Search - War Games (25th Anniversary Edition) on DVD

K. K. (GAMER)
Reviewed on 12/13/2022...

Dated but such a great plotline with Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and others shining very bright! Pay attention or you will miss Mr. Potato Head! A must watch!

Would you prefer a nice game of chess?

Shelley Gammon | Kaufman, Texas USA | 07/06/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This was an instant teen classic. Far more than a movie about romance, lust or "parents who just don't understand" .... this was a great flick and it still is.Matthew Broderick introduced the masses to the world of hacking, phreaking and global thermo nuclear war.The average person at that time had never heard of a phone phreak, but we see the lead character get free calls on a payphone and stealing software via his 300 baud modem before anyone knew there was software worth stealing.Not only are his parents affluent enough to supply him with a computer, he gets discarded computer hardware from friends at a local university to make the super-duper hacking machine that ends up getting him in big big trouble.While a lot of this story is pretty improbable, some of the plot was dead on for the time. There were no minature computers and cameras and while the government had satelites, they couldn't count your eyelashes from the stratosphere like they can today.Nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a real threat when this movie came out... all of my friends talked about it and posters with mushroom clouds were all over our school. Sting came out with the song "Russians" and we all peed in our pants when the show "The Day After" aired on prime time TV.It was a scary time and this movie masterfully played on the fear of nuclear threats and the real likelihood (and nowadays a reality) of having formerly human-manned stations automated by computers.Lots of excitement, great background music and lots of 80s nostalgia abound in this film. If you're in your late 20s to early 40s and you haven't seen this film, it's your duty to get it!I wish the DVD had more features, such as out-takes and interviews with the stars and perhaps others (like folks at NASA or other famous computer geeks) who may have been influenced by this film. The DVD platform isn't taken advantage like it should be, especially w/ a film of this genre. Nonetheless, it's a better format than VHS and definitely watchable over and over again."

Movie is great, but the commentary is superb!

Erwin S. Andreasen | 09/06/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Watching this movie again brings back some great nostalgic feelings -- back in these days computers were *special*, something amazing and almost magical. Being a software professional, I often yearn for those times again, where we weren't something as boring as "IT professionals" but "wizards". Reading an old copy of BYTE from 1980 or watching WarGames helps :)I won't praise the movie further, but I want to highlight the commentary audio track: the director, John Badham and the two writers, Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes comment every scene in the movie. It's really great stuff, not the usual junk you might hear actors say about their own role in the movie (that seldom sounds convincing) but lots of technical details about how the movie was made (for example, the initial blizzard scene was apparently created with the help of helicopters) to exactly what sort of computer equipment was used (a TRS-80) and why. The commentators are having lots of fun and manage to share a lot of trivia (for example, W.O.P.R. was considered named PSIOP(sp))."

Warning: Image cropped on all sides

Chris Schmidt | Scottsdale, AZ United States | 02/04/2010

(1 out of 5 stars)

"This is a review of the 25th Anniversary Edition.

This DVD was made from a full screen version where the left and right sides were cropped. From that image, they cropped the top and the bottom to produce this so-called widescreen version. The image you see when watching this DVD consists of a small rectangle cut from the center of the original movie. If you could find a full screen version, you would see more of the original movie than if you watch this so-called widescreen version.

The package says "widescreen". In the past, the term widescreen meant that you see the entire original image. More and more, when a DVD package says widescreen, that means they cropped the top and the bottom so the image will fit a modern TV. Whereas in the past, widescreen meant you see more than with full screen, now it means you see less.

Why all the positive reviews here for this horrible product? Please, we can find movie reviews on imdb. Here on Amazon, we need critiques of the DVD. If everyone here would give mutilated movies the lowest rating, maybe the DVD makers would get the message and stop mutilating the movies we like. At least it would warn people against buying them.
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