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“Finally, a Rob Lowe movie everyone wants to see,” quipped every stand-up comic and talk-show host after Rob Lowe was caught on tape with his pants down, his dick out and a teenage admirer on the other end of it. While Lowe went on the offensive, chiding the prurient interest of the media and emitting dire prognostications of our future as Tabloid Nation, the saturation publicity didn’t hurt the fact that during the time of the unfortunate incident, he was making a movie in which he played a character wicked and venal enough to videotape a bout of intercourse with an underage partner. Bad Influence (1990), directed by Curtis Hanson, featured both Lowe and James Spader playing against type. Smartly capitalizing on the fact that most of us secretly harbored feelings that Lowe’s outer yumminess covered an evil interior, he poured relish into his depiction of Alex, one of those versatile predator-voyeur-psycho types. Spader, normally the repository of unruffled sadism (he’d rattled off another yawning scumbag in Less Than Zero) plays Michael, a timid innocent whose heavily repressed dark side is brought to the surface by the demonic Alex. This is fine and dandy when the pair indulge in harmless pranks like knocking over a 7-Eleven. Alex seems like a friend in need when he frees Michael from the smothering clutches of his straight-laced fiancée, Ruth (mad-eyed Marcia Cross) by using their engagement party as a suitable occasion to air footage of her soon-to-be-spouse being straddled by a ravenous babe. Soon, though, Alex’s idea of fun veers towards the homicidal. Realizing that he’s volunteered for the sidekick role in a crime duo, Michael has to make a stand against the sinister figure who taught him how to walk and talk. An otherwise standard Psycho Within flick, the best thing about Bad Influence is its lip-smacking portrayal of L.A. decadence. Every nightclub is a glittering Gomorrah, filled with dead-eyed sinners writhing to some plodding electro backbeat.
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Molly Ringwald as dirt-dumb, chain-smoking small-town bad girl? Say it ain’t so. Unfortunately, it was and it was called Fresh Horses (1988). Andrew McCarthy frets up a storm as the college kid whose marriage plans are wrecked by his inexplicable moth-to-flame attraction to Ringwald’s earthy slut. So inert, it’s like staring at stills.
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No Brat was more suited to making the transition from hero to villain than Judd Nelson. Not for him though, surprisingly, the moustache-twirling, insanely cackling and hilarious postslaughter quip that came to characterize every bad guy who followed in the footsteps of Alan Rickman’s Die Hard Eurolouse. Perverse to the end, Nelson, who’d played his leading-man roles like a drooling nutjob, imbued the serial killer he played in Relentless (1989) with a regretful calm. More in tune with the m.o. of the Judd we knew of old was the fact that his psycho was driven to kill by the pressure of being the son of a decorated police hero. The eighties may have been almost over, but Judd Nelson was still blaming his old man.
6
Wired
Arcade Rats, Science Fair Freaks, Time Travelers, Hackers and Teenage Geniuses
In 1995, Hollywood forgot its past and was condemned to eat it. This was the year when evidence was hefty enough to suggest that before he or she was sufficiently confident to deal with solid food, the average American child had flamed the neighborhood bedwetters and downloaded a book depository’s worth of Jennifer Aniston gifs. The timing could not have been better for a slew of cyberspace-based movies, but like skeet shot from the sky, down they plummeted: Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days and Virtuosity. If the powers behind those executive decisions had paused and taken stock of a period a decade earlier when similar thinking lead to similar stiffs, much embarrassment could have been spared. Back in August of 1985, Hollywood put so much stock in the fact that the only time a breed of teenager left the PC in their bedroom was to blast aliens in the local arcade that, in the space of two weeks, they unleashed three teen science movies. The fact that Weird Science, Real Genius and My Science Project went gurgling down the toilet (although only the first mentioned left any lingering odor) points up the essential dilemma Hollywood has always, and will continue to face when dealing with science-minded teens. You might assume that this demographic, long characterized as socially inept, would rush, flattered, to patronize any onscreen depiction of their avenue of interest. In point of fact, they’re aching for the chance to disdain the product aimed their way, bursting for the opportunity to go into tortuous detail about the many ways Hollywood got it wrong. Of course, if you satisfy this crowd, you’ll have their scary, anal devotion for life and beyond. For every Tron and The Black Hole that becomes an object of ridicule, there’s a Star Wars and a Blade Runner that becomes a religion. In fact, of the decade’s mountain of youth-skewing movies, the teen science cycle, though brief, contains the biggest box-office hit. That would be Back to the Future but it wasn’t the defining I Am Geek, Hear Me Roar experience. That honor goes to a movie that both thrilled the mainstream and validated the cognoscenti. That movie is WarGames (1983).
With a latter-day output that includes snores like Point of No Return, Nick of Time, The Hard Way, Another Stakeout and Drop Zone, director John Badham exhibits all the symptoms of a guy who hates his job. WarGames, though, dates from the period when he was wide awake. This slick peacenik movie nails its colors to the mast with a precredits sequence showing a random test in a nuclear missile base. As one of the two men entrusted with initiating the launch of the rockets refuses to turn the fateful key, it is established that the fate of the world is too important to be left in human hands. To this end, NORAD boffin John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) supervises the installation of a massive lump of metal called W.O.P.R. (War Operation Plan & Response), whose sole function is to devise attack scenarios, calculate acceptable losses and remove human frailty from the picture. Crusty Chief of Staff General Jack Barringer (Barry Corbin) is unimpressed by the big computer, taking its introduction as a personal affront to him and his men.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Seattle, nascent hacker David Lightman (Matthew Broderick, as fresh as a newly hatched chick) is so aroused by a catalogue detailing a new range of games from a company called Protovision that he attempts to tap into their system to score a sneak preview. He gets a printout of a games list that includes titles like Biochemical Attack and Global Thermonuclear War. For a seasoned arcade warrior like himself, these titles are caviar. Searching for a password to allow him access into the system so he can start blasting, he explores the first game on the list, Falken’s Maze. This was the work of noted scientist Stephen Falken, who specialized in refining computers to the point where they could learn from their mistakes; in effect, think for themselves. Researching the life of Falken, David finds that his son and wife were killed in a car crash and that he died soon after. This sad fact thrills David, who keys in the name of Falken’s son, Joshua. That’s the password! He’s in! In fact, he’s in the big W.O.P.R. computer. “Shall we play a game?” it purrs through a voice box. The machine thinks David is its creator, Falken. “How about Global Thermonuclear War?” suggests David, who thinks he’s talking to a state-of-the-art computer game. “Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess?” asks the computer.
David is insistent and the game begins. He picks the Soviet side, sentencing Las Vegas and Seattle to be reduced to rubble by his first strike. In the NORAD Combat HQ a Missile Warning is announced. As David and his gal pal Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) giggle and slurp Tab, the defense base is crawling with frantic military men, declaring a state of Def Con 3 and readying a missile response. Suddenly, David’s rarely glimpsed dad bawls at him to come downstairs and pick up the garbage. He switches off the computer, and over at NORAD, as unexpectedly as it appeared, the threat to the West vanishes. The next night, a newscast spreads the horror story of the three-minute nuclear alert. “I’m screwed,” whimpers David. “Throw the number away and act normal,” advises Jennifer. Then Joshua (W.O.P.R.’s informal name) calls him. Trepidation oozing from every pore, he asks the machine its primary goal. “To win the game,” it replies. He unplugs the phone, hugs it to his c
hest and pretends to ignore the time ticking away to the culmination of the game he started. The Feds track David down and haul him in for questioning, figuring him to fit the profile of a Commie convert. Almost evangelical in his own belief in David’s rottenness is Professor McKittrick. “No way a high-school punk could put a dime in a telephone and break into our system. He’s working for someone.” Stuck in McKittrick’s office, David appeals to Joshua. “Is this a game or is this real?” The computer replies blithely, “What’s the difference?” It then, handily, goes on to tell David that he’s a hard guy to track down. The list of addresses Joshua failed to reach him at includes a classified contact spot in Oregon. David grabs on to the fact that Falken’s still alive.
The Feds catch him messing with McKittrick’s computer and lock him in an infirmary room where he demonstrates some of the ingenuity that would go on to remove much of the stigma from being a computer nerd and make an icon of MacGyver. A simple pair of scissors, a cunningly concealed personal stereo. Everyday items but in the hands of David Lightman, they become the tools he uses to record and play back the security lock signal, springing him from captivity. Once he’s out, he sends an ever bigger scare into the bladder of corporate communications, demonstrating deftly how to cheat a payphone with a ring-pull cap. David, joined by Jennifer, heads towards Oregon, secret home of the now pseudonymous Falken, while Joshua continues building toward the final countdown.
The death machine’s creator turns out to be something of a letdown. Stephen Falken (John Wood) is fey and morbid, ignoring the entreaties of David and Jennifer by drawing a condescending analogy between the upcoming end of civilization and the demise of the dinosaurs. “Nature knows when to give up. I could never get Joshua to learn to give up. Did you ever play tic-tac-toe? It’s always a tie, the game is pointless.” Back in the war room, they believe you can win a nuclear war, that there can be acceptable losses. Extinction is part of the natural order.” Jennifer blurts out, “I’m only seventeen, I’m not ready to die,” but Falken is unmoved. “This is unreal, you don’t care about death because you’re already dead,” accuses David. Their touching faith finally penetrates the darkness inside him and he joins them in the mad rush to NORAD HQ where they’ve just reached a state of Def Con One. Falken pleads with Barringer to have sense. “You are listening to a machine. Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.” The general calls off his response. Even though the computer map shows destruction across the country, contacts at various air bases report that they are alive and well. It was all a fantasy dreamed up by a nutty machine! Backslapping and hugging sweep through the base. After spending most of the movie overestimating Joshua, the collected humans now make the mistake of taking, the computer for granted. While the forces of war and science congratulate each other, Joshua whizzes through selections of digits looking for the correct code that will launch the missiles. The good times are over as soon as they began.
Barringer orders the bombers back to fail-safe. David’s last-gasp solution is to engage Joshua in a game. His various suggestions are denied. Then he proposes tic-tac-toe. The computer is flummoxed by the fact that the first game ends in a draw. David has Joshua play itself. As the machine continues to hurtle through numbers looking for the missile launch code, it simultaneously goes through all the possible options in a game of tic-tac-toe. It hits the launch code. The missile engines ignite. Then it runs out of game options. It learns that neither of its games can be won. “A strange game,” it intones, “the only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
Excuse me while I change my soaking shorts. WarGames is a real cake-and-eat-it movie. Its honorable intentions are endlessly undercut by its blatant irresponsibility. “They’re just machines, don’t you see?” it implores us in one breath, then continues, “but look at the cool shit you can do with them.” While none of its adult characters come off smelling of roses, it takes the unusual step of portraying its military men in a more humane light than its scientists. And as for Matthew Broderick’s performance as David Lightman, every computer shut-in across the country probably walked with a spring in their step after seeing one of their number portrayed as a cool, resourceful brainbox who could not only infiltrate the toughest systems but snare a sturdy girlfriend (Ally Sheedy’s Jennifer complemented David’s cerebral tendencies by being an aerobicized, bike-riding picture of Outdoor Girl desirability). These were qualities that he would display again, though this time with less interest in the fate of mankind, when he took on the role of Ferris Bueller.
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If WarGames depicted government as a body outpaced and intimidated by the very technology whose existence it authorized, Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius (1985) took the opposite tack. Its dweebs were the innocent lackeys of a shadowy cabal of warmongers who exploited their aptitude to construct the perfect killing machine. This is why little Mitch Taylor (Gabe Jarret, the spitting image of Sarah Jessica Parker) is brought to Pacific Tech (modeled almost exactly on Cal Tech) to join the crack physics team of TV science guy Jerry Hathaway (William always-the-asshole Atherton). “Compared to you, most people have the intellect of a carrot. We’re different. Better,” Hathaway tells Mitch. So Mitch becomes another one of Hathaway’s lab rats, beavering away on a laser project that, unbeknownst to them, was sold to the government as a weapon with such a powerful yet limited range of fire that it could be shot from space and would strike and vaporize any individual target.
Hathaway is happily diverting much of the funding from the project into the construction of a palatial home, but when the word comes down that a working model of the weapon is needed in four rather than the original eighteen months, he puts intolerable pressure on his prodigies. Luckily for the snivelling Mitch, he has a bosom buddy in the shape of campus physics legend Chris Knight (Val Kilmer). “I used to be you and lately I’ve been missing me, so I asked Hathaway if I could room with me,” drawls Chris, who has evolved from a grind into a leisure-loving wise-ass put-on artist (“I didn’t want you to think I was all brain, no penis,” he tells a prospective employer). When Chris, Mitch and their colleagues discover the true nature of the project they’ve sweated blood over, they conspire to sabotage a test firing. Replotting the weapon’s coordinates, they direct the beam through the window of Hathaway’s dream home, which now has a ton of unpopped popcorn as its centerpiece. Stranded among the furious military men, Hathaway has to sit and steam while unleashed popcorn smashes through the windows, doors and roof of his house.
This socko ending included, Real Genius has much to commend it. Michelle Meyrink is a hoot as the hyperkinetic girl genius, Jordan, and Jon Gries as the eternal burnout student Laszlo, and Robert Prescott as the evil asswipe Kent both perform with aplomb. But Val Kilmer is big-time Not Funny, shooting for a Bill Murray–style hepcat and missing by miles. And then there’s the uncomfortable question of Gabe Jarret. Not since the big-nosed kid from The Last American Virgin has such a real-looking individual stumbled through a piece of escapist entertainment. Jarret’s frozen grin and moist-eyed gaze of worship is appropriate when he’s an intimidated rookie, but when he’s supposed to be acting in a loosened-up capacity and he’s still standing like someone just opened an umbrella up his ass, he’s become more of a threat to our safety than any laserbeam.
* * *
The Manhattan Project (1986)—or Manhattan Project: The Deadly Game as it was cumbersomely retitled—was a direct attempt to mate the tension of WarGames with the science-geeks-versus-the-government stance of Real Genius. In the movie, penned and directed by Woody Allen’s writing partner, Marshall Brickman, Professor John Mathewson (John Lithgow) comes up with a new process for diffusing liquid plutonium. The usual shady cabal of shadowy figures are so impressed with his work that they send him off to spearhead plutonium production in a secret nuclear weapons plant in Ithaca, New York.
Mathewson has a deep-seated yearning for local Realtor Elizabeth Stevens (Jill Eikenberry) and tries to woo her by making friends with her
smart-ass son Paul (Christopher Collet). Paul is suspicious of the weirdo putting the moves on his newly separated mom (typecasting for Collet, who was suspicious of the weirdo putting the moves on his mom in First Born) but Mathewson, playing on the kid’s science-buff nature, invites him to his lab, drawing a veil over the true nature of his work. However, on the outside of the plant, Paul spots a five-leaf clover and this hideous mutation raises his suspicions that something is Very Wrong. When he tells his gal pal Jenny (Cynthia Nixon), she urges him to do something, to summon up the spirit of Anne Frank. “She’s in my English class,” she says, after seeing his blank face.
Paul, showing that David Lightman/MacGyver–style ingenuity, breaks into the plant, steals a jar of plutonium and decides to make his own atomic bomb. The reasons for this are kind of hazy. It may be so that Jenny has an angle to write an outraged article about the nuclear menace hidden in Ithaca. It may be because Paul is turned on by the idea of constructing “the world’s first privately built nuclear device,” or it may be because he wants to win the science fair. This is where he and Jenny take the finished 50-kiloton bomb. It’s also where the FBI swoop down on Paul. In the middle of their interrogation, a bunch of science-fair nerds, who hail Paul as their god, spring him from the clutches of the Feds. This is the film’s single funny sequence; smothering the agents in hydrogen and destabilizing the electric system, the nerds evolve into sinister, sniggering gremlins. Paul and Jenny return to Ithaca, using the threat of the bomb to force Mathewson into admitting the secret plant exists. Will he set off the device? Will the army shoot him? The sweaty tension that made WarGames’ final act so effective is entirely bungled here. Paul’s barely sure of his motives so why should we care?
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