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The end of adolescence, not as a "computer-enhanced hallucination" but a prophecy connecting battlefield and arcade. Reagan's America, Spielberg's suburbia, where the idea of human beings replaced by machines in missile silos is abstrusely reflected in a lecture on asexual reproduction. The Seattle high-schooler (Matthew Broderick) is a tech-head in with the geeks (Eddie Deezen is an obligatory sight), he hacks into the Pentagon's defense system hoping to play a new video-game and nearly triggers World War III, "a classic case of recruitment by the Soviets." The joke is that Armageddon is interrupted so that the whiz-kid can take out the garbage, the government is not amused—the paranoid elders (Dabney Coleman, Barry Corbin, Dennis Lipscomb, James Tolkan) insist on espionage conspiracies, meanwhile the mecha-brain has a bit of trouble separating simulation from reality when it comes to "global thermonuclear war." John Badham's eponymous games include the glances of awkward yearning between the protagonist and his classmate (Ally Sheedy), teenagers negotiating their burgeoning desire while rampant warheads threaten to vaporize the planet. In their introduction to the adult world, children are welcomed by super-machines as long-lost creators and learn of humanity's extinction from the designer (John Wood) who's taken refuge among the dinosaurs. The "DEFCON" sign glowing above the control room, the unlearnable lesson of futility. Fail-Safe, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, it all goes into a finale that contemplates mutual annihilation by transmuting the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind into electronic fireworks. Warfare boiled down to the inanities of tic-tac-toe, with chess as the wise alternative. The trigger-happy general has the Luddite punchline: "Just unplug the goddamn thing!" With Juanin Clay, Kent Williams, Joe Dorsey, Maury Chaykin, and Michael Madsen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |