When I first heard they were dusting off the old Matthew Broderick-Ally Sheedy movie WarGames and updating it for 2008, I was skeptical. The old film had been a fun thriller, but what with the mainstreaming of computer technology in the 25 years since the film’s debut, I just wasn’t sure they could carry off the same sort of “bumbling innocent” plot that had worked back when the tops in personal computer technology was either an Apple IIe or a Commodore 64, depending on your preference.
Happily, I was wrong. Not only has the concept been updated, it’s been brought to life by a solid post-September 11 re-conceptualization that makes the story more relevant than ever. War Games: The Dead Code takes place 25 years after the first film and JOSHUA is an historical footnote on diet pills. The hot new government super-computer is a piece of AI run amok known as Ripley (nice Aliens reference), who identifies terrorist cells by luring them with a big cash-for-play internet videogame that supposedly assesses terrorist skills and knowledge.
Basically, if you win at the Ripley war game, you are marked as a “person of interest” in bio-terrorism and the government comes after you, big time, guns blazing. Yikes! Yeah, that’s what Osama bin Laden and his cronies do all day when they’re not flying airplanes into skyscrapers … they’re playing videogames on the Internet. Right.
Despite the rather ridiculous presupposition of terrorist pastimes, the rest of the movie holds together rather well as a thriller; despite a PG-13 rating, however, parents should be warned that the language in this movie is nowhere near as clean-cut as its 1983 predecessor, which is a disappointment. Next thing you know, they’ll remake Short Circuit as a sexbot.
Matt Lanter of HEROES fame plays the lead role, while Amanda Walsh is his chess-club counterpart; neither seem destined to outshine Broderick-Sheedy, but stranger things have happened and both turn in solid performances and both are definitely better actors at this point in their careers than then-newcomers Broderick and Sheedy were at that time.
The extras are pleasant and in the end, War Games: The Dead Code delivers the goods well enough to say that it didn’t embarrass the legacy of its predecessor; however, aside from being a bit dated, the original is still the superior film and contains far less profanity, making it better family viewing than the remake.
