With culture and society going in the direction that it is, there are Catholic friends of mine that want to retreat to the wilderness.  I cannot say that I blame them, and have entertained such thoughts myself.  It can be a lonely battle when you are holding to a thousands year old tradition and everyone else seems to be moving in a different direction.  It takes a lot of prayer, and it is sustaining.  Sometimes, though, a movie can help.  Recently, I watched the 1983 cult classic WarGames.  It seemed a little cheesy right up to the end.  Yet, it is how we finish that counts, and the message it gives is useful, particularly in our times.

Conversely, Captain Jerry Lawson (John Spencer) and Lieutenant Steve Phelps (Michael Madsen) are just beginning their shifts monitoring a nuclear missile silo at the start of WarGames.  They have barely settled into their chairs when they get properly authenticated launch codes.  Before they turn their keys and initiate a nuclear holocaust, Captain Lawson has second thoughts.  An agitated Lieutenant Phelps points a pistol at his senior officer, but the scene ends.  Apparently, they had mistaken a drill for the real thing, but to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) programmer Dr. John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman), this is too much human error.  Over the objections of NORAD’s commanding officer, General Jack Beringer (Barry Corbin), who prefers the human element, Dr. McKittrick convinces the president to back replacing the soldiers with a super computer called War Operation Plan Response (WOPR).  Meanwhile, we meet David Lightman (Matthew Broderick).  He may not seem all the different from any other high schooler late for class, but after school, he shows off his affinity for computers to his girlfriend, Jennifer Mack (Ally Sheedy).  For now, his demonstration is about changing their biology grades from flunking so that they do not have to go to summer school, but she gets scared, telling him they will get in trouble and to return her marks to their original state.  Once she departs, though, he gives her an “A.”  At dinner that night, we see him thumbing through a magazine talking about a new line of computer games about to debut.  This is his one true passion, but he is a kid without money.  What he does have is the technical knowhow to use the nascent internet to retrieve the files without paying for them.  We call this hacking these days.  His program is still running the next day when Jennifer comes over, having changed her mind about the grade adjustment.  Instead, she becomes interested in David’s current digital maneuvers.  She is there when it appears that he has finally gotten to where he had been wanting to go, but he encounters many firewalls.  Taking the readouts to some friends with similar interests, they gave him the suggestion to figure out a backdoor into the system using information already gathered.  To this end, the name Falken stands out as the title to one of the list of games David had seen.  With some further research, David learns that this refers to Dr. Stephen Falken (John Wood), an early developer of artificial intelligence (AI).  In trying to divine a password to get into the system, David intuits that it could be Dr. Falken’s deceased son’s name, Joshua.  Once more with Jennifer on hand, David types in the name and suddenly he is able to play the games.  Of all the ones he could choose, he goes for the one titled “Global Thermonuclear War.”  Thinking it to be simply a simulation, he starts giving commands as if he were in charge of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, but clearly not understanding everything that is happening.  What they do not know is that the system is WOPR, and it is displaying its actions on the screen at NORAD.  Things get heated for a few moments as they believe the Soviets are initiating an atomic attack until David disconnects and suddenly the screens go black.  The next morning, he is horrified to see on the news that NORAD had reported nearly going to war.  It does not take the government long to figure out the source of the problem, and agents are sent to apprehend David and bring him to NORAD.  He is interviewed by Dr. McKittrick and others, who have trouble believing his story that he had only been interested in video games.  The matter is made worse by the fact that WOPR is still playing the game, with the clock ticking down to Armageddon.  David is treated as a spy and is about to be arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).  Before that can happen, he escapes by blending in with a tour group (things were different in the 1980s, I guess), and is able to get away from the facility.  His next move is to try to contact Dr. Falken, who is supposedly dead, but David guesses correctly that the scientist is living under an alias.  Somehow, David is able to convince Jennifer to buy him a plane ticket to Oregon where Dr. Falken is living, and she joins him on this crazy quest.  When they arrive at Dr. Falken’s, they find a defeated man.  Since the death of his son, he stopped caring about the world, saying that it is going to end either way and unwilling to stop it.  Dr. Falken changes his mind when he sees David and Jennifer leave, still determined to do something to prevent nuclear war.  Producing a helicopter from somewhere, they make it back to NORAD just before they are locking down the facility in preparation for World War III.  While Dr. Falken is able to convince General Beringer and Dr. McKittrick that the displays of incoming Soviet weapons are fictitious, WOPR insists on carrying out the attack.  To save the world, David comes up with the idea of teaching the computer to play tic-tac-toe.  After running through an innumerable number of games of x’s and o’s, it comes to the conclusion that it is unwinnable.  It does the same simulation with nuclear weapons and comes up with the same answer.

You may have read that and thought that sounds like a cheesy way to finish WarGames.  The fact that a super computer is defeated by the kind of pastime kids have played for years when there is seemingly literally nothing else to do might appear farfetched.  I would respond to that by suggesting that perhaps you are getting bogged down in the details.  It is not about the simplicity of the game but its outcome.  One can win at tic-tac-toe, but more often it is a tie.  In other words, there is no winner.  The same goes for nuclear war, except in this case millions die.  To that end, it should be noted that the Catholic Church has always been against such destruction.  Indeed, it is in line with the notion that nobody comes out on top during such a scenario.  What sometimes bothers this practicing Catholic, though, is attaching the word “Armageddon” to such a terrible outcome.  It appears in Revelation 16:16, which reads, “They then assembled the kings in the place that is named Armageddon in Hebrew.”  It is often misconstrued as the actual final battle between good and evil, but it is rather the place there this is to happen.  Hence, using it to refer to end times is somewhat of a misnomer, though I get why people refer to it in this context.  What is more important is having your soul prepared for the end times.  Could humanity wipe itself before the Scriptural events that are prophesied?  It can, but that also does not matter.  What is worse, though, is Dr. Falken’s attitude before he changes his mind.  His sentiment is one of resignation, not preparation.  For the world to end because of manmade weapons would be an abomination, but his theory is that it is part of the natural order.  I am thankful that he reconsiders his position and decides to do something about the potential evil.

Still, it is hard to talk about “evil” with a movie like WarGames.  It is rated PG, although there are a few curse words in it.  Otherwise, it is about a smart but bumbling kid that almost triggers World War III.  I do not know if such content holds up today, but it does pose some philosophical dilemmas worth exploring.