to the fact that we were "on the edge of oblivion." And I guess we were. I guess everyone believed that some crazy power monger was going to push a button and we're all going to be gone in the blink of an eye, so we'd may as well "Wang Chung"--whatever that means.

Of course, no one pushed the button. We're all still here, and I think we're all a little bit bummed about it. No boom. All that fear and fuss and money spent for no reason. Kind of sounds familiar. I watched War Games today for the first time in what has to be over a decade. It looks super janky now, but I remember the first time I saw it, I was like, damn. This could totally happen. Watching it now, I picked up on a marijuana reference early on in the film that completely escaped me back then. One of my favorite things about watching '80s movies now that I'm older and...older...is finding all the pot references.

Other than that, though. I'm not sure if War Games stands the harsh test of time. Obviously, all the equipment is way outdated, and that's fine, but I'm not sure if the film's writers had any grasp of the capabilities of computers. I mean, I don't either, and I guess back when the movie came out no one really did, so just about anything was plausible, but now that the human race and the PC have come a long way together, cracking NORAD with an eight baud modem makes it difficult to suspend disbelief. I mean, was it really like that? Before Windows, could you just type something into a prompt and the machine would basically do whatever you asked? If so, I think the technology has taken a step back. I used to have a Commodore 128k and I remember typing in the "Load "*", 8,1" code to get a crappy game to load up from a floppy disc, but that's about it.

I didn't realize how blatantly message-heavy War Games is. It basically boils down to the only way to win a nuclear war is not to enter into one, which seems like pretty sound advice, but they went ahead and drove that point home about 800 times toward the end. My favorite character is the crazy programmer guy who created the war computer, Stephen Falken. He talks about the dinosaurs a lot, and how the bees will take over after we're gone, and how extinction is inevitable. He seemed comforted by that. He must have remembered to Wang Chung. Other things I picked up on, that I hadn't before, was that Ally Sheedy was kind of a babe back then and--this might be hard to explain--but when Matthew Broderick first breaks into the government system (unbeknownst to him of course), he asks Ally Sheedy, hoping to impress her, if she'd like to hear the computer talk. She does, of course, and he switches on some speaker box thing that creates a garbled digital voice that "interprets signals from the computer and turns them into sound." Great. But through out the movie after that point, every time the confront the maniacal program Joshua, it speaks in that voice, even when they're not at Matthew Broderick's computer. It made me wonder: Is this speaker box standard government issue, or is Matthew Broderick just hearing this voice in his head, because he feels guilty about causing this extinction-threatening scenario?

It's been a long, boring day.