Pettit.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA (07/01/83)
I liked War Games. Granted it will suffer a lot in comparison to "Failsafe" and "Dr. Strangelove", *IF* you think of it as trying to preach the same message. As as a vehicle for "Nuclear War could happen despite our best intentions" it would certainly fail because, as Lauren says, in its choice of a disaster scenario it is neither realistic enough to be believable, nor unrealistic enough to be enjoyed as satire. And as Mike Inners said, "because ill effects are not avoided." But I don't think that was its message at all. I saw the message as "Think! Care! And don't be afraid to do what caring tells you you should do." That stopping a nuclear war was the thing the characters got a chance to care about is almost incidental. The nuclear threat is there for increased dramatic effect and tension, not for realism. So of course the ill effects had to be avoided, in order to show that acting on your conscience can make a difference. The movie is not anti-machine at all -- it is anti-people-acting-like-machines. The computers, like the chess references, are there to present this metaphorical contrast, not to be the dangers themselves. I'm a little surprised that so few people recognized this as the message. The movie wasn't at all subtle about it. EVERY major character, and most of the minor characters, was faced with a choice between acting on a concern for life, or pushing that concern aside. All the acts of caring were depicted as acts of independence and freedom, and were shown by later events to be the "right" choice. All the acts of pushing aside thoughts of caring were depicted as being mechanical, as the actions of a pawn -- by pawns of military orders, of political ideology, of misanthropic bitterness, of programming, of a vested interest in the computer system, etc., etc. For example, the human missile launchers in the opening silo scene were depicted as cogs in a machine, acting on orders, and the independent choice not to follow orders was later vindicated, in that there was no real attack. Even the telephone scene can be interpreted as a machine blindly insisting on a dime when lives of millions are at stake, and human ingenuity winning out. As an example of how blatant the movie was about its message, the turning point in the professor's actions was when the whiz-kid asked him, "When was the last time you really cared?" As another example, the turning point in the general's attitude was when the professor yelled at him, "Look at that! Does it make any SENSE? Would Russia really be so stupid as as to launch a full-scale attack without provocation, that would leave them devastated? It's a MACHINE, playing a game!" At that point, the general told his missiles to halt their launch (too late), and became a good-guy rooting for the kid to win. As a final example, the turning point in WOPR's actions was when it stopped acting like a real simulation program, and did the very un-computer-like trick of looking outside the programmed game goals and acting on a higher meta-goal: "only play games that somebody can win." It was OK with me that WOPR in the final few minutes started doing totally nonsensical things like sparking and draining the power supply and talking without a voice-synthesizer device and running the simulation at thousands of times the rate that it had been running it before, because at that point it had stopped being a machine and become a metaphor for OUR stopping being machines. It had to do all sorts of amazing things to underline its miraculous transformation. "War Games" isn't a great movie. "E.T." presented the same message in a much more poetic way. But it's a good movie, and shouldn't be faulted for not doing all sorts of things it wasn't meant to do. -- Teri Pettit