WarGames (1983)

Shall we play a game? In 2026, we are faced with the growing intrusion of AI into our lives. In 1983, before the public knew anything about AI, WarGames warned us about the consequences it could pose. At the time, it was more about the Cold War and how easily nuclear Armageddon could spark. Matthew Broderick’s David is just a high school slacker hacker who wants to play some games. And to impress a luminous Ally Sheedy, because who wouldn’t. In logic only a 1983 movie can generate, he’s able to hack into the Defense Department and play a game with “Joshua”, the AI running the nuclear defense system. David thinks it’s a game, but Joshua is playing for real. WarGames is nearly a perfect Cold War thriller on so many levels. Computers were so alien to most people who had no idea what they could do, yet here was one sitting on a desk in their living room, so of course it seemed reasonable you could just dial up the Pentagon and launch a few missiles. The threat of nuclear war hung over the world daily, so WarGames plays perfectly into the paranoia of the time. Unlike a lot of movies, no one is truly an adversary. The military isn’t played as villains. Dabney Coleman’s character is trying to stop the end of the world that some high school kid may have accidentally caused. Looking at it from a modern view, it’s the AI that would capture the attention of 2026. Joshua is given free will to make decisions about nuclear deployment, and when it decides it has to win the game, because it can’t see a difference between real life and simulation, it follows its programming to make sure it does not lose, no matter what it costs. It’s a safe bet in 1983, no one involved in WarGames would have predicted it’s AI theme would be more relevant than its Cold War backdrop in 2026. It’s both quaint and frightening at the same time, asking questions about letting machines make our decisions just because they are supposedly “infallible”. Play a game with Joshua sometime, you won’t regret it.