In 1983, computers were strange and vaguely sinister and in the movies they could do anything–ANYTHING–if you knew the right keystrokes. They were also expensive and not many people had one, or had much use for one, in their home, which only contributed to the mystique. There was no internet yet (as we know it today, at least), and the primitive text-based games from back then sucked a dick.
So, what the hell ELSE is a kid like Matthew Broderick gonna do with a computer except hack into the government’s national security shit and almost start World War III? It’s fun, it satisfies his curiosity and it impresses a young Ally Sheedy, who’s always excercising here because it gives her character something to do other than raise her eyebrows.
Not that Broderick is much of the rebel type here. He isn’t sticking it to “The Man”. His character will probably BE “The Man” someday. He’s not good in school, but he is a tech brainiac. He’s also as well-to-do as any of those little fucks in John Hughes movies.
His parents saw fit to supply him with a state-of-the-art computer rig, complete with modem and an accessory that translates the words on the monitor into sound (for cinematic purposes here). He can hack into the government. He knows how to open a physical door locked by an electronic keycode. He can even cheat a payphone with a little piece of tin when he has no money. Broderick’s David Lightman isn’t fucking shit up; he’s just making things easier for himself. (The guy’s probably a billionaire in 2019.)
The REALLY cool thing he does here–the one that impressed all of us kids back in “the day”–is that he hacks into his school’s system and CHANGES HIS GRADES. He turns his F’s into A’s and apparently nobody notices.
THAT’S when we knew that we liked him. That’s when we got hooked. That’s when us young assholes who first caught this movie on cable TV knew that we weren’t going outside for the next two hours (we were always looking for an excuse, anyway). We were gonna sit right down and watch this goddamn movie.
And it was a good movie. It’s complete junk, but good. My guess is that I’ve seen this twenty-five times. And I’ll watch it twenty-five more times. This film hasn’t rotted ALL of my brain, yet (I don’t think so, at least).
Director John Badham, whose big hit at the time was Saturday Night Fever, makes this like it’s an old-fashioned thriller. He zeroes in on the paranoia. The scene where Matthew Broderick is arrested is nicely eerie because it depicts the US government as this many-tentacled creature who monitors everything you do, knows exactly where you live and where you like to go, and it will follow you and it will close in on you and it will have the drop on you until the very moment when you’ve finally figured it out–and by that point, they’ve already won.
This film works wonders with this challenging premise (computer shit is not exactly cinematic). For added tension, I notice how Broderick and Sheedy constantly sneak into the next act by the skin of their necks. When they have to board a ferry, it’s already taken off and they have to make a mad dash across the dock and leap for it. When they later have to reach the big government nerve center to save the world, they get there in the very last seconds before the vault-like doors close and seal off the outside world, potentially forever. There’s no reason for ANY of that, except to make the movie more exciting. And it works.
When I watch this, I’m also reminded of another thing that freaked us out in 1983. Nuclear war. The end of everything.
I was about eight years old when my mother felt that I needed to know that the Russians had nuclear missiles pointed directly at me and that everything could end at any moment. She was also a half-assed Jesus freak who read the cheap pamphlets sold at supermarket check-out lines and that predicted, with quotes from the Book of Revelation and Nostradamus, that the world was set to end sometime between next Thursday and the middle of 1994.
With that knowledge, I didn’t even know why I was still in school. I didn’t know why I was doing anything if I was going to be dead in a few years anyway.
2019? That year was never going to happen. I will never be 42 years old.
I will die a scared adolescent in the late 80s or sometime in the 90s with no idea about why a foreign power is dropping a bomb on my head.
Between 1984 to 1989 or so, I really thought that.
Thanks, mom.