Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon sat down for an interview with Aint It Cool News.com, and during the course of that conversation the focus shifted from his current project to the next one on his agenda: a remake of John Badham's 1983 film, Wargames.
In that film, a teenager inadvertently hacks into a military computer and nearly causes World War III. That film starred Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy and was one of the box office hits of that summer. What follows is the Wargames-related portion of that interview. For the full interview, click HERE.
BEAKS:
It sounds like you are about to shift gears fairly dramatically with Wargames. That could be perilous. It’s a movie that our generation knows front to back. How do you approach Wargames in a way that I guess honors the original, but is also very much its own thing?
GORDON:
I think that’s obviously the goal of what we are going to try and do, which is to honor everything about the original. I think it all comes down to the fact that the world has changed a lot. Technology has changed a lot, and the world of hackers has changed a lot; that somebody would accidentally hack into some part of the government that they didn’t mean to is actually a lot more plausible now. To trigger something that they didn’t mean to, just because they were poking around… it’s a weekly news story that somebody got into the NSA or LulzSec. It’s everywhere now, and, essentially, that story is a lot more plausible in 2011, ‘12, ’13, than it was in 1983. That’s essentially how we are approaching it.
Would nukes be involved?
GORDON:
I can’t imagine they wouldn’t somehow, right? I mean it’s got to be some international destabilizer of some sort, and nukes… there are people who argue that if there were no nukes, then we would have already had World War III. There are people who argue that the threat of them means nothing happens. So that’s got to figure in somewhere. We are figuring that out now. We are working out the story right now.
Wargames, of course, is just one of a number of us-against the machine type of films in which our over-confidence in the devices we create ultimately leads to our downfall.. or damn close to it.
It's a sub-genre that probably began with 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project, which was based on the trilogy by the late D.F. Jones. In that film, Dr. Charles Forbin (Eric Braedon) creates the ultimate computer in which we entrust control of all of our country's defense systems. It isn't long before Colossus gains consciousness and effectively takes over the world. Colossus has been earmarked for a remake by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment, with rumors that Will Smith will portray Forbin.
James Cameron, of course, dealt with similar themes, though in a much more kick-ass way with 1984's The Terminator, which led to three subsequent sequels, a TV series, numerous comic books, novels and a reboot that's in the works. In that franchise, Skynet is another system in which we put in charge and it's a short matter of time before it really takes charge, becoming hellbent on wiping us out. To actually see Skynet exert its control for the first time, check out the highly effective climactic sequences of T3: Rise of the Machines.
Rob Cohen's 2005 film Stealth featured a jet fighter that is designed to "think" faster than the human mind, and it ultimately decides to try and use its nuclear arsenal against its creators. Director D.J. Caruso's 2008 production of Eagle Eye dealt with another security system that gains consciousness and will do whatever is necessary to carry out its programming to make the world safe -- with a special bent towards self-preservation. A year later saw the release of the Adrian Paul starrer, Eyeborgs, about a government surveillance system in the form of tiny robots that patrol the world, which (once again) gains consciousness and comes to see humanity as an annoyance.
In the world of Marvel Comics -- and featured prominently on the animated The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, is Ultron, the robot system created by Ant-Man Hank Pym, that comes to recognize that the only way to fulfill its programming of eliminating all chaos in the world is to actually destroy all life on Earth.
Finally, from television to film is the original Star Trek and the frequent battle of wills between Captain James Timberius Kirk and all matters of machine that have deemed humans impractical. It is only through Kirk's usually talking them into self-destructing that the race is saved. On the '60s series it was a theme best explored in the episode "The Ultimate Computer," in which a space probe, having achieved consciousness, is hellbent on wiping out humans -- until it mistakes Kirk for its creator (which is all the good captain needs to point out its illogic, thus causing it to destroy itself). Then there was the big screen variation of the same idea, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), in which the space probe Voyager 6 has been given self-awareness by a machine planet and is returning to Earth to "join" with its creator.
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