Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen ON THE BEACH THE SUMMER SCHEDULE LIKE THE KIDS in it, War Games peaks early. It never lives up to the promise of some opening scenes. In them, an unassuming kid named Dave (Matthew...
...The stand-off between Dave and Norad would seem a failsafe formula...
...Like the Ewoks, Pryor must carry the movie for its exhausted super-hero...
...We might expect that the sequels would be too much like their predecessors, but the problem is more insidious than that...
...Like Falken, the Emperor is a lightning rod installed in the movie to keep it from being burned down by its own plot...
...But they also recover for us the lost innocence of our youth...
...Or are they hallucinations...
...He gets to bio class just in time to be handed back a test with an F on it, and to bungle a question about asexual reproduction...
...The showdown between Luke (Mark Hamill) and Darth Vader (i.e., Luke's Dark Father) seems a bit stale and anticlimactic by the time we get to it in this third episode of the trilogy...
...This isn't the only point on which the two films concur...
...In that final episode (based, I believe, on one of the TV programs), Lithgow plays a white-knuckle flier who hallucinates goblins on the airplane's wing...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...
...This kind of recycled trash (or maybe laundered money would be a more apt comparison) immediately makes the film look dated...
...This is about the same average that the summer schedule as a whole bats: .250...
...Ewoks, on the other hand, are a Stone-Age race of extraordinary gentleness, tree-dwellers like the legendary Tasaday...
...the latter looks as if made from the spare parts of other people's movies...
...Of the four, only one - the last, directed by George Miller and starring John Lithgow - is worth seeing...
...Their plots seem as arbitrary, as listless and purposeless, as the anthology film that contains them...
...These young lovers are not so futuristic as they first seem, however...
...The final wisdom Star Wars has for us is the same found in War Games - that the world can be saved from technology only by a return to what is instinctively, perhaps primitively, human...
...He raises her bio grade along with his own, which makes her wary again...
...The innovation is "Ewoks," a race of kuala-like creatures living on "the forest moon of Endor...
...Like other summer fare, these flashbacks from the Zone are stories whose time has come, and gone...
...That's why it no longer matters who directs a Star Wars episode...
...They are at once harbingers of things to come and a throwback to the America that existed before the sixties...
...When he invites her up to his room, she hesitates...
...They seem a hopeful sign...
...When he has to dash off to a high-level meeting, he hands the gum to his assistant (and girlfriend), who pops the a-b-c wad into her own mouth...
...In this new movie, Superman (Christopher Reeves) is almost turned to the Dark Side of the Force, like Vader...
...Dave and Jennifer are hard to resist...
...The evil such a future contains is summed up by a warning Luke receives that "Your father is more machine than man now...
...When Dave accidentally happens on a "back door" in Norad's programs, he thinks he's playing games with a toy company, but Norad thinks he's an incoming Russian strike...
...Aren't your parents home...
...There he switches on his computer terminal to show her how he can change grades in the school's data bank...
...The disorientation was not only spatial, but temporal...
...The other three episodes are, I'm afraid, truer to the summer's form...
...But director Jon Badham has already shown this summer, in Blue Thunder, that he can botch a promising scenario...
...Thus the warning about Vader's having become "more machine than man" might be sounded as well in Superman III, one of whose villains is transformed into a robot right before our eyes...
...He gets help this time from writers Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, who throw a ringer into their script in the person of games theorist and original Norad programmer Steven Falken (John Wood...
...Even McKittrick is nervously chewing, on a stick of gum, thus reminding us that he's still human too...
...It's The Falcon and the Snowman, about kids who steal secrets from computers and sell them to Russia...
...There's hope left for mankind after all...
...They appeal as much to a nostalgia for the kids of the past, before adolescents became promiscuous the way they are today...
...His own relationship with his girl Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) is a curiously asexual one...
...It is that all these movies are too much like each other...
...One setting represents a technological future, the other a primordial past...
...None of the other summer biggies - Octopussy, Return of the Jedi, Superman HI and Twilight Zone - can make this claim...
...Perhaps Twilight Zone gives us the final score for the summer...
...Everybody was convinced the reels were out of sequence...
...They leave a black hole in our collective imagination...
...The role the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) plays in Jedi is, despite his malevolence, the same that Falken has in War Games...
...Though Superman must save himself, what saves the film is Richard Pryor, who is at the same time an intuitive computer genius like Dave in War Games, and an overgrown Ewok from Jedi...
...War Games would have been better had the filmmakers been more audacious...
...His anti-intellectualism, his renegade mentality, his intuitive grasp of machines are very much in the American grain...
...It begins with an escapade whose climax in an airplane hangar is overly reminiscent of last summer's Clint Eastwood starrer, Firefox, and whose follow-up is the gag from 1941 where an airplane refuels at a gas station...
...In them, an unassuming kid named Dave (Matthew Broderick) arrives late for school because he can't tear himself away from a video game...
...The universal myths for which they reach tend to collapse into a single myth, a generalization of such crude mass appeal that we can no longer tell one movie from another...
...While Luke does battle with Vader aboard a new Death Star, Han and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) maraud through the primeval forest inhabited by the Ewoks, trying to break into the bunker from which the Star's defense shield is generated...
...They seem to be made with interchangeable parts...
...There's a sly suggestion here that computers are replacing biology - replacing not only the science, but sex itself as the basis of relationships between boys and girls...
...Technocrat John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) has had all personnel taken "out of the loop" of computers that launch missiles...
...He defuses the confrontation between Dave and Norad and generally steals the movie's thunder from the kids...
...It is of course a sequel too, as it acknowledges by having four separate stories each the length of one episode from the original TV show...
...They aspire to the quality of an instant cliche...
...While the kids munch Doritos and slurp Tab at their terminal, Norad's ranking general takes a chaw at his...
...The Emperor draws off Luke's fury, leaving him free for a last-minute reconciliation with Vader...
...The notion that playing video games leads to a genius for computers is pure bunk, of course...
...So does the attitude toward women that these Ian Fleming stories from the fifties continue to perpetuate in the eighties...
...The contrast between these mises en scene is so stark that at the point when cross-cutting between them begins, one California audience rioted...
...But the Ewoks, along with Jabba the Hutt, a brigand from whom Han Solo (Harrison Ford) must be rescued, provide enough entertainment to carry Jedi...
...But it's attractive bunk...
...They might even remind us of the benevolent Falken in War Games, who broods constantly on pre-historic times...
...That's the sort of puppy-love gesture we might expect from Dave and Jennifer...
...They should have had enough faith in their precocious hero and heroine to let them play out the plot to its endgame unaided...
...For now, though, War Games has the distinction of novelty...
...ANOTHER film already in production sounds as if intended to cash in on War Games' popularity...
...Of these, Jedi is best because George Lucas and co-scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan do manage to inject something new into the now too-familiar Star Wars saga...
...Later, an octopus wraps itself around a character's face just as the creature in Alien did...
...Whatever they are, they show more personality in one take than some characters do in an entire movie...
...These films fall together in our minds like a burnt-out star...
...Jennifer and Dave are the next generation...
...Still, a film like Jedi remains light years beyond Octopussy...
...Dave is an old-fashioned American in many ways...
...As Dave goes eyeball to eyeball with Norad, we can see encouraging similarities between them...
...She cuts her visit short, as if he'd gotten fresh...
...The situation is desperate, but not serious...
...she asks warily, but then follows him upstairs...
...The former has interchangeable parts...
...They represent a new consciousness...
...They re-establish the human element in the age of technology...
...At Norad Command not far from Dave's home, the human element is thought of as a subversive element...
Vol. 110 • August 1983 • No. 14
