The 80’s were a fun decade for me; I lived through the whole Breakdance craze of the 80’s, with b-boys and girls breakin’ on the streets, I witnessed many a dance battle during my lunch break in school, I lived for collecting comic books (still do actually), I played street football, I watched ‘V’ and ‘Knight Rider’ religiously on television, and though I was having a blast, I wasn’t fully aware that the 80’s was also a decade were people lived “under the shadow of a mushroom cloud” meaning that nuclear holocaust loomed heavy on everyone’s mind. Dying in a nuclear attack was a very real possibility on peoples’ minds back in those days. Those were the days of the Cold War, when the Americans and the Russians had the whole world frightened with their nuclear possibilities. Though neither of the countries ever engaged in actual war, they had the nuclear capabilities to erase themselves from the planet, all they had to was press a button and we’d vanished in a matter of seconds, turned to cinders by political madmen.
During the 50’s, people were very afraid of the Atomic Bomb,
this fear seeped into popular culture
and movies (as fears commonly do) and as a result we got a lot of movies about
giant animals who mutated due to radiation exposure. Films like Godzilla (1954),
Tarantula (1955) and Them! (1954) appeared
as a direct result of this Atomic Fear.
The Cold War, which supposedly ended in 1991 spawned its own nuclear
themed series of films: The China Syndrome (1979), The Atomic Café (1982),
Silkwood (1983), Testament (1983) and the two films I’ll be talking about
today: WarGames (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986), among other films made
for television. I decided to talk about both of these films together because
they are both about whiz kids who figure out a way to mess with nuclear weapons
and the governments defense systems.
In John Badham’s WarGames we meet David (played by a very young
Matthew Broderick) a computer whiz kid whose figured out a way to use computers
and the internet in his favor. He hacks into airlines and reserves flights to
Paris for him and his friends. With a few keystrokes, he both changes his
grades and breaks into a video game manufacturers’ data banks to steal their
latest video games. Funny thing is how out dated all the technology in this
film is! I mean floppy disks where the size of vinyl records for crying out loud!
To use the internet they had to hook up a real phone to a machine…it was funny
to see all this old technology that at the time must have seemed like cutting
edge stuff. Yet it’s still cool to see David hack his way through anything,
even if he is using ancient technology, it’s the principal that counts. The guy
can get away with bloody murder with a few keystrokes! How cool!
For David, problems arrive one day when he accidentally hacks
into a government computer that simulates nuclear war scenarios. David innocently
decides to play with the computer, thinking it’s just a game, but suddenly, the
game turns real as the computer decides to really activate the nation’s nuclear
arsenal. Things get pretty intense, because the fate of the human race rests in
the hands of this kid and ‘Joshua’ the governments computer. This film reminded
me a lot of all of those movies where computers go bad and want to destroy
everything. Films like Stanly Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which
HAL, the computer that flies a spaceship goes rogue and decides to turn against
its creators. It also reminded me of Eagle Eye (2008) starring Shia LaBeouf,
yet another film that presents us with the idea of a computer that starts
thinking on its own and decides to kill everyone in government because according
to it, they are not doing a good job of running the country. This also happens
in John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974), where an astronaut has to actually reason
with a computer (by philosophizing with it) in order to make it understand that
earth doesn’t have to be blown up with a nuclear device. In WarGames we have a
computer named ‘Joshua’. Will Joshua
learn that with nuclear war nobody wins?
WarGames is all about how no one really wants to blow each
other up to smithereens, not even the guys who are supposed to press the button
want to do it. I liked how WarGames explored that idea; if the time came to
push a button that would result in the death of 20 million people, would you do
it? Would you press that button? Would you want to be the one responsible for
that much death? The film helps us see that no one wants to have that in their conscience;
that everybody is that much happier when the bombs don’t go off. It’s the idea
that nuclear power is simply too much power in the hands of us bumbling,
idiotic, mistake making humans. In the words of one of the characters in the
film: “Your defense system sucks!”
There’s lots of tension in those scenes when the computer is
just about to blow us all to hell, and I have to hand it to director John
Badham for playing with the visuals during those last scenes in the war room. During
those scenes, Badham expertly plays with sound, music and editing as if he was
directing a philharmonic orchestra, great stuff. WarGames wasn’t the only technology
gone bad movie Badham did, he also directed Blue Thunder (1983) where an ultra
modern helicopter built for surveillance is taken by its pilot, who has a
crisis of conscience as to the helicopters real purpose. He also directed Short
Circuit (1986), a film in which a robot designed for military purposes becomes
conscious of itself and decides that he doesn’t want to kill, he’d rather dance
with Ally Sheedy and chase grass hoppers. So I’d say that this anti-military,
anti-war message has been a constant in many of Badham’s films.
In WarGames, David accidentally hacks into the governments
computer and thinks he is playing a game called “Global Thermonuclear War” with
the governments computer, but when he realizes what he’s done, he does his best
to stop the computer from starting World War III, which makes him the hero of
the film. This is not the case with The Manhattan Project (1986), which
portrays the whiz kid as more of a threat because it puts the power of the
atomic bomb in the hands of a high school whiz kid named Paul, who thinks it
would be a good idea to steal plutonium from a government laboratory that’s in
his neighborhood; in order to make his own home made atomic bomb and expose the
militaries secret nuclear experiments. Apparently,
nobody knows that in this facility the military experimenting with plutonium
and nuclear power. Paul thinks the people of his town have a right to know this,
so he plans on building a bomb and submitting it as a project for his high
school science project.
The whole thing starts when one of the scientists working in
the military facility wants to date Paul’s mom. In order to get the kid to like
him, the scientist (played by John Lithgow) decides to give Paul a tour of the
lab. Paul is thrilled to get a tour of the place, because he is a geeky genius
and he loves all that techno stuff. But he soon realizes that these scientists
are playing with plutonium. He then decides to steal some of it to create his
own bomb.
After that, it’s a game of “let’s chase the whiz kid before
he blows us all up” type of deal. Again, same as in WarGames, there are some
very tense moments when everyone is afraid to be blow to bits. That whole scene
where they are attempting to disarm the bomb, was all played very well, the
film ends up being entertaining; the difference between WarGames and The
Manhattan Project is that The Manhattan Project gets a little more philosophical
with its ideas; it has scenes of the scientist and the kid reasoning out things
about the nature of nuclear weapons and the reason for their existence, I guess in a way it has more of an edge to it.
Another difference between these two films is the way their
main characters are handled. While David in WarGames comes off as a hero, the
same cannot be said for Paul in The Manhattan Project. Some people find the
character of Paul controversial because he contradicts himself. He wants to expose
the “evil government lab” but creating a nuclear bomb himself, and puts
everyone around him in peril. Doesn’t Paul think he’s exposing himself, his
family and friends, not to mention his town and hell, a couple of states to the
dangers of nuclear holocaust? These questions are definitely worth considering,
because when we get down to it, he is actually a terrorist. I guess one could
argue that he’s trying to make a point in a very extreme way, or that the kid
is simply a confused, messed up product of the times. He is scared of dying in
a nuclear attack, but then again, Paul is never portrayed that way. Had they
portrayed him as a kid who is up to date with world news, and worried about
nuclear attacks, maybe it would have made more sense. Still, I get what they
were trying to say with the film, and it’s an interesting premise, also, at one
point Paul finds a four leaf clover and he thinks this is a mutation that comes
as a result of the secret experiments, so that motivates him to do something, I
guess he just went about it the wrong way. My only gripe with the film is that Paul’s
actions defy logic and reason, and him being a whiz kid and all, he could have
come up with something better. His actions come off as arrogant, he might want
to expose the military, but it also seems he simply wants to have the glory of
being the first kid to create a nuclear bomb in his own house, I just think they could have
developed the character a bit further.
I personally liked WarGames a bit more because it’s more
exciting, more cinematic. The Manhattan Project has a television movie feel to
it. It does have the excellent John Lithgow to liven things up though; and I’ve
always enjoyed his performances, in my book he is a solid actor that should
have had a bigger career. In the end, I don’t think The Manhattan Project is a
bad film, it does take its anti-war message across, it just does so in a
strange way. The main character doesn’t come off as likable at all. In the end,
he comes off as a crazy kid who could have killed a hell of a lot of people. He
certainly could have found different ways to expose the military base, like
maybe a protest? But I guess then we wouldn’t have a movie. In the end, what I
like about both of these films is the message they want to give us: blowing
people up with nuclear weapons is just not cool, pass it on.
Rating WarGames (1983): 4 out of 5
Rating The Manhattan
Project (1986): 3 ½ out of 5
2 comments:
Wargames is a fantastic movie. Just watched it again on TV the other week. Broderick is on fine form (definitely some Ferris Bueller aspects to the character).
I love all the dated technology - it's a fascinating glimpse at what used to pass as cutting edge.
Just watched Blue Thunder recently too. Badham definitely had a thing about misusing technology. Shame he hasn't directed anything recently.
Never heard of the Manhattan Project. Will have to check it out.
I'll try and review Blue Thunder, to me it's a seminal 80's flick, I remember wanting to own the toy that they made of it when I was a kid, a very cool toy!
Manhattan Project is very similar to WarGames, only the protagonist comes off as a looney kid who puts his loved ones in peril to make his point. But it's still a good watch, recommend it.
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