WarGames (1983)

1 suggested correction

★★★★☆

Starring: Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Ally Sheedy

Other mistake: When Jennifer meets David in Oregon she says she drove 3 hours to get there. In the next scene they are getting off a bus to catch the ferry. What happened to her car?

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Suggested correction: There are possibilities off-screen as to why. It's possible that the bus used its own private road to get to the ferry which may be closed to the public, or the parking lot may have been too expensive and they parked on a street instead and caught a bus. It's not really known, but those are some possibilities.

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Mistakes

Factual error: At the end of the movie WOPR tries to crack the launch-code using brute force. So far so good. When WOPR finds out one digit of the 10 digit code, the first digit locks and the search goes on with the remaining 9 digits. Then he finds the second one, it locks too and so on. Problem is, brute force doesn't work that way. It would be too easy (26 letters and 10 numbers = only 36 possibilities for one digit). Brute-Force works only "all or nothing", you can't sneak your way to the whole code one by one.

Goekhan

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Quotes

Stephen Falken: The whole point was to find a way to practise nuclear war without destroying ourselves. To get the computers to learn from mistakes we couldn't afford to make. Except, I never could get Joshua to learn the most important lesson.
David Lightman: What's that?
Stephen Falken: Futility. That there's a time when you should just give up.
Jennifer: What kind of a lesson is that?
Stephen Falken: Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
Jennifer: Yeah, of course.
Stephen Falken: But you don't anymore.
Jennifer: No.
Stephen Falken: Why?
Jennifer: Because it's a boring game. It's always a tie.
Stephen Falken: Exactly. There's no way to win. The game itself is pointless! But back at the war room, they believe you can win a nuclear war. That there can be "acceptable losses."

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Trivia

Trivia: Closely listen to the TV playing in the background, when Mathew Broderick comes home from school, before all his trouble starts with the Feds. The local news is on, and is saying "a fire broke out in a prophylactic recycling factory."

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Questions

Question: How could WOPR not know the difference between a game and real life?

Answer: While merely speculation, the WOPR is not alive and knows only what it's been programmed to do. It would have no concept of life or death, and as such would see no difference between the simulation and the real thing. That being said, an easy way to make it see the difference would be to program it to not waste physical resources. It would then see the use of all its actual warheads as less desirable.

Answer: This film is science fiction and hardly reflective of a real-life scenario. The WOPR is depicted as being almost semi-sentient that is flawed. The movie employs an illogical, suspension-of-disbelief plot line.

raywest ★

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