I decided to watch this for the first time
since it was released in 1983 after seeing some clips on the news the other
night. It still holds up wonderfully well with a fresh faced Matthew Broderick,
three years before he did Ferris Bueller, and an equally peachy faced Ally
Sheedy, two years before Breakfast Club. The basic plot is pretty well-known
with Broderick hacking into NORAD thinking it was a computer game and starting
a process that could lead to WWIII. What is not as well-known is that in the
same year, there was an incident in the Soviet Union in which false readings
were given by their computers that the USA had launched missiles at them and
basically one man in the Soviet Union, Stanislav Petrov, refused to believe
the data and did not retaliate. If he had, I would not be writing this. You
would not be reading it.
The computer technology brought back some nostalgic memories, not that I
was a computer geek by any standards, with the use of floppy discs, DOS and
dial-up connectivity with that sound you will never forget - but I was trying
to recall if at the time I saw this, whether the ability of Broderick to connect
to other outside computers and then hack them felt like sci-fi to me or if
it was already known that this could be done. The Internet as we know it
did not exist yet and the protocols that we use did not come along till later.
I don't think I got onto the Internet until the mid-90's so this must have
felt quite new at the time. The Defense Department since the 1960's had always
been one of the leading researchers into developing this interconnected technology.
Look for a couple familiar faces in the opening scene when two men in a
silo are given instructions to launch and one of them is psychologically
unable to - thus leading to the film plot point of taking humans out of the
equation of nuclear war. The two men are played by John Spencer who later
went on to a terrific TV career in L.A. Law and then West Wing - and the
other is a much slimmer Michael Madsen in pretty much his first film role.
And even a few minutes from Eddie Deezen is always equally annoying and welcome.
