Shall we play a game?
Just accept it: Pop-cultural “turnover” moves so fast now that every single dubious classic of the 80s and 90s is going to be remade in the near future. Some will be bad, some will be good, hopefully MGM’s newly-announced do-over of WarGames will be one of the good ones.
The 1983 original is often called one of the best science-fiction thrillers of its era, and is considered a landmark in the depictions of home-computing and “hacker” culture onscreen. The film starred Matthew Broderick as a troublemaking teenaged computer whiz who likes to hack into software companies to play unreleased video games. Unfortunately, his latest conquest turns out to actually be “Joshua,” a super-advanced Artificial Intelligence system housed at NORAD designed to assume control of U.S. missile defenses in the event of a major attack. Unfortunately, “Joshua” interprets the teen’s maneuvers in a thermonuclear war simulation “game” as a genuine attack and begins a countdown to a real nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.
MGM is reported to be seeking relative newcomers Dean Israelite and Arash Amel to direct and write the remake, respectively. No details as to what the (presumably) modernized scenario of the film have been revealed at this time. A sequel to the original film, WarGames: The Dead Code, was released direct-to-DVD in 2009 and featured “Joshua” being used to combat a new out-of-control military computer named R.I.P.L.E.Y.
Source: Deadline
