I would add to that the great performance by John Wood as Professor Falken, going from irascible, grieving grump trying to live in seclusion away from the real world consequences of the machinations of his computerised, substitute ghost in the machine son to being dragged reluctantly back into the action to finish what he started. I sort of bracket his character together with the interlude of visiting the famous Mathematician in The Day The Earth Stood Still in how his character is performing a similar function in the story. But instead of just one isolated scene with him before our main characters have to hurriedly leave his sanctuary, he gets to tag along with our young heroes into the bunker itself for the magnificent final scene.
I really like the way that Wood plays Falken during that final scene as well, softening toward and looking on the Matthew Broderick character of David seemingly like a substitute son. Not in an overstated and overly underlined way, but more as a mentor figure in those moments where it is made obvious through his performance and the lingering editing of a scene that Falken has figured something out but instead of saying something himself is often letting the youthfully enthusiastic David take the lead in showing the crusty old-timers what to do. That's a beautifully played scene, and even though Ally Sheedy's character is a little sidelined in the final sequence, she does get that "I told you that you shouldn't have played that game!" moment that makes Falken and David come to their revelation about what to do.
I kind of love this film. It was part of that really interesting mid-80s trend of archetypally normal youngsters driving the US Military bonkers by their antics, together with Flight of the Navigator and D.A.R.Y.L., which usually involved at least a couple of scenes of the kids being placed under Military Police arrest and then showing their ingenuity by breaking out of a locked room and going on the run with helicopters and army trucks in hot pursuit! I don't know what that was saying about the way filmmakers were seeing the world at that particular period around 1983-86, but I always liked it!
And WarGames is perhaps just as cutting in the way that it highlights the MAD absurdities of nuclear war as Dr Strangelove in many ways, perhaps even melding that aspect together with WOPR as the 'driven crazy (but actually only really fulfilling its tasks to the best of its abilities) by the conflicting demands of its human operators' equivalent of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey!
The final statement of the entire film: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of Chess?", may be some of the most perfect final lines in cinema. It is certainly Kubrick-worthy!
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WarGames itself has been interestingly influential in recent years. It was the centrepiece of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One novel, where one of the 'tasks' in that story involved a game where you jump inside David's first person perspective and have to perfectly recite all of the lines of the film from memory to trigger all of the events of the narrative in the correct order! That was the aspect that was entirely changed in the Spielberg 2018 film version to instead focus on Overlook Motel from The Shining. Which was probably a bit more cinematic!
And it felt as if its influence was all over that icily dark video game
Defcon!
