Lately my movie collecting has turned to the 80s and 90s US output, specifically computer nerd-themed movies.
Tron may be the actual first 80s movie to blind us with computer geekery but for me it started with WarGames. Matthew Broderick taught hacker ethos and Ally Sheedy was an adorable sidekick. I mean my god, that shot of her in gym attire? Yes, please!
I’m trying to backtrack to 1983, I was 11 at the time, so would be in 4th grade. My earliest memories of computers are from 3rd grade. Here in Sweden this is when we start to learn english (and although you can’t tell from reading this shit I was actually really good at it) and the school had a computer room full of home computers, mostly VIC-20s if my memory serves.
Anyway, by the 4th grade I had a VIC-20 of my own and seeing WarGames absolutely blew my mind. It’s a cold war thriller with a computer hacker (Matthew Broderick) breaking into a computer at NORAD to play war games but NORAD thinks it’s real and we narrowly escape World War III. It’s still a light and enjoyable watch, the tone of the movie is never too serious although it’s more thriller than comedy.
WarGames from 1983 by John Badham is available on 4K UHD Blu-ray.
So why didn’t Tron influence me as much? The short answer is that there was nowhere to watch it. I had a short booklet with a tape retelling the movie (from Disney) but didn’t actually see it until quite a bit later.
Tron from 1982 by Steven Lisberger is available on 4K UHD Blu-ray.
What I did watch was Short Circuit, same director as WarGames (John Badham) and we’ve now stumbled into 1986. This is a comedy about a robot with AI going rogue and becoming alive. It was built as a war machine but discovers there’s more to life than that. Ally Sheedy is back, still adorable and the movie still mostly works, mainly because of the believable robot design. It’s still a kind of thriller but the cross-over of actors from Police Academy will tip you off that the tone of the piece is more light-hearted.
As we cross into the 1990s the computer nerd movie evolved into a more serious affair. Sneakers from 1992 is a rather more tense affair than anything from the 80s, hacker ethos (and paranoia) oozes through it. Robert Redford and a team of hackers get involved in a plot to seize a crypto box that can decrypt anything. Although there are som fun moments this is much more of a straight-faced thriller and it still works.
Sneakers from 1992 by Phil Alden Robinson is available on Blu-ray.
The above were my main influences from the movie world that moulded me into the computer nerd I still am today.
Other movies of the ilk later joined my short-list of movies about computers and/or AI that I enjoy immensely.
First and foremost is WestWorld, in my book this is peak Michael Crichton. Yul Brynner as a robot cowboy going berzerk and killing people at the titular amusement park is a chilling endictment of technology taken too far. And I adore Brynner in the role, super-detached, relentless, certainly this was the template for James Camerons Terminator.
Westworld from 1973 by Michael Crichton is available on 4K UHD Blu-ray.
An undeservedly much less known, slightly earlier movie (1970) is Colossus: the Forbin project. Here, a brilliant computer scientist puts the US nuclear weapons under the control of the titular computer that promptly locks out the humans, colludes with its Soviet counter-part and enslaves humanity. Nightmare fuel all the way through, the tone is clinically serious in this one and certainly a warning that rings true in our current times.
Colossus: the Forbin project from 1970 by Joseph Sargent is available on Blu-ray.
Why isn’t Blade Runner or the aforementioned Terminator on this list? It’s not that I don’t love them but they don’t concern themselves with the minutiae of computers or computing.
Both Blade Runner from 1982 by Ridley Scott and The Terminator from 1984 by James Cameron are available on 4K UHD Blu-ray.