Review of Wargames

Introduction

I think everyone is pretty much familiar with the story. Matthew Broderick plays highschool underachiever "David Lightman", whose world revolves around computers and games. I think we can all identify with this character at some point in our lives. More than just changing his highschool grades with his computer, he`s on a mission to play the latest videogames before they`ve been released. He unwittingly comes across a computer with strategic games such as chess and Global Thermonuclear War and of course, these are intriguing sounding games. One thing leads to another and he`s in real trouble as it looks like he`s about to start World War 3. The computer he hacks into won`t leave him alone and keeps calling his computer at home to carry on playing the games.

His unlikely accomplice in all this is Ally Sheedy playing Jennifer. She gets involved with David in all this when they change their highschool grades and become firm friends. We watch Lightman trying to figure things out while evading capture by the government with Jennifer in tow. He`s on a quest of discovery to find the man behind these games, someone that can understand and help sort out what`s going on.

Video

The non-anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer to DVD is a disappointment. On the whole, the clarity of the image is good, but once you expand it to fit a 16x9 TV, it loses definition and becomes slightly soft, so watching it on a TV switched to 14x9 seems to be fine. There`s little sign of compression while watching the film so it`s not bad at all. The blacks don`t seem to be dark enough though and appear a dark grey, but this is probably down to the age of the film and the budget for putting this on DVD in the first place. Anamorphic would have been a better bet though, and perhaps the PAL disc would be that bit better.

Audio

It`s not an audio laden film by any stretch. What there is here works well enough to tell the story and it`s been remastered in 5.1.

Features

Apart from eight pages of production notes, there`s the director commentary and a trailer. WarGames was made in 1983 when they didn`t really get into doing extras for movies, so there`s very little here. The production notes are interesting and the director commentary is superb from director John Badham with writers Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes. I thought it was quite insightful.

Conclusion

I`ve always liked WarGames since the first time I saw it in the eighties, it`s one of those movies that work well for me even now in 2002. The performances here from Broderick and Sheedy are really good, they`re teenagers in cahoots and you can sense the chemistry between them as the film plays out. Even in 2002 this film has common underlying threads which we can understand and for me the film has a charm all of its own. It still stands out as a movie to enjoy.

Forget about the fact that the technology is old school and just have fun with it. I find that since I grew up around the time as a teenager, this is exactly the kind of technology we had; green text on those hulking big terminals, though digitised speech was quite something at the time.

The commentary track is good since the writers and director simply tell anecdotes as well as how certain things were achieved as the film plays and you can tell they had fun doing it. Matthew Broderick`s performances haven`t really changed much since WarGames, but I think he`s still likeable enough here. WarGames is a tech thriller worth getting if you liked the film the first time around and want a piece of quintessential 80`s on your shelf. Worth getting but only at a cheap price.