War Games

War Games

War Games is a sci-fi movie from 1983 that narrates the story of David Lightman, a teenager that trying to hack into what he thought was a videogame development company accessed instead into a top secret military base computer and initialized a "game" called Global Thermonuclear War, which ran a simulation of a nuclear war between the USSR and the USA, driving everybody mad as they thought the simulation was a real deal, and giving a head start to a potential World War 3.

Even though it is considered a classic, I must admit I had never seen the movie, not even heard about it. I watched it without knowing a thing about the plot, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to be honest. However there are a lot of things that I found a little absurd and highly unlikely to occur in real life. The plot itself, for instance. Just to think that a kid by accident has the ability to enter a military base is something I found too fictional to my taste, even when we are talking about the 80's and technology and security protocols were not as complex as today.

Other thing I've never been such a fan is the need to put a love story arc into the movie, even when it feels totally forced and unnecessary. But most popular movies use this romantic tramas in the plot, so I understand that they include it in the main storyline. But don't get me wrong, I very much enjoyed it and would recommend it to a fellow geeky friend.

Another aspect I loved about the movie is that it gave me a lot of context to the lecture of the semester, Ready Player One, as the book mentions several references to the movie itself and different details about how life was in the 80's, and the movie represents a lot of them., so it's nice that the contents of the course complement each other.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moon Machines

Moon Machines The struggle to take the man to the moon So, tonight I just finished watching this documentary called "Moon Machines EP3: Navigation Computer" in Youtube. To be honest, I've never been too keen into space and aeronautics, so my knowledge about spaceraft technology and history is not great. I've always supposed that aerospacial engineering ought to be quite a challenge, and probably Apollo 11's mission to put a man in the moon is the peak representation of years of research and development of hundreds of engineers and scientists. However, I cannot help but to state I am completely astonished by the content of this documentary, as it relates one of many obstacles that engineers had to face in order to achieve the mission in time and quality: the navigation system in space.  The first thing that caught my attention is the fact that the US government chose a university as the main development centre (MIT) to achieve the mission, even when there we
Read more

Understanding the SOLID Principles

Understanding the SOLID Principles In a section on the book “Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success”, Edward Guiness talks about a set of practices to have simple and efficient code: The SOLID Principles. The acronym stands for:  Single Responsibility Principle Open/Closed Principle Liskov Substitution Principle Interface Segregation Principle Dependency Inversion Principle The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) states that each class should have one and exactly one responsibility. Only experience and practice will help you determine what one responsibility envolves, The Open/Closed Principle (OCP) says that each class should be open for extension, but closed for modification. When adding new behavior, we should leave the base class alone and instead create new inheriting classes, and avoid unexpected consequences for the original subclasses. The Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) says that the less inheritance we have in our cod
Read more

Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures Hidden Figures is a movie of 2016 that tells the story of different black women that were outstanding mathematicians and formed part of the NASA on its different missions during the Space Race. As (I suppose) most of the people that watched the movie, I had absolutely no idea who each of the main characters of the movie were. I had never read or heard of them whatsoever (which is the point in "hidden figures" I guess but well it's the truth).  After watching the movie, I had a mixture of feelings. I loved the movie, plus I'm a fan of history, and I LOVE historical pictures, so yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. I was astonished by the intelligence, courage and determination of each of the three characters. Many people tell stories about the scientific geniuses that changed history and the understanding of the universe, and it is pretty notorious that making all those break-throughs ain't a simple task. The majority that make these discoveries go throu
Read more