Game Boy
I was just watching WarGames. One of the fun things about looking at movies of your youth is to see how they've held up. I thought it was still a pretty good film, with a well-constructed screenplay. But some of the dated stuff made me laugh.
Matthew Broderick, who was in his 20s at the time, plays a high school student, and almost looks too young for the part. But his engaging presence holds the somewhat extravagant movie together. If you recall, he's a computer whiz who breaks into the government system and almost starts a nuclear war.
What's funniest is how some of his computer stuff is so old--no graphics, just words on screen (kind of like the complaint of certain critics of Pajama Guy)--while other bits--in particular a computer program that can talk almost like a human--are probably not possible today.
Then there's the music. Nothing places a film more firmly in the 80s than the ditzy little sounds they liked then. It's such a particular sound, but, like smoking in restaurants, it's not something I really noticed back then. And since WarGames is about computers, the music at points is even sillier.
Then there's the ending. This was the time of the nuclear freeze movement, and calls for unilateral disarmament. The ending of WarGames seemed silly to me even then. After a short-lived victory (not caused by Broderick, so I knew it wasn't the real ending), the computer goes out of control and starts planning to launch some bombs. Broderick gets it to "play" games against itself and it quickly "learns" that no one can win in a nucelar war, so refuses to start. You'd think they might have figured that out before they installed the program.
Columbus Guy says: After this graphic, I don't think we'll ever run graphics again. I'd comment about it, but these days if you call someone "John Edwards," you have to go into rehab.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:55 AM
3 Comments:
Two words: Awful movie.
Your point about computers is very true. It's amazing that no television show about police officers would show their guns firing laser beams. But in computer movies, anyone called a "hacker" can guess your password.
"Hmm, LA Guy... that's Los Angeles... aha, his password must be ANGEL!" "Password accepted. Do you wish to print this user's confidential files?"
You wrote:
.... some of his computer stuff is so old--no graphics, just words on screen ... while other bits--in particular a computer program that can talk almost like a human--are probably not possible today.
While thinking about this, I may have had a profound realization.
Look at any pre-1980 SF story (or pre-1999 SF movie) that features a robot or a futuristic computer. As you point out, from our perspective today these appear to be a bizarre mixture of the primitive and the fantastic.
But what's the pattern? Which features are primitive, and which are fantastic?
Let F be the set of features that we see in fiction but not in reality, and let R be the set of features that we see in reality but not in fiction.
I submit that, in almost every case, the F features are humanoid features. In the case of Wargames, F includes the ability to talk, the ability to hold a conversation with a human, a personality, curiosity about the future (can Earth survive a nuclear war?), and the ability to learn.
What features are in R? What can my laptop do that the Joshua computer couldn't? It can hold all the music in my CD collection, it can generate graphics so beautiful that they actually are nicer looking than what's out my window, it can generate music as well as my stereo can, and it can locate a piece of data virtually instantaneously (no "Working.... click-click" like the Enterprise computer). Also, it's smaller than a coffeetable book.
In other words, the R features would make my computer a really boring character in a story. But they also make it the most valuable and useful inanimate object in my room.
So what was the mistake of these traditional science fiction writers? They assumed that computers would gradually become more like people. So their supercomputer was just the clunky computer of their day with a bunch of human features appended to it. Joshua, in Wargames, is simply a 1982 computer merged with a human being.
Why is this? I think it's because traditional SF thought of robots and computers as replacements for people.
But they are not. They are replacements for the world that humans live in. In 1950, you had human beings living on a planet full of books, records, cars, telephones, radios, television sets, date-planners and calendars, notebooks, pencils and pens, cars, trains, and cash registers. In the bad sci-fi of the 1950's, we saw this same world, but with robots walking alongside the people.
But reality is just the opposite. If the trend from 1950 to 2007 is any indication, the future will see humans just like they are today, but the physical world we live in will be totally replaced. All the books, records, cars, telephones, radios, television sets, date-planners and calendars, notebooks, pencils and pens, cars, trains, and cash registers will be gone. I will be the same, and my friends will all be human. But the devices we use to perform our daily tasks and communicate with each other will all be changed.
Pretty hopeful. I like the R and F stuff, but I'm afraid they're going to inject Intel Inside. Bill Joy had it right. The future doesn't need us.
SWMBCg, etc.
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