Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-05-03 (Saturday)

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

On 5/4/2025 10:23 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

. . .

If the U.S. and Russian missiles had to be manually retargeted, then the
rest of the world should have declared war on the U.S. and Russia.
Colossus would have apparently been powerless to retaliate.

Good point

Wargames (4K disc) 1983 movie which opens with the U.S. military putting
the finishing touches on a new supercomputer called Skynet, I mean
Colossus, I mean WOPR that is buried in the Rocky Mountains that
controls the U.S. weapons systems and will make human decision making in
war obsolete.  But when Ferris Bueller decides to take the day off from
school, he hacks into Skynet, I mean WOPR so he can play a little Global
Thermonuclear War.  "Shall We Play a game?"

I love this movie despite massive plot holes that we are forced to
overlook to enjoy the movie.

I'm not sure if I noticed this before now, but why exactly were they
giving local tours of NORAD?  They even let the people on the tour sit
at the controls and push the buttons!

It's kind of based on Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove. As you may recall,
both movies are based on the same novel as the authors of one novel sued
the authors of the other novel for copyright infringement. That's why
both movies were released by the same studio to force a settlement.

One of the novels had this tour in it (it was the military contractor
and some politicians), so WarGames made the tour even more ridiculous.

What, you've never taken the World Of Spycraft tour at CIA's theme park?

Then when WOPR is trying to break the launch code you see it guessing
one correct number at a time, and when it guesses correctly the number
stops spinning.  But there are only 10 digits and 26 characters in the
alphabet.  It's there are only 36 possible choices for each line and the
computer is guessing all lines simultaneous.  It should have guessed the
correct code almost instantly.

It's a huge tumbler lock! WOPR is spinning the dial like a safecracker,
listening for each tumbler to fall into place!