Doomsday thriller neatly adapted to fit the home-computer and video-game craze. A high-school low-achiever (the highly likable Matthew Broderick) attempts, from his bedroom keyboard, to tap into the intelligence center of a video-game company, but unwittingly taps into the missile defense system instead. The opposing computer, nicknamed "Whopper," offers him a choice of games from Checkers to Global Thermonuclear War, and once he has chosen the latter, won't let him resign. Are subsequent developments real or simulated? To get to this point, a couple of high hurdles of disbelief have to be leapt over, but any basic incomprehension of computer procedures will go well with the general air of distrust. The action never stagnates, as it easily might have, in front of computer terminals and print-out screens, and there are some nice, small human moments strewn throughout (a corn-buttering technique, for instance, that fixes Dad in memory for all time). There is also, of course, some sure-fire (not to say sure-holocaust) countdown-type suspense, and there is a blaring message, agreeable to all ideologies, which equates nuclear war with tic-tac-toe. Despite everything in its favor, director John Badham seems determined to make the movie as visually unattractive as possible, with lots of large, lily-pad heads afloat in soupy gray space, and with a fundamental belief that anything, to have any impact, must be pushed right up into our faces. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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