26 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
26 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
it's a fact that a good thriller or action movie doesn't need violence to be good or worth watching .
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all it takes is potential violence to make the audience bite their nails .
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and what kind of violence could be more efficient than a global thermo-nuclear war ?
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and potential violence is the premiss wargames is built upon .
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a computer whiz-kid , david , is usually contended with hacking into the school computer to change his grades .
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but after having read an advertisment for an upcoming computer game , he wants to be the first to play it .
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instead of getting into the computer at protovision software he accidentally comes to the frontgate of norad .
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with the help of jennifer , a girl in his biology class , he starts to play a nice game of nuclear war with wopr , war operation plan response ( a top-notch computer at the time , but now hardly faster than my own computer )
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i remember being 12 and watching this at the cinema .
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it was very efficent at giving you a scare in those days and that hasn't changed .
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of course , a nuclear war seemed to be much more of something that could actually happen back in 1983 .
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i wouldn't be surprised if this gave people nightmares .
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i hope it still does since you still hear about school kids hacking into the computers at pentagon .
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broderick and sheedy are just fine as the young teenagers ( although her interest in david remains a mystery ) .
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but the rest of the actors are , by no fault of their own , restricted by the script to play one-dimensional grownups .
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david's parents are the same kind of parents that populate all these college comedies from the 1980s , movies like secret admirer , porky's or zapped and the norad general beringer is straight out of dr . strangelove .
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if for no other reason , you should see this movie to enjoy how far the computer technology has gone since those days .
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david uses the same telephone for calling friends as calling other computers .
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the modem is some kind of device that he puts the headset on .
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far from any 56k modem my guess is that it's some kind of 2400 bps modem , the kind of technology you now find at your local technical museum .
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the big computer at norad has a lot of flashing lights ( just like those you see on star trek or any old sf-movie ) but it's hardly impressing compared with what you can get today .
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what are the lessons we can learn from wargames ?
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1 .
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make sure there are no secret backdoors into military computers .
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2 . thank you , whoever it was , for giving us a graphical user interface when we use our computers !
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