Metacritic reviews

There's not a scene here where Badham doesn't seem to know what he's doing, weaving a complex web of computerese, personalities and puzzles; the movie absorbs us on emotional and intellectual levels at the same time. And the ending, a moment of blinding and yet utterly elementary insight, is wonderful.

Badham and company elide a lot of technical details of hacking, but the basics of the nascent computer culture still feel spot-on, right down to the body type and personalities of Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin, who play two of Broderick's techno-literate confederates (and work in Seattle, no less). More important is how WarGames plays up the contrast between teenagers—rebellious on the surface but conformist by nature—with a cynical adult world that has become convinced that nuclear annihilation might not be so bad.

Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker's script is tight, and Badham directs the whole thing with economy and pace but it's Matthew Broderick's film.

The chase sequences with government agents are tame but the film builds to a tense (and witty) conclusion at the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker in Colorado Springs.

John Badham, a last-minute replacement on the project, impresses with his Spielberg-inflected direction of the young actors and his efficient management of competing plot levels. But much of the credit should go to Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, and Walon Green, whose screenplay deftly links the boy's sexual and moral maturation with a similar development on the part of the computer, thus accomplishing the thematic goal of “humanizing” technology that all the video-game movies—and video games themselves—have been striving for.

Although the script has more than its share of short circuits, director John Badham solders the pieces into a terrifically exciting story charged by an irresistible idea: an extra-smart kid can get the world into a whole lot of trouble that it also takes the same extra-smart kid to rescue it from.

The teaser scene is phenomenal. It depicts the escalating tensions that accompany being one of the men in the final chain that leads to a nuclear launch. In this case, it's just a drill, but the men (played by Michael Madsen and John Spencer) don't know that. They must confront the morality of obeying an order that could lead to a worldwide holocaust. It's a taut scene that is suffused with verisimilitude.

Featuring some strong performances from a cast that includes Dabney Coleman and Ally Sheedy, convincing re-creations of defense technology, and nicely modulated tension, WARGAMES is a generally effective message film.

An entertaining movie that, like a video game once played, tends to disappear from one's memory bank as soon as it's finished.

The first half has a sardonic edge to it, but the more seriously the movie takes itself the sillier it gets.