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Just the other day my wife asked me what movies I love for my childhood.

We had just watched the secret of Nim, a beloved classic with our eight-year-old daughter,

and she wanted to share more films from our childhoods with her.

Not remembering many, I grabbed my phone, a device that did not exist in my childhood,

pulled up Google, a service that did not exist in my childhood,

and looked up movies that did exist in 1983,

a year in which I was the same age as my daughter is now.

The results pulled up and it was a pretty good year in film,

returned of the Jedi, terms of endearment, flash dance,

trading places, two James Bond movies,

Octopussy and never say never again.

Also debuting in 1983 was War Games.

Matthew Broderick playing a teenage computer with mistakenly dials into a top secret

NORAD defense computer and begins playing what he thinks is a game

against an advanced artificial intelligence.

In so doing, he almost starts World War III.

War Games is interesting as a mirror for the anxieties of the time.

The rise of automation and computer technologies and nuclear annihilation.

And in that, this fictional Hollywood adventure thriller was dead on the money.

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