Shall we play a game?

Wow, Paul, this is going to be such a wonderful episode because I just have nice things to say. I am so happy. Some of them are funny, snarky, but mostly really nice things to say. I want to play a game, and I'm very excited. How are you doing, Paul?

I want to play so many, starting with Galaga in that vintage arcade.

Oh my God.

I am so happy you're so happy. I am also very happy, although I have two unavoidable nitpicks with this film. Oh wow. That I will share in good spirit, but still vex me to no end.

All right. Then we, okay. So let's just start this podcast because I'm dying to talk about a little movie called WarGames. I'm Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

And I'm Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

And this is...

Multiplex Overthruster Summer of 83.

That also takes care of my Tai Chi for the day, which is all there.

It's always so satisfying. And to those who may or may not have noticed, Producer Brad has given our theme a subtle, I would say magisterial update to our opening theme.

The magic of Producer Brad is not to be underestimated in any way.

It knows no ends.

It really does not.

Thank you for covering for my losing the original file.

Okay, Producer Brad and Paul, when did you guys first see this film? What was your experience of seeing this film?

I saw this as a kid in the Multiplex in the wake of having repeatedly seen Return of the Jedi.

Okay.

Producer Brad? I saw it also at Briarwood Mall.

Now, did I see this one with you or I don't remember the... This might have been one where we all jumped into the Econoline van and went to see it, but I don't know. Did we see this one together?

I don't remember the details of this one. I just remember Briarwood.

Actually, we did not because this was during that weird interregnum where you went to a different middle school than I went to, right?

Yes. Very sad years.

Yes. No, I rue them to this day. But anyway, so actually, Simon, I think I saw this one at Fox Village. The thing I have to say about this is that I don't have a lot of memories of seeing this as a kid. I remember liking it a lot, and I think the last time I saw it was on VHS whenever it came out on VHS, and I hadn't seen it since. The first time I've seen it in literally decades. Paul, Brad?

Same. Same. I don't know that I've seen it since it came out. I'm trying to remember. I probably saw it again, maybe on a video rental night at home, a year or two after, or maybe on cable. But I have not seen this since, I'm pretty sure, since the 80s.

Pretty sure, Brad?

I think I saw this a lot on cable. But not since the 80s, so it's been decades since I've seen it.

Now folks, we're talking about a movie called WarGames, directed by John Badham, who also directed Saturday Night Fever, among a billion other things. One of the really most prolific guys, kind of workman-like directors in Hollywood. This is the story of a young man named David, who is a computer- Whoa, whoa, what's going on? Producer Brad, what's happening?

We do have a listener comment from our Return the Jedi episode that you guys need to address.

Oh my God, we're now doing viewer mail. I love it. Do go on. Yes.

Well, the issue is we chose a Star Wars film and you guys made some assertions, shall we say, and someone disputes one of your assertions.

Are you suggesting that- The deuce you say. Yeah, that's from Bucky Banzai. Are you suggesting that Star Wars fans have very, very strong opinions about things? Because that's weird. I've never heard of that before.

Well, the question is, is it an opinion or knowledge?

OK, well, let's find out.

In the Jedi episode, Javi, you said that in Return of the Jedi, it was their first use of vocals in the score, in a Star Wars score.

OK.

Now, I've been told that in Empire Strikes Back, the first time is actually when they're flying to Cloud City.

That is correct. That is correct.

Great.

That's awesome. I didn't know that.

Now I know a new thing. That's awesome. OK. Cool.

We can move on now. We've cleared it up.

That was it? Did somebody fact-checking the use of vocals? That's it.

It's a lovely cue. I was imagining something far more worthy of our time.

Of course, this could be something swallowed by it.

Yeah. I just thought I was going to be called an asshole and a hack by somebody and told that this movie is in fact... I mean, I don't know. That's usually the kind of comments I get. So...

Well, I think for this person, this was a very big deal.

You know what? I appreciate the correction. And in fact, I'll correct myself. At one point in the episode, did I say that that opening scene with Moff Jergerod is like that there's no human beings in it? The fact of the matter is Moff Jergerod walks with two lines of fully human imperial officers. I was wrong. And I think one of the interesting things is sometimes in this podcast, even though we saw the movie like sometimes immediately before recording, our memories of them are still stronger than the actual experience of viewing the film. Don't you think, Paul?

This is true. We're very old. I'm 145 years old.

And when 145 years old you are, this good you will not look.

Exactly. We got a lot on our mind. We got a lot going on. So every once in a while we're going to have a slip up. But here's the thing. Are they are they slip ups or are they merely mechanisms of engagement to test how attentive our listening audience may be? So to our astute listener and fan of John Williams' choral music, especially at the glorious arrival to Cloud City on Bespin, you get a gold star. Should we come up with a little multi-star thing that we give?

Since we have the multi-awards, we should call our no prize, like in Marvel, we should call it the plexi. If you're in a movie, you get a multi-award. If you have a no prize, you get a plexi.

OK, I can go with that. While we're on this tangent, Javi, I don't mean to bring this up in public on a recording, but you made a bold assertion between last episode and this that our audience shall be known as?

Thrust-a-Rikens.

Thrust-a-Rikens. So I have a question.

Do go on.

Where does the C in Thrust-a-Rikens come from? Because that makes no goddamn sense to me. Should it not logically be Thrust-a-Rians?

Yes, but I'm from Puerto Rico. And it's a pun on Puerto Ricans.

Yes.

You're Thrust-a-Rikens.

Yes, because Puerto Rico has a C in it.

Yes.

That then is the bridge to Eakens. So Puerto Ricans.

Yes.

There is no such C in Multiplex Overthruster to turn into Eakens.

Well, you know what? I have a good solution for this. It's based on the Cold War, which actually is really good because it brings us back into the movie, okay? So, as you know, we have divided our social media into two separate but equal superpowers. Yours is Instagram and mine is Blue Sky. On Instagram, we can be Thrusterians.

I don't know that we should reveal this much detail behind our Ozzy and Kurt.

All I'm saying is like, on Blue Sky...

Am I interpreting you correctly that you are asserting that we can have both Trekkies and Trekkers?

Yes.

In the form of...

Thrusterians and Thrustericans.

I can't even say that. Thrusterians.

What is it about Thrustericans that...

It breaks my brain. It is programming. It's counter to... My degree is in journalism, okay? It's a heavy burden.

I see that. I see that.

Language provides order in our lives, and Thrustericans breaks that order in a way that...

Thruster-Rekens. Thruster-Rekens. Okay. In the words of the theme song from Rocky IV, two worlds collide, rival nations.

Can I go back a second?

Yes, please.

I beg you. Before we move forward, let's go back.

Why not?

When I said what the error was from Jedi, Paul nodded like he knew. Did he know at the time and let it slide, or did he... Yes, Paul, yes.

Oh, here's the thing. I love my nerd cred. I will never dispute that Paul is probably the more knowledgeable geek than I am. Also, the other thing I would say is my mind works on putting narrative in order to get meaning, much in the same way that the Americans had democracy and the Russians used communism to give meaning to their lives, or the way that our Instagram account calls them Thrusterians and the Blue Sky account calls them Thrusterikans. They're two very different ways of thinking. I'm much more of an imagistic thinker. So, yeah, that's...

This is just to say that...

I'm wrong. Basically, I'm wrong a lot.

Oh, that involved...

Be in defiance to some who would oppressively assert otherwise, wholeheartedly embrace the fundamental American values of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Yes, we do.

So, Thrusterikans... Did I say that right?

Thrusterikans.

Thrusterikans. I'm never going to get that right. And Thrusterians alike.

We love you all.

We love you all. You're all welcome. Even if you self-identify in your own creative way. Yes. If it's something that's going to be hostile to my brain, you know, just spare me. But it's a fragile thing. But yeah, you're all welcome. And please join us and follow us on various social medias. And we're probably remiss more often than not in not actually asking you to find an episode to share with the friends.

Oh, yes, please, please.

Because now the totality of season one is available. We're now well underway to season two. Plus, we have our special episodes on Dark Crystal and The Hunger and the Multi Awards, which is a great way to kind of catch up and look back on a lot of things from Summer of 82. But yeah, sharing is caring. And so our big ask today, your assignment, should you choose to accept it? Pick one of your favorite episodes to share with a friend and then see if they're still your friend. They might be a deeper, richer friend after experience.

Yes, or you may find out who your real friends are. Yes, both very valuable, both very valuable.

And knowing is half the battle.

That's right. So hit that subscribe button.

Yes. Paul. Yes.

This is the story of David, a young hacker who has a room full of Commodore computers and very large floppy disks.

He has all sorts of electronic accoutrements.

Oh, so beautiful. He even has an acoustic modem, which is just a thing of beauty. Oh my God. Right.

Most of the tones of dialogue.

In trying to impress a girl and in trying to steal some games from a game company that have not yet been released, David accidentally hacks into NORAD and almost starts a nuclear war. Well, it turns out that NORAD has just changed their operating system. They now have a machine called the Whopper that can launch the missiles on its own. And what David doesn't know is that he triggered a war game that the machine does not understand is going to play out in the real world. For the next 52 hours, David and his girlfriend Jennifer are going to be in a desperate quest to find the creator of this machine, a professor named Stephen Falcon, and see if they can have his help in stopping this machine from nuking the world. At the same time, inside NORAD, there's a power struggle going on between Mr. McKittrick, who is the director of the computer operations of NORAD, and General Berenger played by Barry Corbin, and McKittrick played by Dabney Coleman, two of the greatest character actors ever. And at the end of this incredible film, all of these paths combine as the world is on the brink of nuclear war, and we need to put our faith on one thing, the capacity of consciousness to learn the error of its ways.

And the existential lesson of futility.

Exactly. Paul, I gotta get into it. Producer Brad, give us the bell, because I gotta get into this.

Ding, ding.

Paul, I love this movie. This movie, literally, I haven't seen it in forever, and I enjoyed it so much more as an adult. It is a film that has finally given me an appreciation for nostalgia, honestly. I literally, this film has very little plot, okay? Here's the plot of this movie. Kit does a thing, thing goes bad, he gets caught for doing a bad thing, the bad thing is ongoing, he escapes from the people who caught him, he finds the guy who can help stop the bad thing, and they do. Yeah. Now, if this were a modern movie, this would be like a short, in modern editing and modern writing, this movie would be 30, 45 minutes long if that. This movie to me plays like an indie film from the 1990s, the scenes are long, you get to breathe with the characters, you get to live with them. The plot doesn't really kick into 35 minutes into the movie. It's beautiful and the other thing that I adore about this movie, Paul, is that other than some very primitive Atari style 8-bit computer graphics that are part of this montage at the end of this movie. There's very, I don't think any model or effects work in this film.

Right.

And every piece of spectacle in this film is completely carried by the faces of this incredible cast.

Yeah.

And it just blew me away. What a different film-going experience this is than anything I've seen like in the last three years.

Yeah.

I mean, so much more appreciation for this movie as an adult. And it has made me so happy during what's kind of a dark time, to be honest with you. So, Paul, if you want to set the table, give me a little, give me a little, but I'll just start on the plot. Let's go.

Who would have thought that we would have such nostalgia for the height of Cold War paranoia and existential angst over the threat of nuclear Armageddon?

Yeah.

That this film makes so charming, and yet has very thoughtful things to say, that we're very timely in the moment that it was released.

We're no longer in the Cold War, obviously, but the humanism of this film is for the ages. It really is. And I think that it is even more relevant today, because it actually simplifies an issue that we're all living with.

Yeah.

Which is the rise of artificial intelligence, not to mention the ongoing threat of nuclear war. Yeah. The movie starts beautifully. We are in a nuclear bunker, a place where Minuteman missiles are going to be launched from. And who's there? You're already slowing me down. What do you want?

I just, I got to savor this, okay? First of all, we open in a storm, and then these like air force people arrive in this, this like nondescript house.

It's like a shack. It's like a shack.

And then we get the coolest kind of Cold War reveal.

So Ian Fleming, right? So James Bond, the best.

It is the cover of a secret US Air Force nuclear missile base.

And who's the main officer?

And the main person who arrives is the great, the great John Spencer.

Oh my God. Best known for the West Wing, where he was Leo McCarrie, the team staff.

And one of my favorite actors of all time.

Yep.

And immediately comes, you mentioned Michael Bay, he would later show up on The Rock. That's right. But immediately brings some gravity and humanity.

Yes. In spite of the fact that during the sweatiest part of the movie, he clearly just has Vaseline smeared on his face. I mean, people don't sweat like that. This opening goes on for approximately seven minutes.

Did you catch who the other guy was?

Who's the other guy?

Michael Madsen.

Yes. Young, very young Michael Madsen.

I saw him in the credits and I was going to ask who was he? Because that's Michael Madsen?

Yes.

Oh my God. It must be before he learned how to make this face. Ready?

I almost, he was so young, I almost didn't recognize him until I kept thinking, wait a minute, he sounds like Michael Madsen. Is that Michael Madsen? Yes, it's a line-blowing duo of these two, who could have their own movie as this guy. So what's their life like as this duo who are taking, assuming there's shifts in the-

Because as they go into the shift and they go past the house, to the two-way mirror and all that, they're just bullshitting about how bad the weather is, and how these two are always late, even if the weather's good, and the guys who they're taking over for on the shift are giving them crap for that. And this brings up one of my favorite things about this movie is that everything in this movie is lived in. This movie sets the stakes, not by showing you a Michael Bay montage of little girls wearing angel wings waving American flags. It sets the stakes by having every character in the film be a human being that you care about. It's magical.

And also so much of the film is very contained.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. And most of the film is in interiors. Absolutely. And somewhat, sometimes claustrophobic ones such as these. But this little opening prologue functions almost as its own little short film that veers into horror of nuclear fear and faults, you know, in launch instructions.

But I'll tell you, I'll tell you, you know, Paul, Paul, Paul, on this one, I'm doing the plot. You're doing color.

Yes.

All right. So just, you know, you're going to have to live with this now because we have four hours. Because we did four hours on Return of the Jedi. And I have a meeting with my couple's therapist in two hours.

So it was closer to five.

Release the producer Brad Cut. Oh, wait, we did. Anyway, there is a launch warning. America is being attacked by the Soviet Union. And the movie takes its sweet time as these guys open the safe, break open the stuff. All of these bits of procedure that have to happen are laid out. And I only bring this up plot wise for this reason. The great thing about this movie is that so many of the stakes are about the real world. They're about the time it takes to authenticate. They're about the time it takes to get from point A to point B while bad shit is going on in the background. This movie is so grounded and so delightfully grounded.

Paul, hit me.

I love this for so many reasons. On the one hand, this is a great study in effective exposition. Now, a lot of these things we know because of movies and pop culture and stuff.

Much like this one, movies much like this one. I've never seen this before, though.

And in 82, this was kind of like pulling a big curtain back in terms of demonstrating very specific procedural protocols of how things work in a missile silo and what happens to, how do you authenticate a code, like all this kind of Cold War geekery stuff. It's really cool. And it works in terms of immediately providing a sheen of realism to the film, also kind of getting us up to speed quickly in terms of understanding and explaining how this thing works, but also then framing it in what emerges as this human emotional dilemma that these two characters face and that breeds conflict between them.

In the final second, when they're both supposed to turn the key, Leo McGarry, you know, because he knows he's got a career in politics after this, doesn't want to turn the key. He doesn't want to kill half a humanity.

He tries to verify the order, which is against protocol.

And then Michael Madsen pulls a gun on him and says, launch the missile, and he doesn't. Once this has passed, and we know that John Spencer knows he's got a future as Leo McGarry and can't destroy the world, and we don't know whether Michael Madsen shot him or not, right? We have our opening title sequence, which I call a lot of big doors.

Oh, so many doors.

And I love this because, you know, in TRON, they had one big door, and it was like, oh, now that is a big door. But this movie has a lot of big doors, and they're huge.

Big ass doors. Big ass doors. Here's another thing I love. In stark contrast to the, let's say, temporal ineptitude of the Megaforce and its unending tour into the Megaforce secret base, John Badham does something very smart. He doubles our entrance and tour of NORAD for the main title sequence. So it's killing two birds with one stone very effectively. And objectively speaking, NORAD is much cooler. And he is taking a place that does exist in reality. And then with, I think, some exteriors that are real. But then interiors, the showcase set of the NORAD command center is glorious. That's the big...

It's the second best war room in the history of cinema. And I think we both know what the first one is. What's the first one?

Of course, Dr. Strangelove. Yeah, of course. This is iconic. And yeah, in the 80s, it's a pillar of Cold War iconography as Strangelove did for the 60s.

I think this movie taught the world more about that than anything that came before it, even Strangelove, because Strangelove still was, you know, though a pop culture touchstone, not necessarily a broad appeal film, you know?

Javi, I have to ask, and this is as good a point as any to ask, at any moment in this film, did you have just a little tiny yearning for a character and the camera to go down a hall to reveal the Stargate? Okay. Okay.

Just glad I wasn't a little on the map.

Just so y'all know, if you're a Stargate fan, this is also the home of Stargate Command.

So, Paul, I really, there's a couple of things I really liked here, and one of them is, I love the kind of 8-bit music, you know? And, you know, it's not really 8-bit. It's an orchestra trying to do 8-bit, but it's 8-bit-ish. And I love that after the titles happen, we go into a scene that could have been in the West Wing. We still, you know, we still don't meet our main character for another five or six minutes, and it is a scene of Dabney Coleman and Barry Corbin and a group of congressional bigwigs talking about why 22% of the missiles didn't launch during the exercise that we saw before the titles.

We don't get a clear identification of all the people in the room, other than they're all white men, except for one woman who's Dabney Coleman's aide with a title.

Very much a movie of its time in that way.

Very much so, but there seem to be some NSA, maybe Intel, who knows?

We know that at least one of them is going to talk to the president.

Yes, and one thing that's very interesting, and you mentioned the West Wing, and not just because of John Spencer, who by the way, we never see again.

Yes, we do. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. In the next scene after this one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we're not through with him yet.

Yeah, that's right. We got to know Michael Madsen and shoot him in the head.

There's a little coda about them switching over. Yeah, okay. After that, basically, they're done. But in contrast to the West Wing, but in alignment with the original plan for the West Wing, we never see the president in this movie. He is very much an active participant in the plot, but is always kept at a distance. Did you ever find yourself waiting for or wanting a cutaway? No. Or even a voice of the president?

No. Because to me, this movie is such a character study. Look, for example, in the opening of the movie, John Spencer is talking about weed. He's already talking about tie stick and shit like that. And Barry Corbin here is saying, well, because this scene is about whether to hand over missile operations to Whopper, the war operations, what do you remember the acronym?

Plan response.

Yeah. So it's about whether or not to computerize everything. So this scene has to carry a lot of freight.

By the way, Javi, and I'm going to circle back to a couple of things at some point that you will hopefully not hate me for. I just have to observe Whopper, a huge missed opportunity for product placement.

Yeah, I know. Somebody should have been eating Burger King in this movie, right?

I'm not getting eating Burger King. It just, who's the ball on that? You would think after the Reese's Pieces.

Yeah.

No, not go with M&M's in the prior summer, that the hours that be on WarGames would have been like, hey, we got to.

And how hard is it to add an H, another P, and an E to that acronym? Not that hard.

I don't think you even need to do that. I think it's just like you're just... Anyway, that's just the precise...

The precise of this scene is Dabney Coleman and Barry Corbin disagreeing about whether to computerize this, and that sets up the immediate problem in this movie. And frankly, it's actually a bigger conflict than anything that Matthew Broderick's character, who we're not going to meet for a few minutes still, has to do, because this movie really is about that conflict between humanity and automation. But also, this movie has to carry the freight of explaining computers before the internet. So it's explaining to us networked systems, it's explaining to us how these network systems work in a very economic way. And one of the things I love about this scene is that Michael Piller, who was famously the showrunner of Star Trek The Next Generation, always maintained that great scenes carry double or triple freight. And this scene carries the freight of both explaining the technology that was alien to most people back then, but also establishing this dramatic conflict between Barry Corbin and Dabney Coleman, which again is actually the most important dramatic conflict in the film. So that's what I got to say about that. Yeah. And Corbin calls it an overgrown... You're telling me we're going to hand the command to that overgrown pile of microchips?

Yeah. Barry Corbin, in no way saddled by an excess of stereotype. In his characterization and interpretation.

If Slim Pickens had not ridden that bomb to attack the Soviet Union in Strange Love, he would be General Barrister.

I was going to say, Barry Corbin is the spiritual successor to Slim Pickens in this film. But Danny Coleman is very fervent in his philosophy of wanting to eliminate human error. And as you say, this is a very auspicious philosophical disagreement that resonates in new and multi-dimensional ways now, given where we are with AI. But yeah, at the time, I was in a lucky household with an Apple II and had had a VIC-20 in Commodore 64 or something. So it's that era where computers were not widespread, but what computers were available were very primitive.

Yeah.

I mean, look, when producer Brad and I were living in Ann Arbor when this movie came out, even though we were not in the same school, one of the really interesting things is one of the teachers in, I think it was either a high school or my junior high, actually was the first person to open a computer store in Ann Arbor.

Elementary school. It was the gym teacher, Mr. Inwood.

Yeah, Mr. Inwood, right? Mr. Inwood.

It was Computer World. He left.

Computer World, yeah. Yeah, and it was across the parkway from Arborland, and we all would go there to look at the Commodore. There weren't even Apple computers. They were all Commodores. Yeah.

He introduced us to the Commodore and Devo's Whippet.

In gym class.

In gym class.

To go together well.

It's funny that you should mention that Barry Corbin's character feels very stereotypical and we should dwell on the kind of how Slim Pickens in Strange Love kind of informs this character because even though this character is a Southern fried profane, you know, he's swearing, he's chewing on the red man tobacco in the middle of NORAD, and he's saying bullshit to everything and all that stuff. Every character in this movie, no matter how stereotypical, gets a redemption. Yes, and that is one of the things that the humanism of this movie that I love is that it leaves no character, even and even Dabney Coleman.

Yeah, I was going to say whether they deserve it or not, and I don't know that Dabney Coleman does.

No, but he gets it at the end and you see that in the face of everything, he does have a human side to him. And McKittrick, the interesting thing about McKittrick is that is the 1980s idea of a tech guy, right? You know, and he's literally a guy in a wool vest and a waffle weave jacket.

And similarly to how we all know that John Spencer would then leave the Air Force and go into politics and ultimately become Chief of Staff to President Bartlett. We know Barry Corbin retires from the Air Force to Alaska. And spends many happy, strange years.

And Dabney Coleman's character after being fired and barred from any government duty or even being able to be near a computer after this fuck up.

Poor Henry Thomas at the Alamo in San Antonio.

Or, no, I actually thought he became a grouchy reporter named Slap Maxwell.

Oh, yeah, that too.

So anyway, so this scene ends with the two white men deciding they're going to recommend automation to the president. And then we have the little coda, which is last time we see John Spencer, where there are workmen removing John Spencer's chair as he watches and putting in the computer module that's going to launch the missiles for him. And he's like, wow, damn, oh, yeah, no tie stick here, John. Anyway, and we don't see Michael Madsen, which leads me to think that Spencer took the gun away from him and beat his bitch ass with it. But that's a whole other. All right.

So now, well, Michael Madsen had to go off and become Mr. Blonde.

Oh, that's true. Michael Madsen chose it.

He had some debts. He had some debts to pay off.

After facing down Armageddon, he became a nihilist and had to take a life of crime.

By the way, I also want to commend the grandeur of the supercomputer room and the design of the Whopper supercomputer with so many blinking lights. And I love all the blinky lights.

A lot of blinkies. It's just sort of a big gray box with a middle stripe with all the blinkies on it and one central blinky cabinet. It's got the word Whopper and what the acronym means on it. And the thing that's great about the design is that the camera can kind of track around it and it has enough corners to make every turn really satisfying.

And it's kind of a brutalist design.

Yes, it is.

Of a supercomputer. It's so ominous and almost like this giant sarcophagus of doom.

But by the way, you see a lot of real computers there and they're just great cabinets. So this actually looks to me like one of those cranes.

The real tape.

Yeah, exactly. But this looks to me like a Cray supercomputer I might have seen in Time magazine in 1987. So it's not that far from the design. It's just fantastical enough. And it's the same thing with The War Room. There's a lot of negative space. There's a lot of blackness, which I'm sure that in the real world, it's all very brightly lit, not nearly as dramatic and all that. But it's minimalist in a weird way because it doesn't seem to have a background. It just trails off into negative space. But it is so effective. And one of the things this movie does so well is that it blends that with the real world in such a just seamless way that you don't question it. And I love that about it.

Yes.

Now, Paul, now we meet David.

Yes. In his natural habitat.

Yes. Which is playing Galaga. Paul, when you were a kid, did you guys stack up the quarters on the ledge of the nameplate? Yeah. And that's how you knew that you were the next one to play the game, right? Yeah, exactly. Okay.

Yeah.

All right. And he's playing Galaga, but he's timing himself and he's going to be late to school. So he just has to hand the game over to some kid.

Can I ask a question?

Do.

Doesn't that kid, he hands off his Galaga duties also? Shouldn't he be in school too?

I think that kid goes to the elementary school and they start later.

I find that very dubious, but it is not one of the things that particularly vexes me in the film.

He goes to the private school and that's a whole other thing.

I guess so.

So now, David goes to his classroom where he goes to Richmond High. Is it Richmond High?

But it feels like there could be a potential crossover.

Oh my God, yeah, between 82 and 83. We find out that Paul is a bit of a fuck up. He goes into the classroom, he gets there late, his teacher greets him by giving him his exam where he's gotten an F.

Yes.

We find out that Jennifer has also gotten an F because she also doesn't pay attention. And the way we find out is the teacher is giving a lecture on a sexual reproduction and he asks the question, who was the first person to suggest a sexual reproduction? And David is caught making the joke that it's the teacher's wife. Which by the way, I love that. Your wife.

And thusly gets sent to the principal's office.

And what we find out is that David knows where they write the password for the school's network computer, which is like on a little note card on a ledge.

Yes.

So he looks it up and that whole scene is literally about just him going to the principal's office and seeing what the new password is.

Exactly. And it implies strongly that David willfully provoked his teacher to send him to the principal's office for this explicit purpose.

Because you get the sense is that...

Because apparently they change the password every week and he's got to stay on top of what the password is.

And the principal says, Mr. Is it Richter? No, that's not his name. Richter is the guy in the company. He says, whatever, like Mr. Leitman, I'm getting tired of discussing your attitude problem. So you get the sense he's here a lot.

Yes.

He looks at that ledge, you don't know why, until later in the movie, when a few minutes later, when Jennifer offers him a ride in her moped.

Yeah.

And they go to his house and he kind of... You find out David's a latchkey kid, which is about as 80s as the 80s get.

By the way, how cool is Jennifer, Ali Shidi?

She's the best.

She seems just so enjoying life and unbothered by many things. And tooling around on her...

Not the least of it, wearing a helmet.

Well, there is that. That is egregious oversight by the responsible parties of the film to portray. But again, it was 1983, so we didn't know better. She is so charming and they have such instant chemistry and they're sitting right... David sits right behind her in class. But yeah, they clearly have a vibe.

The thing I love about David as a character, and this is something you see a lot in the movie, he's really good at doing human, human intelligence. He's very good at talking to people. He's actually very good at getting details out of people, at learning things from people. And what's interesting about it is, there are other characters in this film who are played as the stereotypical nerds. But David is kind of a much more fully rounded character. My favorite thing in Broderick's performance is that he kind of walks like a nerd. The physicality is very nerdy. But I love that David's kind of like, I mean, he's a kid. And he's not some malodorous pervert. He's a kid whose hobby happens to be computers, and he's really good at it. But he has social skills, and Jennifer is not judging him by that sort of... Do you remember that old National Lampoon poster, Are You a Nerd? Remember that poster? It was from the 80s.

And we will soon meet a very stereotypical nerd. But to your point, I find the two of them, and they're so impossibly young in this movie. They're so instantly endearing. Broderick does not go full Ferris Bueller on being...

He's not smug. He's not smug. Exactly, exactly.

He has this earnestness to him. He's charming, but without trying too hard. He's kind of a schleb, kind of dressed a little sloppily. His hair is kind of messed up. He often... His mouth is often hanging open.

Yes.

Like he's...

In his defense, so is mine during those years.

Yeah, but I just buy him as, oh, this is a real teenager. And so is Ali Chidi. Her teeth aren't perfect, and she's cute, she's charming, but she feels...

She's not wearing tons of makeup.

She feels real, and they both just have this naturalism and are so charming and have such great easy chemistry. And again, without trying too hard, without pushing anything too much. And it's just charming. I just really find them very endearing.

And I would argue that you need that in this film, because as I said earlier, the entire trick this film makes is that whether the characters are good, bad and different, played for laughs or not, this movie makes you want to save the world because you live with these characters a little bit. And even David's parents were kind of played mostly for laughs. So this scene basically David shows Jennifer that he can hack into the school computer and change her F to like a C. And she it turns out has ethics, tells him not to do it.

This is so interesting to me.

Yeah. And she leaves, but he does it anyway, which is kind of, it's kind of, and he explains how he got the password and all of that stuff. Yeah. What's your moral quandary with this?

Oh, no, I love this. I love the delineation between the two characters in that he is stressing about his grades and about having to go to summer school to retake a class. She has accepted her fate. She's like, whatever, it's fine. She's like, cool, okay, it's annoying, but it's not the end of the world, whatever. But he is fixated. He's like, no, no, no, I got to change this. I'm going to, and he knows how to do it. He's figured out how to hack the Kobayashi Maru and get himself, not just to see, he's going to give himself an A or whatever. Like, why not? Go big. But she actually, yeah, has this pause of this is wrong. This is not right. And it's an interesting tension and difference that I kind of felt might diverge even more in the film than it does. But in fact, it actually goes the other way. It converges.

So, yeah, David, you know, look, David is not a criminal. He's not a moral. You get the sense. Maybe he might turn into that later if this movie hadn't happened to him. Which, by the way, reminds me of something that there's a screenwriter named Rick Jaffa who with Amanda Silver wrote the Planet of the Apes movies. And he once said that when he writes a movie, the first question he asks is, what kind of character needs this movie? And what I love about this movie is that, you know, David could have been Kevin Mitnick if this movie hadn't happened to him.

Yes.

But this movie happened to him and he comes out of it a much better human being. And Jennifer is kind of his moral. She doesn't necessarily need a moral center, but he does need a moral like a tether to morality. And she kind of serves as that, which is really cool.

She's a valuable frame of reference to the real world. But yeah, the hackery dimensions of his character that are peppered throughout the film, that is in the early kind of this period of hackerdom, even in terms of phone freaking and being able to do, you know, free long distance calls and dial up and all these things that he does, it's very cool and very geeky.

I would say, and this is the point that I want to make later, but this movie may to this day be the movie that is the most accurate about what hacking actually is about. And I have...

To a very specific point where it isn't, then I'll get to you, that vexes me enormously. But I do like the appreciation, and this isn't stated in the film, I don't know how popular these terms were, is that David is a white hat hacker. He's not a black hat hacker. He's not out to do anything malicious. He is purely driven by curiosity. He doesn't want to do any harm to anyone. He just wants to play the game and get early access to this new game system that he covets. That he's... I know we're not there yet.

It's the next scene. Well, here's the thing. The next scene is wonderful because David's parents, you find out, are gold blazer realtors from Century 21 or some analog of it.

At least his mom is, which I think is hilarious. Again, nice product placement.

They're both talking about real estate and the father's kind of vexed, whatever. And David is looking at a magazine with the advertisement for the game system. And he wants to hack into Proto vision so he can play the games before anybody else.

Yes.

Because what is hacking about? Knowing shit the other hackers don't. Yes. Gaining knowledge before anybody else.

Yeah.

By the way, it's, it's, it's the great place where hackerdom and geekdom, you know, sort of, sort of coincide, which is the, I saw the sneak preview for this. Here's my review. You know, and I think you know a little bit about that. And with hackerdom, it's like, I got to play the video game before you did. You know?

So yeah. And the pure simplicity of his motivation. And so we've established that his ability, in terms of being about hacking the school computer, then we get the escalation of that.

Not yet, but no, no, no, no. First of all, you're taking over the plot. Sorry, sorry. That's my job. That's my job. That's my job. But the other thing is, then the movie digresses for approximately 60 seconds. David's father bites into the corn his mother has made and makes a comment about how it's raw.

Oh my God.

The corn. The mom says, can't you just taste the vitamin A? The father is like, can I just take a pill and eat my corn cooked? You wonder, the pacing is, the movie doesn't feel loose, but the pacing is deliberate. I love that they stopped to do this because I love his parents, even though they're dorks.

So the parents, also that the film takes the time to showcase the dad's method of buttering his corn on the cob, which is ingenious, and if tedious, which is first to meticulously, generously butter a slice of white bread.

Yes.

Then to embrace the corn on the cob.

With the bread.

With the bread, like a hot dog or a, you know, and then just lovingly roll the corn cob back and forth in the buttered bread to get it perfectly glazed in butter throughout. It's just wonderful.

And it is those little moments that establish a world that you want to be in and that you don't want to see destroyed, even if they're dorks.

Yes. And I am reminded of this dynamic and characterization of these tediously banal parents and their dynamic that you feel like there's a whole other side story in movie about just the sheer mediocrity of their existence. Yes. Reminded me a little bit of Heather's, I'm sorry, Veronica's parents in Heather's.

They are characters from an Albert Brooks movie that's going on in The Next House.

Yes.

You know, Albert Brooks lives in The Next House and these two people are like his neighbors who are annoying.

Yeah. But it's just a little glimpses of the fact of like, oh, how did David come from them? He's a reaction, a response against them. But it's very charming, like many things in the film.

Now comes the escalation you're talking about. Jennifer and David meet again, and they chat a little bit, and Jennifer has kind of changed her mind about her grade, and David lets her know that he's, well, he doesn't let her know. He kind of brings her back into his house. And then once she's in his lair, because David uses hacking as game, he lets her know he's already done it. She's okay with it.

And he's moved on to something else.

Yeah. And then she sees his computer where he has a program that uses a very large floppy disk that is auto-dialing every area code in Sunnyvale trying to find a computer that will respond with an acoustic modem tone to his computer so that he can identify it as the Proto Vision computer to hack in. It's Paul, this is what hacking I love was about. And I know you're going to have a big thing, a big thing about it. But I mean, when you compare this, when you compare this to the hacking and say hackers or swordfish or any or Jurassic Park, this feels like phone freak culture from the 70s and 80s. And it also feels like it's accurate, you know, like I buy it, you know? And from what I know about phone freaking and that culture, it does feel like, yes, it's heightened, but it feels like that kind of methodical, almost tedious way of breaking into shit.

It is a simplified, you know, movified version of it. But the attention to detail and the thought, again, I love a good procedural, the nitty gritty of, ooh, how does this work? And that he knows how to do these things. And that concept of the auto-dialer, and then the so many, and he's just calling literally everybody that has a phone number. So most of them are live, people are wrong. But then he gets some connections to the wrong companies.

Yes.

But he takes advantage of one as an example, and as a vehicle of flirtation to Jennifer.

He winds up getting a printout of games that he cannot bust into. He gets into Pan Am, he makes a reservation for Paris.

Yes.

Right. And he doesn't get her in a car. They're going to walk. It's fine. He's impressing her with how he can kind of get into things. He gets into a travel agency. Yes. Brad, what were you going to say?

They had a whole bunch of computer experts on set who were telling John Badham that he was doing a lot of shortcuts. It doesn't work this way. And what he said was, we're not doing that. Audiences will have left the theater by the time he logs into the computer one time.

Exactly.

But here's the important thing about this. OK. And this is the magic trick that Matthew Broderick as an actor and John Badham as a director do so masterfully in this movie, is that there's a scene in this movie where Matthew Broderick is locked in a room, and it takes him about 52 minutes to get out, and it's played out in real time, OK? It's much later in the movie. This movie makes you enjoy watching Matthew Broderick think. Yeah. And that's so that is such a magic trick. I don't know how they pull it off because it's nothing particularly interesting. It's not a montage where, you know, the equations are floating on his head or anything. You're just watching this kid kind of solve a problem. You don't even know what problem he's solving half the time. Yeah, but it's fun to watch him. And I think, and by the way, you mentioned Ferris Bueller earlier. And I want to say two things. One of them, Ferris Bueller has grown in my esteem as one of the most disgustingly sociopathic valentines to white people entitlement ever. I think that character ruined Matthew Broderick. I think this character is a naturalistic form of acting that I think Matthew Broderick sort of left behind later in his career. And just watching him be so raw and pure is wonderful.

Yes. I don't disagree. Even if I might have framed it in more diplomatic terms.

Sociopathic? It doesn't seem diplomatic to me.

Again, I don't disagree. But yes, Broderick gained success and reward from a showier performances.

Yes.

And the more subtle, understated, humanist, more grounded portrayal here I think is really endearing. And yeah, and that isn't a very interesting question about had he gotten equivalent reward or reversal, how would that have maybe affected his perception by the industry and by audiences in terms of how he was used going forward or not? It's a very interesting question.

I don't know if I said this before, so forgive me. John Badham directed Saturday Night Fever, right? And everybody remembers from Saturday Night Fever is the disco scenes, right? The very showy, flashy disco scenes. And most people remember from this movie, the finale. They remember, shall we play a game? You know, they remember that stuff. But, you know, Saturday Night Fever was a slice of life. You know, it was about trying to get out of the neighborhood. And this movie feels very much like a slice of life. And I feel like this is a really interesting set of choices that Badham made in terms of how this movie, I feel like he stays out of the movies way so much and lets the script breathe. And I just adore that.

A slice of suburban life at the dawn of computer culture. Or cell culture. And again, the backdrop of this Cold War.

And as great as ET was at giving us this, ET gave a much more stylized, and even in its messiness, much more fantasized version of this, much more archetypal version of this. This feels to me a lot more like, I can't say documentary style because I haven't really shot that way, you know? But it just feels like a kind of dirtier, more lived in version of it. You know, in a way that I actually found really, really endearing. I'm not going to say more or less, but just endearing. Yeah.

And he wasn't the original director. He replaced Martin Brest, who had been shooting for a week.

Is that right? Martin Brest, who directed Scent of a Woman and, you know, famously Gilly and Meet Joe Black.

He fought with the producers because he made changes and he made the script darker, more paranoid, more of a thriller. And Badum came in and looked at it and said, I know it's wrong. It's missing the fun.

Yeah.

Yeah. And he said the characters need to have fun.

Yeah. Yeah.

You need to love these characters. This, you know, this I see it, I see it being a paranoid thriller, but it's not it's not the movie I would have wanted to see out of this. You know, that the paranoid thriller version of this feels like a movie Marshall Brickman directed, I think, two years later, called The Manhattan Project, you know, which was the movie about the kid who builds the atom bomb at home. This movie is much more rewarding and satisfying, you know. But anyway, so in this printout, David gets a name of a couple of games and he goes to meet his hacker mentors, who are these two guys.

So just to clarify, his autodialer has hit upon a mystery computer.

With a game listing.

Yeah, that he surmises must be the Proto Vision mainframe. But he is unable to penetrate it. So he seeks expert aid of an elder hacker in the form of...

The great Maury Chakin.

Maury Chakin.

By the way, he's so young, I didn't even know who he was.

My God, I am a big Nero Wolfe fan. So I've seen all of Maury Chakin's Nero Wolfe. He's, of course, been great in many things.

Yes. He's one of the great character actors. He's just one of the great hit side guys.

Tremendous. Almost broke my brain to see him this young. It just seems wrong that there ever was a young Maury Chakin.

He should have been 65 at birth, right?

Yeah. Just one of those actors. He's like a grad student here or something.

It's wild. So he plays a very, very overthinking, quiet, twitchy nerd, and then the 80s nerd. I mean, this guy was the nerd. The archetype was the nerd in the Grease movies.

Yes.

We talked about him a lot, and I don't remember the actor's name. He's playing the really-

Eddie Deason.

The Eddie Deason. You know, like, I mean, look.

You want to quote from him what he said?

Please.

He said, Pauline Kael said that I was the first computer nerd of film, and since then, nobody has ever challenged me.

Yeah. He kind of owned, he owned that territory for a while.

And God bless him.

I mean, honestly, like, yeah, unfortunately, I think that it's his performance in this movie is very over the top. Well, and it created a stereotype that that proved anyway, whereas whereas actually the Maury Chaykin nerd is far more like a lot of the computer guys. Yes. Yes. Very thoughtful, very like more layered, kind of imperious.

Yes. But also but also very internal, like he's in his own head. He's sweating something in his own head. And I get the sense he's thinking about eight other things at the same time, like he's multitasking internally. Yes. But he but he has my favorite line delivery in the movie, which we're not going to do. We're not going to do a tape of it. Do you want to say it or shall I? Paul, I'll give it to you. Eddie Deason is being is being just annoying. And he turns him and goes, Mr. Potato Head, Mr. Potato Head. Anyway, what Maury Chaykin's character says is, here's how you figure this out. It's a back door. The person who designed the system probably put in a back door. I put them in all my systems. And it's a simple password that comes in that no one else knows but the designer. And he says, the best way to find out what the back door is, is to get to know as much as you can about the designer. And what's really interesting is, then Eddie Deason's character gets his little redemption, you know, because every character gets a redemption in this film. And he says, I already figured it out. It's the first game. You have to go through Falcon's Maze. And at that moment, I'm like, you know, he's okay.

Yes, because the list of games that is displayed from this mainframe server, whatever, are all generic games.

Yes.

Until it gets to things like Biological Warfare and Guerrilla-like Warfare and really dark stuff, it escalates to that. But the only one that is not a generic sounding game is this Falcon's Maze, which is the first one listed. And so that's the clue that they say, oh, that actually is a game that was created by this computer scientist programmer named Falcon. And that sends David on our second act montage. Yes.

Right. And I love this because, again, so much of hacking is research. And yes, the research methods in this are primitive. He uses a microfiche reader, which, god, I miss microfiche so much. What a beautiful...

A card catalog.

Oh, the card catalog!

I miss that! I love it so much! Print magazines.

Print magazines. And what it does is, I mean, look.

Dot matrix printers.

Oh, oh, please. Look, this movie made me very nostalgic in a lot of ways. One of them was that... One of them was that the relationships... And I'll just say this now. It's a point I wanted to make later. But one of the things I love about... One of the things that made me nostalgic about this movie is not, oh, childhood was more innocent back then or less innocent or more this or more that. It was childhood was not as mediated by technology then. You know, childhood technology was not implanted on us at birth and then been a part of our lives, our entire thing. It was something that people chose to be involved with, something that people chose to engage with, and these characters have richer inner lives for us because they're not living their emotional lives outwardly on the web and social media and all of that. And seeing these primitive modes of research just made me really appreciate the idea of a more analog life and of a life where you are more free to make up your mind about things because you have to look, you have to find things in a much more deliberate manner. Paul, hit me. You got this look like you want to get in there. Let's do it.

I mean, I can hear many of our younger listeners if they actually exist kind of rolling their eyes. Maybe.

I mean, you know what, maybe.

At our analog nostalgia, but yeah, it's a period piece at this point.

It really is.

I love these little bits of texture.

But it also made me think of this. We now live in an era in the last 150 years in which period pieces are not plays that were written where you have to go research what the people were. That history is there for us to see. You can go live in that time in a way that you can't go live in the time of Richard III. You can only understand Richard III through the eyes of a director. You know, whatever. Whereas like even in something that's as constructed as this, that world is just there to be seen.

Yeah.

And it's gone.

It's gone. All these CRT screens and all these other artifacts of this age will never see them again.

But what I love is that even though the pace of this film is so deliberate and the plotting is so also deliberate and a little bit shaggy, the film keeps you delighted. It keeps you involved with character. It keeps you in these long scenes and you're just sort of enjoying it. And that is a type of ride that I don't think we see very much.

Also, because it's driven by character, because David at this point is a study in obsession. He is fixated on this very particular goal, this white whale, and he is so close he can taste it. And he will not stop. He has this relentless just focus, even to the point of missing a week of school. Yeah.

And then he finds a videotape that shows the person who designed this computer and the person who the Falcon of Falcon's Maze, and that is, of course, Brian Ferry. Yeah. I mean, Paul, I'm glad that you just nodded and smiled because I don't want to be, I don't want to have an argument about John Wood's uncanny resemblance to the lead singer of Roxy music, Brian Ferry. Am I right?

The illusion is only punctured when, spoiler, if you don't know by now, all of our podcasts are spoilers wall to wall.

Of course.

When we finally meet him and he speaks.

Of course.

And does not sing, which would be amazing. Like that would be amazing. But yeah, we get after many false login attempts that do not dissuade David.

But wait, you learn two things. One of them is Falcon is dead.

Yes.

Falcon died soon after his son Joshua died. This is very important.

And in a car crash.

And then he died. And also one of the things I love is when Ali Shidi, first of all, the video tape machine was one of the top loading with the big toggle analog switches, which was the first VCR all of our families had.

Yes. But then they do some math and there is such a painful comment from. Well, what is it?

Oh, but before she says that, she said, Oh my God, he's amazing looking. And I thought that's really interesting that she finds him just compelling that way, because that actor's face, John Wood is the actor and Stephen Falcon is. We're going to get into just how much I love that character and what he meant to me in childhood. But I just like that.

Then we get. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Then we get this line, which I believe we have. He's dead?

Yeah.

Here, look, here's his obituary.

It wasn't very old.

Well, he was pretty old.

It was 41.

Oh, yeah?

Oh, that's old.

Oh, God.

Ow, ow, ow. 41, that's real old. Oh, insult to insult to insult. It's not even, it's like injury to injury to insult to, oh, Ali Shidi thinks we're geezers.

Oh. Well, but let's just, to clarify, 41 in 1982. That's true. So, you know, not, not, but, but you want to have better food and gyms.

And this is why we had these Olympian physiques, right?

Still.

And these great looks.

So, but anyway, so they do this. I'll let you take this, but they do the tech report to connect the dots. He's been trying to find this back door, all these failed attempts. And what do they figure out, Javi?

What do you mean, what do they figure out? Well, they get in and they start.

How?

Oh, they get in because, and it's actually kind of a shitty back door because it's not as, as, oh, oh, is it shitty, shitty, which is really interesting because it's sort of like there's a dichotomy here between male and female thinking that the film kind of makes, which is stereotypical, but kind of endearing as a character point. Allie Sheedy is the one who goes, you know, because because Matthew Broderick is trying like all these other things about Falcon and all that. And she goes, what was the name of his kid? And he goes, Joshua. And then that turns out to be the password.

But but it's not the password. It is the login.

The login. Yes, yes. And then you described this, Paul. I don't fucking remember any of this.

But there's no password. There's no password. The login is a password.

What's the back door? No one's supposed to know it, Paul.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is bullshit. This is bullshit. No system of this magnitude and security and, and stakes and clearance and all these things would have a six-letter code to just get full unfettered control of it. That is madness and that is so-

Paul.

No.

Paul, did you have this thought in 1983?

Yes. Yes.

Really?

Because if you log on any dial-up thing, you need two things. You need a, everyone knows this. You need two things.

I didn't. I didn't either.

You need your login ID and you need a password. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows this. This movie does not know that and I'm like screaming at this-

I've just gotten, I've just been told that we have, we have a call on the Red Courtesy phone and it's the NITs. The NITs are worried about the crime against NIT-dom that you're committing right now. They just, they just stop the picking. They're like, this is not a NIT.

This is not a NIT.

Vladimir, stop.

This is not a NIT. This is funny. If you are going to make a movie about hacking. I mean, this is like saying, oh, I'm going to make a movie, a show about cooking, but I'm going to neglect to ever turn the other on.

Oh my God. Do you hear that sound?

It's like the sound.

It's the sound of the brakes on the fun train.

But how much more fun would it have been if they had to like the cruciform key in Mission Impossible, have to find these two things, the ID, login, and a password?

Paul, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, you've just made my point for me, which is a really interesting point that I was going to bring up later in the film as you see.

It would be a longer movie.

No, it's got nothing to do with that. It's funny that you should bring up. What I love about this movie is that once the computer gets started playing the game, and that's the scene we see now. I'm going to bring this point up later, but I want to kiss it now because you brought up Mission Impossible. Mission Impossible is a 2.5-hour movie about Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, and I reckon that you reckon...

Oh, they're both longer than that. A lot of reckoning.

The threat of the AI is so overblown, it's so melodramatic, it's such an operatic treatment of this personalized AI as if it is just a Bondian, Vagnerian villain. It's like if Jim Steinman were a screenwriter, he would have written these movies, right? What I love about this movie is how once the plot kicks in, the computer, the AI, it's... I mean, we have to call it an AI because that's what it is, but the AI works so subtly, and the AI is just doing its thing, and the tension builds gradually, quietly, sometimes almost without score, and without any of all of the stuff that's going on in that, and there's no cruciform key, there's no... And it's so beautiful because it is literally driving a point home that this is quotidian life, and an AI is doing this while people are chewing tobacco, smoking cigarettes, watching Captain Kangaroo, whatever. And I love that in 90 minutes, this movie does everything, except for the action scenes, obviously, because, you know... But...

It's just shy of two hours. It feels like 90 minutes, though.

Because even though it's lived in, it feels tight. I just love that about this movie. And there's a point to be made about this kind of filmmaking and how it's been pushed out by a filmmaking that is so adrenalized and such zap the rat kind of entertainment, you know? I don't think this movie could exist today.

You know? It would be wildly different.

It would have truck chases. It would have Matthew Broderick's character suddenly knowing Tae Kwon Do and Hap Kido and Jeet Kune Do because, you know, it would suddenly like...

Or if not him, Jennifer. Because he has the brains, he has the hacking skills. So she would have like martial arts skills.

And they would wind up dangling from the back of a C138 plane while David is trying to hack on an iPhone to get the plane to land remote. And it's bullshit. And this feels like, oh, I buy this, you know? Anyway.

Yes, I buy it with a password. But moving on.

So David and Jennifer play Global Thermonuclear War.

And while they're sipping, and while they're sipping, because the computer asks them if they'd like to play a game. And so, of course, what do they choose? What is David?

Global Thermonuclear War.

The one that sounds most exciting.

And the computer wants to play a nice game of chess. How about a good game of chess? But he goes, no, let's play Global Thermonuclear War. And the computer obliges.

Again, thinking that this is the yet to be released Prodivision gaming system. Oh my God, of course, that sounds like the most exciting game. It hasn't even been announced.

Forget it, Jake, it's Prodivision. So, now, I love this part of this movie, because while they're drinking Tab, first of all, which was the diet, because there was no Diet Coke in 1983. There was no Aspartame. You had a special soda that had the highly carcinogenic saccharin in it, that only your mom could drink, because, frankly, her life was kind of over anyway. Because it was just Tab and Valium for her, it's fine. But, so anyway...

Suddenly got so dark, right?

But anyway, while this is going on, you're cutting back to NORAD, where again...

This is very effective intercutting, this whole sequence.

Yes, and in a very workman-like procedural way, it's not overblown, the score is barely there, they start getting printouts of shit happening. Suddenly the screens light up and there's missiles coming toward them and all the stuff is happening and it does ramp up that you finally see in the big screen the missile sort of coming in from Russia, right?

Well, because they have to make a choice, first of all, of what side do they want to play.

And they choose the Soviets.

And so David chooses to play as the Soviet Union.

And the first place they're going to nuke is...

Vegas, baby, Vegas.

And then their hometown of Seattle.

And I love, by the way...

Which is crazy.

The best callback in this movie is later when Professor Falcon says, I liked how you chose to nuke Las Vegas first. It was a suitably biblical ending to the place.

Yeah, that's a nice payoff to that setup. But I also want to ask you a cool question, because this ties in to three episodes ago. Javi, what is the code name that Norad is...

The Crystal Palace. What's happening?

I don't know what's happening. The Crystal Palace.

What's happening? What's happening? I don't know what's happening. What am I missing? Paul, I have...

The Crystal. The Crystal Calls.

The Crystal Calls. Oh.

Whopper is the Dark Crystal. Whopper is the Dark Crystal that is missing a shard...

Oh, my God, Becky. Wow...

.of a lesson that David is on a quest to go get and insert into the Crystal to make it whole to save the world. Javi, WarGames is a remake of the Dark Crystal.

Paul, I love your guts. That is phenomenal.

I can't believe I'm telling you this.

I'm going to dine out on this forever. I love it. But speaking of dining, what stops the Armageddon? Literally, NORAD is about to go to DEFCON 2. They're going to scramble the bombers, the subs are going to go out, the missile silos are going to open. But then David's parents get really pissed off because he threw some of the garbage wrong. Then they tell him that- He didn't secure the lid from the dog. The raccoons ate the garbage. The dog. It's the dog. I thought it was raccoons. It was raccoons. No, Bo would never eat the garbage. It's the raccoons. I know this because my kid's pet rabbit was attacked by raccoons and I had a Vietnam flashback to that. But also, what stopped-

I was attacked by a raccoon in the garage at the home of an aforementioned Oscar-winning director.

A raccoon. There was that-

I'm not going down that tangent right now. Just play with that in your mind. Yes, I thought you were going to say the meal or the dining that wasn't going to occur was Barry Corbin with his large bag of chewing tobacco. Because this man goes through a whole lot of chewing tobacco.

But again, I don't think that a modern movie would give him that quirk. And again, I think that that juxtaposition of quotidian, everyday existence with the stakes that are happening- like this is just a dude who went into work today and he's bossing people around and-

His teeth are so brown.

Oh yeah, there's some gross shots of his teeth.

But I'm okay with that because it makes it real, you know?

But wait, wait, wait. Yeah, so he scrambles the bombers. And meanwhile, yeah, David's called to the window because of the goddamn garden.

His parents are going to make barbecue. So do you want your little friend to visit? So he has to stop the game. And that's how the apocalypse literally barbecue stops the apocalypse. It's the barbecue of redemption. And by the way, yes, I kind of love David's parents for even though they even though they embarrassed him by saying, Your little friend can stay for dinner.

They kind of say, Yeah, yeah, because suddenly, yeah. So he has to he just turns off his right, his PC. And then immediately the whole NORAD tracking goes down. But here's a moment. And I I refrained from commenting on it earlier. And you alluded to it. But I have a note here among many times I have this note. Dear God, the score is awful. I cannot stand the score in this.

The only I think the only reason I can stand it is that it's used so sparingly and it seldom shows up in a lot of the climaxes played without it.

That was not my experience. I think this film, I'll go so far as to say. I think this film would be more widely remembered and richly embraced as a classic if it had had a great score. I think the score comes perilously close to ruining the film.

I'd like to say two things about that.

No offense to Arthur Rubenstein, who's very talented, but it gets so, it plays so cartoony at times, so overdone and absurd and ridiculous and plays against moments that, you mentioned the West Wing earlier. And even the West Wing, it gets, you know, bombastic, broad in its scoring and dramatic, but it can really make you feel. The Snuffy Walden's score can draw you in and connect you, but I found this score taking me out of the movie repeatedly by calling too much attention to itself by being too over the top and ridiculous, instead of underlining moments of drama and tension and realism to make us feel like, oh, this is real instead of like, oh, this is a-

Paul, you have just given me what people in recovery refer to as a moment of clarity. And I'm being serious, actually. Now I realize who's directing this reminds me of and what I would have done with the score. The movie this reminds me of is actually Sidney Lumet's Network, because it is not shot documentary style, but it's shot where you are there. And also, because that film had no score. And I think if this film had had no score, it might have actually been much more, if it had only had score at the very climax, and it had been played sort of more documentary style, I think this movie might even be more effective. I don't think this movie would work with a big John Williams score. I don't know, I don't imagine that.

But a good spy thriller espionage, like understated score, that was kind of evocative and cool. Like, I don't know, I just think, but yeah, having marveled at the pit this television season, I don't disagree that I think this could be very effective without a score. But I do feel the score is the worst thing in this film. And I think that it holds it back from being a truly great film. And that frustrates me so much because this film deserves a great score and it feels so misaligned with the tone that Badam's going for. And I'm just, I don't understand how that happened. It's, yeah, anyway, that's my one vexation of the film. Beyond the password.

So Paul, one of the things, what follows is one of my favorite moments in this movie. And it's when, first of all, David and his family hear about the botched Armageddon in the news. But by the way, there's like maybe two other stories about other shit going on. It's not one of those things where you turn on the TV and the news is immediately the thing it's supposed to be.

This is so well done. I'm so glad that you were spotlighting this moment. Yeah. Because I love, again, the narrative efficiency of this, of stacking the news report of that, oh yeah, this, they actually were affecting the real world and caused a near like nuclear catastrophe underneath this other scene, in the background of this other scene, because what's arrived in the mail, his report card and, oh, the parents are happy and pleasantly surprised that he has passed all this class.

That's right. And in the background, David is, you know, the parents are being very-

Yeah. And in the background, David is like, what is that on the TV? Talking about that there was this like-

Did Ted Koppel just say that I almost caused the Armageddon? What the hell?

There was a nuclear false alarm.

I love the next scene because this is the part that makes me think these are kids. You know, David is on the phone with Jennifer and he's like, I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm so screwed. And the performance is so real and I love it.

And the contrast in terms of the two of them, again, as mentioned before, that he is kind of-

He's twitchy, yeah, he's twitchy.

And she is just kind of like, oh, can I tell my friend?

That we almost caused the alarm. And he's like, no. And he's like, they're going to come take me away. And she's like, dude, just throw out all the printouts, get rid of everything, it's all going to be fine.

Yeah. Yeah. She keeps her head and she's just like, will both act normal? Everything's going to be fine. Like, she's totally unblazed, unbothered.

And then arguably, this is the moment when the movie kicks into, like, this is the second stage rocket of the movie because he hangs up with Jennifer, and then the phone rings and it's Joshua. And we're going to call the AI Joshua from now on. And it's Joshua saying, greetings, Professor Falcon. You have not finished the game.

And again, we are dialing deeper into the genre element.

But slowly, slowly, gently.

Slowly, slowly. And again, it's a moment where I'm crying out for like a really juicy, good, like score that could that could emphasize the I don't I don't even remember whether the scene was scored.

I just remember his face and Broderick's reactions telling the whole thing.

Yes, but it's a it's a very good scene. And it's like, yeah, he's trying to gather all these evidence, print out to cover strikes in vain. And yeah, his phone rigs and it's it's the tone. It's the and he and it's played.

So matter of fact, that it's almost more terrifying than if, like if Martin Scorsese had been directing this movie, you know, there would have been a big zoom into the screen and then a big zoom into the door knock as he as he closes the door and turns the lock and that. And literally is just the phone comes in and he sells it, you know?

And we have to there's an unavoidable parallel to be drawn with how.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, obviously, in terms of the dispassionate detachment of Joshua, who is given voice, but it's a it's a it's a computer voice.

It's a very Stephen Hawking kind of voice. I mean, it's very like, yeah.

Yeah. But it but it's very effective and and chilling. And yeah, I like it. And again, he David hangs up, tries to disconnect, is trying to like get out of it. And then he keeps calling back. Finally has to disconnect the phone. And then he's like hugging and clinging to the phone to his. Oh, yeah, he disconnects like a teddy bear, like a teddy bear.

I mean, the best, the best visual effect in this movie is the human face. And I love that about this movie. And and you know, so so David, you know, he's panicked, you know, and he's and he's kind of twitchy the next day. He's coming out of a 7-Eleven.

And of course, the thing I should specify, though, because there's another important point in the escalation.

Oh, this is the thing I want to say. Oh, I'm sorry. One of my notes later on in this movie is every scene in this film is escalated so masterfully.

Yes, because well, the exchange between David and Joshua, when he effectively gets to the point of what is the primary goal, like that, you know, this that what's first revealed is that the simulation has not ended. It was interrupted, it was suspended, whatever, but the clock is ticking. So we first get our awareness of a ticking clock.

Yes, this is where the ticking clock enters the movie.

Where there are 52 hours before the simulation is going to complete toward the primary goal of...

Of winning the game, of global thermonuclear war.

And yeah, and that's the question David poses, is what is the primary goal? And Joshua very coolly responds to win...

To win the game.

The game, and that's terrifying. Because it seems that Joshua does not know...

Joshua seems to... Sorry, Joshua does not only not know the difference between reality and the game it's playing. Joshua also thinks that this is a winnable game, which is the entirety of our Cold War... The entirety of our Cold War paranoia during this time, for those of you who were not alive during the nuclear age, was the two... Russia and the United States are at détente. We all have enough firepower to kill everybody. There is no version of a nuclear exchange that doesn't leave the world a cinder, but we're still doing this. And that's the insanity that the Pentagon, people like Curtis LeMay thought that you could win this with nuclear weapons. Yeah.

Mutually assured disruption.

But they didn't even know that. I mean, LeMay actually thought that you could bomb Russia and you'd be fine, you know?

There are still plenty of people in power who don't believe in climate change. Like, yeah, that's the unfortunate reality of our stupid humans. But yeah, the next scene is one of my favorite scenes for its utter efficiency.

Paul is walk- Paul, no, you're Paul. David is walking out of a 7-Eleven. A suspiciously- not suspiciously, but a suspiciously normal man walks out behind him. Then a couple more suspiciously normal people get there and then he gets arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and thrown into a van. They're reading him as Miranda rights.

Done. In one scene. In one scene. Here's what I love about this. In any other number of movies, you would have this whole extended cat and mouse manhunt for David from the FBI. It is established previously that they disconnected the line during the simulation too soon to trace the call, but they narrowed it down to the Seattle area. So that's all the feds know. Somehow they've then tracked it down to David. We don't need to know. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But the fact that we just very quickly keep things moving, they've tracked him down, we don't need to know all the where, how and why and whatever. It doesn't matter. They nab him, they put him in a fricking van.

And by the way, in a modern movie, this is where you find out, not even a modern movie. In John Badham's, one of one of his next few movies, Blue Thunder, right? In a more modern movie, in a movie maybe even three years later, because there's a part in Blue Thunder where you learn that Roy Scheider's girlfriend somehow is a crack stunt driver, right? In a more modern movie, this is where you find out that David is a crack stunt driver and he jumps into a convertible and hotwires it and leads the FBI on a chase.

He doesn't make a run for it. We don't get any of this other stuff. It's just, he comes out of 7-Eleven.

Yep. And if you ever want to see how a nervous nerd walks, just watch Broderick's performance in this. It's the thing of physical beauty. And so he gets taken to NORAD. And one of the people who've arrested him, one of the FBI agents in charge of the case, is the great Michael Tolkien. Not the Michael Tolkien, who wrote the player and directed the rapture of Michael Tolkien, who viewers our age will recognize as the guy who said, hello. No, he's not. No, he's not Hello McFly. That's Biff Tannen. He's the guy who tells Tom Cruise, you're letting your mouth right checks. Your body can't cash. And Top Gun, he was the principal in Oh, yeah. His note is slacker, slacker.

He is iconically good at being a an iconically bald.

And he is and he is a man who has made your life and mine much better by sheer dint of existing. But anyway, so we go to so David, David is taken to NORAD, McKittrick thinking that he is some great interrogator, insists on interrogating David personally.

There is a very important character beat on his way there.

What is it?

There's a NORAD like visitor tour happening. Yeah, there's no sense after they've had this nuclear scare that they would just, oh yeah, still like letting, doing tours in NORAD.

What's the next day? It's been a day and a half. It's been a couple of days.

It's a little crazy.

They're back to normal.

But then I'm just calling him Dabney Coleman. He is then heading to meet with the NSA people, all the whatever people who are coming and briefing on David's hack. But he does not chew tobacco. He is chewing gum. Javi, what does he do with that gum and where does it go?

I don't remember at all.

Javi, he hands his gum to his female assistant, who then puts it in her mouth.

I have blocked this from memory because this is the most terrifying thing I've ever heard.

It is so insane. It is completely insane.

Oh, by the way, though, but by the way, you know why he's chewing gum? Because he's quitting smoking because when the shit goes down, he's lighting cigarettes left and right.

Nicotine gum, maybe.

I don't think it's nicotine gum. I think it's just bubbly. They didn't have nicotine gum back then.

I don't know if they did or maybe just played gum.

It's why they had Big League chew and stuff like that, was to get you off tobacco.

But that single beat opens up such terrifying doors of possibilities of this relationship between the two of them.

But again, as horrifying as it is, it is what I call a wide open space. Every character beat in this movie opens up a little window to the possibility that these characters are living in some other movie. There's a James L. Brooks workplace drama where this secretary, and she is a secretary, I'm sorry, is she an assistant or a secretary? She's kind of a secretary. In the 80s, they would have called her a secretary. She's actually much more than that. She's actually quite competent. But there's a James L. Brooks movie that these two are living in where they have their own little relationship that is not a romance, but it could be, but it's not, but she's so good at her job, but she's not getting promoted, blah, blah, blah. It's just like we said about the parents, that they're the annoying next door neighbors in an Albert Brooks movie next door. Every little character beat opens up your mind to something else that might be happening with these characters, and that's what makes them endearing. And it's great. So now Dabney Coleman, this is one of my favorite exchanges in the movie because Dabney Coleman is trying to prove that David is working with the Russians, or he's working with somebody.

He is clinging to his arrogance because he cannot imagine the possibility, dare admit such possibility, that some random teenage hacker could have done this on his own.

Exactly.

He had to be working with this vast network of high level enemy antagonists.

And in one of the great callbacks in this movie, he says, you had tickets to Paris for two. Who was the other person? Because Dabney Coleman is assuming that that was a perk of it. The Russians were working him and that was one of the perks they gave him, or maybe he's trying to escape the apocalypse, who knows? So even though the movie plays very deliberately, the interlocks are very, very specific and they fit so well. And then David gives this whole story, I'm just trying to play these games, blah, blah, blah. And Dabney Coleman says, then, why don't I believe you? Which I love that line and I love his delivery.

He's so... Coleman's character is so determined to be right in the space and will not accept any evidence that challenges his worldview and assumptions. There's also a very important revelation in their exchange as Coleman is escorting him through NORAD, which is like, why are you showing him everything, including the computer room? It's just to show off the sets, I get it. And then takes him to his office. Yes, because he's that arrogant, because he thinks he can get to interrogate him and thinking, oh, he's got him. But on the way reveals that he used to be Falcon's assistant.

Yes. Yes. Which, by the way, but it's also great because that's how you understand Coleman's character. This is a guy who's been second best his whole life.

Yeah.

And he is trying to prove that, oh, he's now in charge, he can take over and he is master of the system.

He's like one of those jerks that used to hang out with Ayn Rand. There's Nathaniel Brandon, who was her twin intellectual heir, and then he got disgraced, and then Leonard Peikoff came in, and the guy's a champ. I'm sorry to objectivism, but he is forever just doomed to be second fiddle to Falcon, and that's where his arrogance comes from. It's wonderful.

And he refuses to believe when Joshua is saying, no, because he can't believe, okay, after this happened, you saw the news, why did you do it again? And he's like, I didn't do it again. Joshua called me, and he's like, he refuses to believe this.

And that's the thing, when they're taking David away to be in prison or whatever the fuck it is they're going to do with him, to hand him to Tolkien, to the FBI, David is yelling, Joshua is still playing the game, he's trying to start a war because he goes into the pet computer, and it's not a pet computer, but he goes into the computer in Dabney Coleman's office, talks to Joshua again.

And how is he able to do that?

I can't remember.

Because frickin arrogant Dabney Coleman leaves him alone in his own office.

That's right. And just tells the assistant to keep an eye on him from behind the glass.

Yeah, from across the whatever, which is so insane. With an active computer terminal, he leaves the hacker there, and at first you think, oh, maybe they've laid a trap for David. Maybe this is like, no, no. But yeah, David goes in, uses the same back door, implausibly, and converses with Joshua. And yeah, and then he gets...

He's getting whisked away by the FBI, having just learned that there's only 30 hours.

But he also finds a classified address for Falcon, of where he may now be hidden and actually maybe...

And he remembers enough about it that he'll get there later.

Alive. And actually, here's the point when he discovers that Joshua does not know the difference between what's a game and what's real. And so a further escalation.

Giving those the trailer moment when the FBI is dragging him away through the war room.

Yes, and no one will listen to him.

And he's yelling, yeah, and he's yelling, you don't understand. It still thinks it's playing the game. It's gonna start a war.

Yeah.

And of course, no one is going to listen to him, even though you think this is maybe the one person they really should listen to.

And by the way, yeah, and this is one of those moments in the movie where it does kind of start straining credulity a little bit. And I think that the the credulity bridge in this movie, especially in the last 20 minutes, gets a little bit janky. But I don't care.

It's a movie. It's fun.

Yeah. At this point, at this point, you're either on the fun train or you're not. And if you're not on the fun train, you're a communist. Anyway. So anyway. So now comes that scene I talked about where David is trapped in this dispensary room, right? And he uses, he finds a micro cassette recorder, a couple forceps, a couple of things. And at the same time, we're seeing a classic scene of 1980 sexual harassment.

Yes.

And we learn a lesson in the scene that we should have learned in Hal Needham's Megaforce, which is never trust a man who wears a dickie. Because the security guard is wearing this dickie and a beret, and he is sexually harassing the assistant who's sitting there, you know, just trying to do her work. I mean, and the guy who's supposed to be guarding Matthew Broderick is like, so, do I have to hit, if I hit the right keys in this computer, am I going to get the answer I want? And you're just like, oh, God, this is like, yeah, this is a Me Too, we're literally watching a Me Too moment, which is fine because you're not supposed to like the guy, but it's really awesome.

Yeah, yeah. The dickie with a beret on top of it, I mean, that's a double whammy. You don't want to get anywhere near, but yes, if and when we ever have merch, I think we might need a bumper sticker or shirts that say, never trust a man in a dickie.

But I love this because again, this is watching Matthew Broderick think for five minutes, like literally-

Yeah, he turns MacGyver.

Yeah, but in a very credible way. He literally gets the audio cassette recorder and he uses it. He basically knocks on the door and says he wants to go to the bathroom. The guard uses the acoustic keypad to open the door. It turns out Broderick has recorded that on the microcassette recorder because back then these things worked acoustically. You had a combination of sounds that would tell your phone who to call. You had a combination of sounds that would tell your bank machine your code. So he gets the combination of sounds and then he plays it back on the microcassette recorder. He opens the door and he sneaks out while the guy is sexually harassing the assistant. Watching him do this is, it feels like something from another era of filmmaking, and yet it's kind of really compelling. And I don't know what whammy they put on me to make me enjoy watching, you know, I gotta always put the whammy on because I love that expression, Paul. That's a gift you've given to me.

It is satisfying. Again, it really is, yeah. It's a little bit, but in good fun. But yeah, the thing that's interesting, there's a good setup here where once he has cracked the keypad and been able to open the door to escape, he doesn't leave. He continues to hack the keypad door lock system, and it's not yet clear why, but it soon will be, and it's like, oh, he's really smart.

Because it's how he winds up escaping Norad, and I mean, Norad is the most safe place on earth. So how does he escape, Paul?

Yeah. Well, so he hacks it to lock the door behind him, to give himself time. So when they come for him, they think he's locked in the room and being petulant. They think he's locked in the room. Javi, and then he escapes into some tunnels, which are convenient.

The weird thing is, yeah, then we've got the shibboleth of all action cinema, air ducts big enough to crawl.

But, so then what's his name? Michael Tolkien, bald, tiny man of doom.

Slacker, slacker.

Arrives with guards to get him, because things are happening, and they can't open the door, because David has successfully hacked it locked.

He's barricaded himself in there, yeah.

They summon someone to get in the door and to re-hack the keypad. Who is that person, Javi? Did you notice?

No, you tell me.

Judge Reinhold.

No!

Yes. Judge Reinhold shows up in a cameo in two scenes. In one scene, that's cut up, and he is the guy there. Jaffa. Jaffa. And from Fast Times.

Just another fucking observer from Blue Thunder.

He's the guy who gets him back into the room. It's crazy.

Paul, this is a testament to how good this movie is, and how entertained I was by it, that I didn't notice either him or Michael Madsen. I mean, honestly, when a movie has me, it's when I'm not accruing trivia.

Yeah.

You know, and some movies do the trick of having me and still letting me do that, but this one, I was just in it. I had no idea that was him.

It's hilarious to me.

Can we do one quick correction?

Yes.

It's James Tolkien, not Michael.

Oh, yes, Michael Tolkien was the screenwriter.

Yes, he was the screenwriter, yeah. Paul, I'm going to lead some of the stuff that's happening next, because it also makes a point that I really like, you know, so.

David's escape is really clever.

David escapes, he joins the tour group, and he gets on the bus.

He's mistaken for a student.

And there's a time when a guy, like, stops him and, like, literally gives him the third degree. Hey, kid, what are you doing here? Oh, you're with the tour group. Well, stay with the tour group, motherfucker. You know, he's like. Yeah, yeah. But he gets in the bus, he goes to the tour group, and, I might add, probably gets the complimentary drink that they've offered the tour group. And one of the things I love about what's starting to happen now is that all through the next sequence, it's a back and forth cut. David is making his way. He's on a quest. He's on a quest to find Dr. Falcon.

To get the shark.

To get the shark. To find Dr. Falcon, you know. Anyway. Sorry.

Yes.

As my, Robin Williams had a joke around the same time he said the Falkland Islands war and he was like, hey, who calls a place the fucking islands? Hey, today in the fucking islands. Anyway. So he's Professor Falcon to me. Anyway.

That reminds me, do we have time for a brief tangent?

Make it brief.

I'll try to do this very quickly. So there's a great talk show moment of the great Kevin Klein on Letterman. I believe it was Letterman and he's recounting a tale of shooting overseas this movie in Paris. I forget the name of the movie, Paris Match maybe or something where he plays French Kiss. He's talking about the experience of working with a French crew in Paris. He recounts that the AD or an AD who's French is giving instructions to the extras for the scene and he says, first, the camera will fuck us and then we will shit. It does it much better than I, but that lives eternally in my mind and in the dulcet tones of Kevin Klein.

So here's what happens next and it's masterfully executed. The obstacles in this movie are the real world. David has to get from point A to point B, he hitchhikes, he gets on a phone booth.

Hacks the pay phone.

He hacks the pay phone by getting a pull tab from a can of tab that he finds. Remember in the 80s, how anywhere you went there were the pull, because it was before they figured out just to make open, open a can by going, you have to pull, actually pull a tab and then you have a separate tab.

Yeah, but then you had to discard.

Literally removable tabs in every parking lot in America were just covered with them.

And this is a real hacking trick. This is real.

Yeah, totally. You see it in Silence of the Lambs with Lector and the Wrigley Gumwrapper and whatever. He basically hacks it to the phone, calls Ali Shidi, gets her to give him, to lend him some money.

First he tries to call Falcon, try to track him down through the operator or his fake name. No dice, no dice.

So he's trying to get there. Ali Shidi shows up. I didn't tell you to show up. I said to just give me money. She shows up, it's fine.

He calls Jennifer to get him a plane ticket so he can go to the island of Oregon to try to track him down in the secret address that he got from Joshua in Coleman's office. And then Ali Shidi surprises him, shows up to help him.

The point being that literally they have to get on a ferry, they almost make it, they get on the ferry. But the tension here is there's a real world you have to traverse to get from point A to point B.

And we're outdoors.

Which by the way should be like Vampire for Matthew Broderick's character, I'm just saying. I mean for me that, I wouldn't be outdoors as much as these guys have in this movie, it's horrible. So while this is going on, you're getting these brief snippets at NORAD where like they get, their computers tell them there's a bunch of MiG fighters coming over the transom.

Bombers.

And they sent jets out and the jets can't find them. And you realize this is Joshua just suddenly leading them on because Joshua has to get to DEFCON 1 to launch the missiles. Joshua cannot launch the missiles at DEFCON 5, 4, 3 or 2. It's got to get to 1. So Joshua is slowly and subtly giving them things that keep them rising the DEFCON. He makes jets appear to appear. And then American intelligence helps us out because then a guy shows up and goes like, you know, our intelligence is telling us that the Russians have a bomber that can project it, that can make us think it's 600 miles away.

There's a mention of a stealth bomber.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is not part of popular culture awareness in 1982, yeah.

But not out of the realm of possibility, you know?

But hypothesized, yeah.

So again, it's not the entity sending you emails, telling you that Ethan Hunt killed your dad. It's literally like just slowly, subtly getting upping the stakes in a very naturalistic way, which is really terrifying because then when David and Jennifer have to hop on a ferry, and the door's closing, it actually is kind of like, well, I hope they make it.

And also, David has to convince Jennifer of what's really happening. And she's just kind of like, oh, this is fun. What's this silliness going on? Whatever. And then she finally is persuaded because he has this real moment of it's like, he feels so isolated and alone with his knowledge of impending doom. But then yeah, she does say she has faith in him, believes in him. They arrive on this island. Javi, it's Jurassic Park.

A pterodactyl flies into the frame.

We see a freaking pterodactyl flying. And I'm like, oh my God.

And it's this great character introduction because-

I have no memory of this.

It turns out that Professor Falcon is not just a computer science genius who created an AI, he's an amateur paleontologist. And his character introduction is-

RV, airplane, glider, RC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, remote control.

It's great.

It's great.

And this also establishes he has a love of flight, which enters later in the movie.

Yes.

Professor Falcon finds the kids and he is not friendly. He tells them to go away.

He's a jerk.

Yeah, he's kind of a jerk. He's like, he's like, path, gate, fairy, you know?

Yeah.

And then of course, David brings up Joshua.

Yeah.

And the greatest visual effect of all time happens in this movie, which is that John Wood, he's turned his back to them. And then he turns around to look at David. And that expression that this actor gives is a universe. It is, I mean, honestly, it's like suddenly you see every shard of this man's pain and regret and broken dreams in one glance. And it is, I honestly don't know how the actor pulled this off. It's amazing to me.

And we need one of those shards for the crystal.

Yes, we do. And what I love here is that John Falcon brings him into his home and David explains to him everything that's happening with Joshua. And Falcon pulls down a screen, queues up a 60 millimeter projector and place them a stop motion movie that looks like it was animated by Harryhausen or Willis O'Brien of dinosaurs fighting each other.

That's a whole presentation on dinosaurs.

But the crux of the presentation is such an interesting little bit of character is that you learn basically that Joshua's death turned him into a nihilist. He is so broken. And one of the reasons he left and let the government fake his death is that he not just depressed over the death of his son, but depressed over the futility of convincing humanity that nuclear war cannot be won, that nuclear war is futile. And between those two things, he just walked away. And we find out that he's okay with Joshua nuking the world because he's lost so much faith in humanity. And he gives... And producer Brad, can we have the next line in our quotes? Because this is where some of these movie quotes actually help us out a little bit. And I just want you to hear his voice and the sadness and everything. Can you give it to us?

Extinction is part of the natural order.

Well, shit!

If we're extinguished, there's nothing natural about that, it's just stupid! Oh, it's all right, I've planned ahead. We're just three miles from a primary target. A millisecond of brilliant light, and we're vaporized. Much more fortunate than the millions who wander sightless through the smoldering aftermath. We'll be spared the horror of survival.

That's chilling, and it is such a wonderful moment of the character that you realized he's willing to take the entire world down in his depression. That's how, you know, and it's wonderful.

Yeah, it's kind of like we've arrived at the island of Dr. Moreau or something. Like it's this they found this this lost creator of this AI and who has become detached from humanity and has removed himself from the continuum and the community of humanity. And then Jennifer pleads, pleads.

Yeah, she pleads for her life.

Beautifully. I'm only 17 years old. I'm not ready to die yet.

And Falcon tells her, yeah, you might get old enough to have some children of your own. And then these madmen are going to destroy us anyway.

And then see them die.

Yeah, welcome, welcome. You're welcome to spend the night in my home, sleep on the floor and he leaves.

Yeah, it's.

And then, and then do David and Jennifer MacGyver a boat so they can get through the three miles to the coast so they can go save the world? No, no, they're kids. Yeah, they sit on a rock and.

Well, they look for a boat. The last ferry is left and they leave this asshole and they try to go find a boat. But then it's like, what are they going to do recently? But yeah, they're teenagers.

And then David gives one of my favorite speeches in the film, which I call the Neurodivergence Lament. And this is textbook app to the lowest point of our characters. He says, I wish I didn't know anything about this. He literally wishes all of his genius, all of his intellect, all the stuff he values so much. He's like, I just wish I were a normal person.

I wish I was like everyone else.

Oh my God. And literally, there's two things about this that are just so touching to me. And then Ali Shidi talks about how she was going to be in an aerobics TV show, because she's like an aerobics person, because that's what we did in the 80s. Instead of cardio, you did aerobics and you put on your Jane Fonda tights and did exercises to pop music. And he says, oh my God, you're a movie star. And the conversation turned so sweet.

It was very sweet.

And how he would have watched the TV show even though she was going to be in the back row doing aerobics.

Well, and also she at one point is saying, oh, let's swim for it. Let's just try. Three miles, whatever. And then he says, I can't swim. I meant, I always meant to, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Exactly.

And then later he just say, I really wanted to learn how to swim. Like I, oh, it's so, this whole scene is really good.

And he always just thought he'd have time. And it is so, but it is also, you know, like, look, when we were kids, we were watching things like the day after on TV, you know, and we were constantly being told about the looming threat of nuclear war. And one of the things you're always wondering about is, when is it going to happen? What are we going to, you know? And it was sort of a, you know, these two speeches, the one thing that I think would be really difficult, I think, for this generation, the current, you know, the people who grew up after the Cold War, even though they have it now with climate change and still with nuclear war, but not in that cut and dry way that we had it, is just that you're constantly, we grew up, as the great Ban Queen said, beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud, you know, like, we were expecting this to happen. And this movie touches on that very touchingly.

Yeah, and it's plea for basically yearning, and again, this is coming late in the film, we're heading into the third act, but it's sort of, we finally are getting his I Want Song, which is a yearning for normality, for conformity, and for ignorance. And that he's weighed down by the burden of being different and having knowledge.

Then we find out that Professor Falcon is actually James Bond. Professor Falcon, suddenly...

A helicopter!

A helicopter, they get hit by an arc light. It turns out Falcon knows how to fly a helicopter and he's got one. And he has changed his mind and he's going to take them to NORAD. He makes the phone call. The phone call goes to Dabney Coleman's assistant who is... As the world goes to DEFCON 2, the doors are closing at NORAD, the chopper is going...

Oh no, it goes all the way to DEFCON 1 and then they're shutting... Yeah.

And here's the great thing, again, now this character, you know, again, she eats Dabney Coleman's... She's his sub-altern, he's his girl Friday, whatever, but she's the one who knows to let them in, and that's her moment of becoming a real character that you love.

Yes.

Because she's not just good at her job, she also sees things her boss doesn't, and I love that.

Yes.

And it suddenly makes that character into character, they get into NORAD.

Through the very large massive doors, just as they're closing.

Now, that is a big door. And it's great because Falcon has two lines in here, one of them I have the quote for, but when he first sees McKittrick and shakes his hand, he says, I see your tie still, your wife is still picking out your ties for you. And I just, I don't want to digress because we're in the endgame here, but Falcon to me was an alternate model of positive masculinity. He was smart. He was not always on the same wavelength as everybody else. He had some wit to him. He was deeply sensitive. He was not afraid to have certain depth of emotion. And for a nerdy kid like me, growing up in the era of Rambo and Chuck Norris and Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood, who are the major stars of the time, seeing this very sensitive, very sort of, and the way they dress him is very soft. You know, his coat doesn't quite fit. He doesn't have broad shoulders. The coat kind of slumps. He's got this kind of very aquiline face, deeply lined, but he's smart. And he's sensitive, and I loved that. And I honestly just love the character for it. And I looked at that guy as a type of man a person could be, who wasn't an athlete, you know?

Do you want to know who they were thinking of when they wrote it and who they were hoping to get?

God, who? Clint Eastwood.

Don Lennon.

Really? Oh my God.

Yes, but then he died, so they couldn't.

And also not an actor who would have done this probably in a million years.

But spiritually they thought he was what they were looking for.

Yeah, yeah. I also draw interesting contrasts, parallels, echoes between him and Keys in ET.

In ET, absolutely. He's got the same...

Once the full character of Keys is revealed.

Exactly. Absolutely.

Of having gone a different, interesting path, yeah.

No, but it's funny that you should say that because I thought the same thing. And you were talking about Keys as the father figure, the father Elliot never had.

Yeah.

And I think that producer Brad brought this up in our pre-show, which is that Falcon is really the father figure that David needed. Ethical, you know, maybe flawed and not able to proceed past his own issues and problems to become a better person, but very much the kind of ethics that David needed that he didn't have. And then, you know, we're in DEFCON 1, we're about to launch the missiles, it's going, and then Falcon makes the following statement to General Berenger.

General, you are listening to a machine.

Which one? Three or four?

Do the world a favor and don't act like that.

Oh, I got it, I got it.

And, I mean, that moves me to tears. I don't know why. It's as fascinating to me that...

Yeah, because they're making the case that everything they are seeing in NORAD is a mirage.

And then we have the redemption of Barry Corbin's character, which is that Barry Corbin decides, makes the call to tell the president to sit out the attack. Yeah, Barry Corbin gets on the horn with three bases, two of which are being run by the officer in duty. And the last one, everybody has run off because they think they're going to die. And the only person on the horn is Airman Doherty, uh-huh, who's a boy. And of course, Corbin calls him son. And he waits there with Airman Doherty as NORAD lights up with all of the impacts of all of the nuclear bombs.

Yeah, and he's in a base in Maine, I think, where, like, will be one of the first that's gonna be hit by these missiles that may or may not exist.

And Corbin basically holds this young man's hands through what they don't know, whether it'll be the end of the world. And then Airman Doherty's like, we're still here. And it's a wonderful, and that's when you get the redemption of all of the broadness of this character. You know, all of a sudden you see, no, this guy's a real human being and we do love him. And he's gonna say something later that makes sense. Because then, falcon is, everybody's celebrating, everybody's celebrating, but then...

There's a celebration and also...

Yeah, suddenly people slowly are twigging to the fact that they can't get back into Whopper.

They're giving the call back orders to like call back all the bombers and the subs and the missiles.

Whopper's not letting them. And then John Wood is standing there and he goes, Joshua, what are you doing? And you realize that Joshua is going to win the game. Joshua locks everybody out and Joshua starts hacking the command code for the missiles. It's 10 numbers and he's doing a brute force attack of just shooting random combinations until each number takes.

And am I correct in that Dabney Coleman's character was complicit by having issued a lockout order Yes, yes. to prevent any override and can to call back.

So when Barry Corbin says, why don't you just unplug the thing? And this is the moment I said, oh my God, the escalation in this movie is so brilliant because Dabney Coleman with a cigarette rips off his headphone, runs in a handheld because now the movie gets very, very funny.

Yes.

In a way, it's never been before and the camera starts moving in a way. In a way, it only really has her own whopper.

Yeah.

And it follows Dabney Coleman around the corner and he's saying, It will interpret any shutdown as the destruction of Norad and it'll launch the missiles anyway. And Barry Corbin says, one of the two most great and quotable lines in this film, producer Brad, give it to us.

Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.

I don't have to take that, you pig-eyed sack of shit.

No.

I was hoping for something a little better than that from you, sir, a man of your education, general.

All the time, they're trying to heck in. Then, Falcon and Matthew Broderick and David Colluding realize that they have to teach Joshua the lesson of futility. They have to teach Joshua that mutual assured and David meant it.

That this is a game that cannot be won.

They try to get Joshua to play some games, Joshua keeps locking them out, and then they realize, no, no, no, and then Ali Shidi actually is the one who figures it out because she says, the worst line and the worst line delivering the movie. She goes, I told you not to play games with that thing.

But it's kind of a double payoff to the setup of the scene in the cabin, Falcon's cabin and the lesson of futility. Because Falcon uses the example of Tic Tac Toe. Do you still play Tic Tac Toe? No, of course not because it always ends in a stalemate. It's a stupid game.

So Joshua starts playing Tic Tac Toe. Matthew Broderick realizes, have it play itself. And then the movie becomes this very impressive intercut between the big screens and the faces. Yeah. And the big screens are sort of Atari graphics. They're not, but they're showing you all the different scenarios of Tic Tac Toe. They get faster and faster and faster. And then Joshua starts playing Global Thermonuclear War. And then Joshua hacks the codes. And then the missiles are about to launch. And Joshua stops the missiles as it goes to every variation of Global Thermonuclear War. And you're seeing them. And they sound like Tom Clancy. The Kamchatka option, the Central America, you know, bluff, the China syndrome. I mean, it's great. And the best thing is when somebody says we should just let it play a game, what does General Berenger says, Producer Brad, the best line in this movie, hit me.

God damn it, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd do any good.

Joshua plays Global Throne of Mucovore by itself. The climax of this movie is literally the emergence of ethics in consciousness in a machine in real time. The characters have just let it rip. They've done their little heroic bit, and the computer learns that nuclear war is futile. All the screens go dark after this masterfully edited light show in which all the stakes are conveyed by the faces of the characters watching hoping the computer learns before it launches the missile. Missiles. The room goes dark, and then this happens.

Greetings, Professor Falcon. Hello, Joshua. Strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

And this is just ecstatic. And by the way, the movie just ends here. The characters celebrate, they're happy. Dabney Coleman gets his one moment of loving humanity, which is that everybody hugs, and then it comes time for him to hug Matthew Broderick, and instead he just sort of tassels Matthew Broderick's hair. Matthew Broderick tassels his hair, they hug. And is it earned? I don't know, but it's just a wonderful little moment where McKitrick is just not as big an asshole anymore. And the movie ends. And it's-

It's a great payoff.

And it's beautiful.

Yeah. Except then there's Harmonica playing for some reason.

I'm like, what is happening?

Why isn't there a score?

Yeah, anyway, but that aside-

Producer Brad, how did this movie do?

Well, it opened June 4th, 1983. It was the second John Badham film of 1983 following Blue Thunder, which opened 21 days before this.

Oh, I thought that was a later movie. And I said that earlier.

Wow.

Okay. Great.

Wow.

I stand corrected.

I wonder if that'll be playing in the Dollars Theater soon.

Oh, we might have a look at it some weekend. We can't. Oh, that's interesting.

I think we're going to need to watch it. Yes.

Okay.

So, it was the number five film of the year. Blue Thunder was number 18. It was the number three movie for the weekend after Return of the Jedi and Psycho II. And all time, it's 1,203. One spot ahead of Long Legs from 2024.

Well, you know, I got to tell you, this movie has literally just rocketed to like my top list. I founded a revelation to watch again. And I frankly just wish that... It's, you know, look, there's a lot of... They don't make them like they used to in this podcast, but wow, this is the first movie to make me wish that they made them like they used to.

I'm hoping it's a sign for 83, because these films we don't remember as highly as we do of 82. We don't watch them as much. So maybe we're going to relive these in a way we haven't.

I was going to mention that, producer Brad, because, you know, 82 is so iconic that a lot of those movies, you know, they're just staples. We've seen them all a billion times. And, you know, well, Paul, before we ask what next weekend's movie might be, do you have anything to add to this?

Yeah, it's interesting because I feel like this film, like many, are in the shadows of bigger films.

And I'm reminded of last year, last summer, Poltergeist being in the shadow of ET. And similarly, I feel like WarGames is in a similar shadow to Return of the Jedi.

Yes, and Psycho 2.

Well, we're avoiding that like the plague. But I have a similar feeling in terms of reconnecting with both of these films, of WarGames kind of how I thought with Poltergeist, because I hadn't seen either in so long, and they've been so overshadowed by bigger movies around them at the time, but yet are so special, not perfect, but fantastic, and really worth seeing and revisiting.

They're objectively great movies. Good movies affect great movies.

Primarily, and are just have such wonderful casts, such wonderful performances, which as you say, are their best effects, even though Poltergeist has incredible effects.

Absolutely.

This film does not. But anyway, but no, I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I just adored it.

Producer Brad, what's next weekend?

We're going to June 10th, 1983, and only two movies open on this day. Here is option number one.

Here's the poster, Trading Places.

Wow. And what's the next one? Octopussy! Oh my god, I don't, oh wow, that's a, you know what, I think we're gonna leave the audience on a cliffhanger about what we're gonna do next, because this is a hard one.

No cliffhangers, we're making a decision.

Paul, which one do you wanna watch?

I mean, you gotta go with Bond.

You gotta go with Bond.

You gotta go with Bond, it's got a mini-plane.

Come on, we're doing it, yeah, come on, we're doing that, okay.

And we're on a fun ride, so hopefully, maybe I would love to squeeze in training places at some point.

It might make it to the Dollar Theater a little bit later.

Maybe, yes, if we're lucky, but as far as a priority and an imperative, the good news is Trading Places was a hit movie, played a long time, so we know it's still going to be in the theaters in about a month still, so we're good. But Roger Moore in Ian Fleming's James Bond 007.

Roger Moore in the Bid Aerostar Miniplane. All right, we have a plan, and until then, we will see you in line at the Multiplex. Catch you later.