There are some movies that provide an enjoyable story when they are released, and as time goes by they mature into something different, a movie that gives the viewer a taste of the genuine flavor of an era. 

1983's WarGames is one of those movies.  This was the dawn of the home computer era.  To the adults of the era, computers were something they knew of but didn't really know, large intimidating machines that sat in banks and universities and government buildings and crunched numbers.  But a certain type of bright kid saw computers very differently.  Computers were something to have fun with, to play with.  To befriend.

The term 'hacker' had an entirely different meaning then.  Not yet representing destructive malevolence, breaking into computer systems to cause damage.  The hackers of the era were bright kids who wanted to get into computer systems just to prove that they could.  They were... cute.

David Lightman (Matthew Broderick in his first starring role) is one of these bright kids.  Too smart to be motivated at school, he spends a lot of his off time in his room, playing with his computer.   To keep from having to go to summer school due to low grades, he hacks into the school computer and changes his grade.  (I can feel 21st century readers tsking and making frowny faces right now - at the time this was considered lovable high jinx.)

David shows his friend-morphing-into-girlfriend Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) how he gets into computers, getting into airline booking systems and other business computers just to show off.  He tells her and through her the audience what his next project is. 

A computer game company has announced the upcoming release of some new games.  But David doesn't want to do anything so tame as to wait for the games to be released and play them then.  No, he wants to hack into the company's computer and play the prototype games.   Why?  Well, obviously, because his way is harder and thus more interesting.

David has his computer dial all the numbers in the computer game company's neightborhood, looking for a number where a computer answers.   And a computer does answer, and David starts to communicate with it.   He asks it for a list of games, and of the list, he decides that "Global Thermonuclear War" sounds like the most fun, so he gives it a try.

Meanwhile, deep in a mountainside, a strategic military command headquarters is scrambling, because their state of the art supercomputer is reporting nukes inbound for Las Vegas. 

Yep. Turns out that David isn't talking to the game company computer after all, but to a military computer.  Not just any computer, but WOPR.  (I  forget what the acronym stands for, but the obvious point is to be able to call the computer "Whopper".)

General Jack Beringer (Barry Corbin) is an unbeliever in all this computer wizardry, but against his wishes, the ultimate control of nuclear missile launches has been programmed into the WOPR, being managed by Dr. John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman). 

The programmers know that WOPR has been hacked and they scramble and manage to shut down the indications that nukes are inbound when they're really not.  And grim-faced men in dark suits and wires in their ears snatch up David off the street and whisk him away to the high command, where he is told he's going to be prosecuted for espionage. 

David is naturally scared spitless, but he's even more scared when he realizes something that the grownups don't.  The WOPR (which David calls Joshua, as his original designer did) is still playing the game.  A countdown has commenced, at the end of which WOPR is going to launch missiles and set off WWIII, the Global Thermonuclear War game that it is playing, and there's nothing the humans can do to stop it.  And Joshua can't tell the difference between simulation and reality.

David escapes from the mountain (a bit too easily, IMO), and has to track down Joshua/WOPR's designer, Professor Stephen Falken (John Wood), a man so reclusive he's allowed himself to be declared dead, and so hopeless about humanity that he doesn't even really care that the war he always expected is now just hours away.

Joshua is a computer that has been designed to be able to learn on its own, a cutting edge concept at the time.  Falken is a mathematical and computer genius of the adult kind.  But it says a lot of the gestalt of the era (and probably accurate as well) that it is whiz-kid David, the member of the new breed who is growing up with and and has a gut-level understanding of computers, who eventually hits about the solution that brings Joshua out of the game before the final deadly move.

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