WarGames Sequel Now Filming

iluvcapra writes "This news is a little late, but on November 20th WarGames 2: The Dead Code began filming in Montreal. (I only became aware of the new production when I read that MGM is suing the rightful owner of WarGames.com for his domain name.) The film will be produced and distributed by MGM — distributor of the original WarGames — and directed by Stewart Gillard, director of such gems as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3. Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, the team behind the original film, are not involved. The plot revolves around a hacker breaking into a terrorism-simulation computer."

Brilliant

[TPIRman]

I can think of no better way to kick off the marketing campaign for WarGames 2 than by filing an outrageous lawsuit that will piss off the very geek fanbase who'd potentially be interested in the film. Well done, MGM. Because wargames-movie.com just wouldn't be good enough, would it?

The chances that I would see this movie just went from slim to none.

Re:Augh!

[garcia]

It was a good movie for its time IMHO. It was definitely more geeky than those "geek" movies that followed (The Net, Hackers, etc). I certainly enjoyed it then and will still sit through it if it happens to be playing on a boring Saturday afternoon.

This looks like it has nothing to do w/the first other than the stolen name for credibility.

tagging (beta): lame

Re:Augh!

[mythosaz]

Odd. While there were huge *glaring* technical problems with the film (acoustic modem wardialing, anyone?), it had a fairly reasonable portrial of "young hacker kid" before it was popularized. Social loner who wardials entire exchanges looking for carriers is EXACTLY how a lot of us spent our time growing up. Poking and probing new systems was always a joy.

Few other movies include the phrase, "I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd help."

This isn't a film for geeks.

[FatSean]

It's for scaredy-cat non-geeks who want to be terrified by what those mysterious boxes can do in the wrong hands.

Plus, a romantic sub-plot, a cool chase scene, and some improperly used computer terminology.

Re:Augh!

[XxtraLarGe]

If you saw it back in the Cold War era, it was actually a very good movie. It's hard to take serious now with the current state of technology and political climate.

Re:My Rights Online??!!

[Rob T Firefly]

The rightful owner of a domain is being sued for that domain by the people behind this new movie. That's pretty damn YRO-y.

Re:My Rights Online??!!

[qortra]

The title is not exhaustive, but the description clearly says: "MGM is suing the rightful owner of WarGames.com [cadenhead.org]".

People have the right (or ought to anyway) to keep domains that they purchase, develop, and maintain in good faith. MGM is going to try to bully him into giving it up. They will probably succeed, and if they do, it will be because they have more clout and more money (a more expensive lawyer). Ergo, his online rights are now in jeopardy of being violated.

I bet you're glad you posted anonymously now. And to the lazy moderator who gave this guy an "insightful", shame on you. Check more carefully next time. I realize it's too much of a hassle to read TFA, but please take the time to at least read the short description on Slashdot.

meh

[haplo21112]

Already sounds lame, I doubt it will have the soild story line and lesson that the first had, and it already sounds like its being made by and with sub par talent.

I am sure that it will focus to much on action sequences (for the most part the first had very few) and Technobabble/Technobuzz, that will confuse the uninitiated and make the rest of us groan. The first movie avoided most of that by not over explaining concepts and just sort of glossing over just letting the viewer assume there is a technology to make such a thing happen, and letting those in the know imagine how it might be possible.

So far sounds I'm seeing direct to video land, as its best hope.

Hopefully now I can be plesantly surprised, but I doubt it.

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[rudeboy1]

Congratulations! You have accurately defined the plot for the following movies:
Wargames
Hackers
Hackers 2 (yeah they made one, believe it or not)
The Lawnmower Man
The Net
Sneakers (Good movie, but still makes the list)
Johnny Mnemonic
Swordfish
Tron

Anyone see a pattern here?

nooooooooo

[j_kenpo]

Lets see, considering Hollywoods track record with movies sincce the time period of the original Wargames, I have a feeling that they are going to make this soooo bad that it will ruin any quality the original had. This.... this is why your profits are slipping, bad movies, not piracy.

Broken Premise?

[DG]

The premise behind the original - for those too young to remember - is (abridged) that a hacker breaks in to a NORAD computer and proceeds to run a wargame simulation of an ICBM strike on the continental US. The game plays out on the screens of the main command centre at NORAD and, unable to tell that what they are seeing is not real, a retaliatory strike is nearly launched.

That's probably not an exact synopsis of the plot, but it's close enough to make no nevermind.

Now in the world of Mutually Assured Destruction, which relies on a massive counterstrike against the initiator BEFORE his missiles arrive at their targets, this is at least a plausible scenario - close enough to allow sufficient suspension of disbelief to allow the movie to work. It's true that these command centres were manned 24/7 watching for any sign of an incoming strike, and that the time window between detecting the strike and making the decision to initiate the counterstrike was very small. It's also true that in real life there were a number of "near misses" where technical failures and other issues were initially interpreted as an incoming strike and disaster only narrowly averted.

But we aren't in that game anymore. There is no longer a 20 minute window in which someone has to decide to launch a nuclear counterstrike based on a fairly narrow band of incoming data. No terrorist group - indeed, very few nations - are capable of the "mutual" in "Mutually Assured Destruction".

So a Homeland Security central command centre starts reporting dozens to hundreds of terrorist strikes on US Territory? So what? Response will be in the hands of local Guard units and law enforcement/emergency responders, not a remote C3S cell. The worst that could happen is that troops are mobilized needlessly - and there's time to see if the purported strikes show up on CNN.

The premise only works in a Cold War, MAD environment, not the modern day "ball of snakes" environment.

That doesn't bode well for the success of the movie, methinks.

DG

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[rudeboy1]

Son of a BITCH! How did I miss Antitrust?!? I'm going to hanf my head in shame for the rest of the day.
By the way, I'm already kicking myself for excluding anime from the list, as most large budget anime movies seem to have this as a universal theme (Take Ghost in the Shell, though the romantic subplot is a little different... the series leads me to believe the Major is a lesbian in love with her repair-woman). Oh well. Didn't have time to make a concise list. That's the curse of Slashdot. You can make a hurried post that will make it to the upper area of the thread, or you can spend your time making a well-thought out post, and see it wallow in obscurity at post #1990999 in the thread.

Re:Broken Premise?

[Junta]

The game plays out on the screens of the main command centre at NORAD and, unable to tell that what they are seeing is not real, a retaliatory strike is nearly launched

I haven't seen the film in years, but I still can't imagine how someone could misremember it like that. The humans were not controlling the response, the computer was. Hence the whole 'play tic-tac-toe with itselfs'. They were watching the computer prepare to launch the strike and it wouldn't listen for some long-forgotten reason.

The blurb is really confusing "Ripley has been designed to appeal to potential terrorists, and certain glitches have turned made him become paranoid. ", wtf does that mean?

There is a scenario I could think of that could mimic the War Games Scenario, on a somewhat reduced scale, related to the most common domestically feared terrorism attack, hijacked planes. Ripley could decide all passenger jets in the air are hijacked and control automated missile batteries to threaten all flights... Toss in some key characters on flights to bring the viewer more into it. It certainly doesn't speak to the MAD message that was central to War Games, but I doubt the studios have a particularly deep meaning in mind...

I seriously doubt this movie will be remotely good, but there exists potential for some of the fundamentals of the first movie to play out in the terrorist context..

Re: Because the truth 25 years later is depressing

[TaoPhoenix]

For historical quaintness, and my proportionate age at the time, Wargames will always be worth watching every 5 years on my $1 copy. (1981 pricing!)

The truth is that the kid will hack in, find someone using the server to host Things Not Intended For The PG13 movie rating ...

Re:Could be good

[rob1980]

It's still a sequel of a movie that doesn't need one.

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[Wdomburg]

Or dislikes incredibly poor pacing (not to mention ludicrous plot holes and freshman level philosophy, but all three movies had that).

What are "reasonable rights" in holding a name?

[BTWR]

What are "reasonable rights" in holding a domain name? I fully support any company, big-or-small, in suing some squatter who buys up every domain name like "Spiderman-3.com" "Spiderman3.com" and "Spidey3.com," and simply puts up a ransom-note-like "this domain name for sale - $500,000!" index.html on it.

I also see the idea of not allowing people to put up blatantly copyrighted domain names, and then holding them from the copyright owner (i.e. "cocacola.com" or buying "amazon.biz" and holding it from Amazon.com purely for profit), but something like "apple.com," while a name of a major computer manufacturer, would be perfectly valid had it been bought by a person who used it to sell bushels of apples online, or had apple-picking vacations for sale, etc. Similar to "War Games" - it is a common term. Of course, had wargames.com been squatting the site, that'd be another story.

When the U.N. decided that famous people can sue for their domain name (juliaroberts.com was the case I remember), I assume this does not apply to some 24 year-old girl whose name is Julia Roberts from Ithaca, NY - right? Surely Erin Brockovitch has no-more right to the domain name than the nobody from upstate NY. But they both have a right to it over some squatter of course. But then again, what if someone bought that site and made a legitimate Julia Roberts fan page? Would that be valid?

Computer Intelligence = Oxymoron

[mabu]

Does anybody really think the notion of an intelligent computer is realistic any more? I mean, it's believable that a computer won't cooperate with you, but having a mind of its own and actually getting things done? It seems that the popularity of Windows OS has pretty much made such a concept pretty unbelievable among average people these days.

Now maybe when the computer was a mysterious device that few people used, could you get away with portraying them as dubious, intelligent entities, but is that a believable plot device nowadays? This kind of premise should have been abandoned about the same time movies about high school kids building sentient robots was abandoned.

I suspect, like most late remakes, this will fall flat.

Re:Augh!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"No offense, but the first blew chunks. I don't see how this can be improved."

Rimmerian Nitpick: If it blew chunks, wouldn't it stand to reason that it had plenty that was improvable?

Is it a sequel?

[91degrees]

Sounds like a remake.

Except, Wargames was pretty good in terms of research and accuracy. The AI philosophy (learn from its mistakes) looks a bit outdated now but was pretty much what researchers were looking at at the time. The voice synthesis on every terminal in the world was a bit daft, and a few bits and pieces were a lttle hokey, but we didn't have the usual computer cliches. There was no "Running Virus" with progress bar. No 72 point lettering. No magic mechanism to break the password. Broderick's character actually had to spend ages rummaging through information just to get past the login. I'll admit that some of this was hokey but it's the least hokey computer movie ever by a long shot.

If they can manage a similar level of realism for Wargames 2, then it would be interesting. Somehow, I doubt they'll do that. I expect to see loads of pointless explosions, a whole bunch of meaningless jargon, and lots of computer nerds totally bamboozled by the genius of some 16 year old kid.

Is it wrong of me to judge the movie so soon?

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[Tony Hoyle]

Even Hitler wasn't completely evil, just nuts (not helped by his doctor prescribing him drugs which made him worse).

Of course you have to define evil first..

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[WilliamSChips]

To the three people discussing how Hitler isn't evil: I only put the "other than Hitler" comment so that parent wouldn't try to hit the low-hanging fruit. Thank you for proving my point though.

Re:Augh!

[Overly Critical Guy]

At some point, you have to accept that the movie isn't going to portray every little thing with maddening detail, and that you have to assume some plausible backstory exists that isn't being depicted. Guess what, you rarely see characters going to the bathroom or sleeping either. Rather than calling it a "glaring technical problem," you assume they do it off-screen at some point.

Re:Brilliant

[IgLou]

You know what, you're absolutely correct. MGM, is the commercial entity WarGames2 is just a project. But the reality is TLD's are given out like riddilin to school kids and everyone wants a .com and no one cares if you're valid using .com TLD when you should have a .net. Well, at least no one with money cares. I just don't know how something like this gets fixed.

But for those who feel like doing something, just fire an email to MGM tell them you don't like this and then boycott their films and better yet raise the profile of their actions to local media. People in general don't like it when the big guy puts the squeeze on the little guy so leverage that.

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[susano_otter]

Much better is the struggle between principled but impractical vs. unpricipled yet practical. The redeeming factor for Swordfish, for example.

I see this as a classic example of good vs. evil.

What you're describing is a conflict between doing what you know to be right ("principled") even though it's very difficult ("impractical") and doing what you know to be wrong ("unprincipled", though really it's just a different set of principles) because it's easier.

And that right there is exactly what the struggle between good and evil is. It happens every day, in our own choices, and in the choices of the people we interact with.

Stories, especially stories that illustrate fundamental principles, are often simpler and clearer than real life. This is usually a good thing; it gives us a chance to look at the fundamental principles, apart from the confusion of the real world.

Fairy tales are true, not because they tell us that dragons really exist, but because they tell us that dragons can really be defeated.

Sure, the dragons don't appear in real life as they do on the Hollywood screen; sometimes, they're just a private idea or temptation of our own. But look at the world around you. Can you honestly tell me that the struggle between good and evil isn't a constant factor in all our affairs?

Re:They had to revise it for the times

[evilviper]

Game Over. Opponent has no weapons.

You were eaten by a grue.

Re:This isn't a film for geeks.

[WilliamSChips]

What he really means is a story answering the question "How much of your principles should you sacrifice to get your principles accepted?" i.e. "When do the ends stop justifying the means?". That is not Good versus Evil and becomes severely distorted when you try to make it such, although a "good vs evil" may be the backdrop for a "where ends stop justifying means". (For example, the war with the Cylons is the backdrop for A Measure of Salvation [wikipedia.org].)
The best stories don't answer deep philosophical questions, they raise them.

Re:Brilliant

[1u3hr]

actually to make geeks happy they should save DNS space and put it at: www.mgm.com/wargames2

A true geek would use wargames2.mgm.com.

Too bad the concept of subdomainms seems beyond most companies. And registrars and the like actively promote the proliferation of separate .com domains for every purpose, that often after a year or so are neglected and end up as phishing or porn sites, where subdomains cost nothing and last as long as the parent domain.

Re:my proposed slogan for the new film

[Dachannien]

Sorry, but even if we didn't hate Muslim extremists, they'd still hate us.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Brilliant

[kreyg]

A true geek would use wargames2.mgm.com.

Now that you mention it... I wonder why they don't do that? Studio logos and name always get top billing in any film, obviously they believe that studio/brand awareness is important. What could be better than associating the film with the studio right in the URL? It gives a level of authenticity to the site as well, making it obvious it is the official site.

Re:Brilliant

[Moridineas]

Beyond most _companies_?

Maybe it's just me, but so often people I talk to have trouble dealing with sites that don't start with "www".

As one example, I setup a number of years ago an intranet for a small company, that had a "home.theirdomain.com" internal site.

me: "ok, the server address is home.theirdomain.com"
them *typing*: "ok, www dot home dot ..."
me: "you don't need the www"
them: "????"

I don't get it!

Re:Brilliant

[Fred_A]

Maybe it's just me, but so often people I talk to have trouble dealing with sites that don't start with "www".

This is a very common problem, mostly with the "Internet == Web == IE" crowd. Basically because nobody ever explained the structure of a URL to them. They don't know what a host name, a domain name, a TLD or a path are. And don't even get started with the protocol bit at the start. It might all be written in runes for all the good it does.

On a related note my domains are in the .org or .net TLDs and a lot of people have trouble with that as well :
"and my address is foo at bar dot org"
"what ?"
"dot O-R-G"
"Oh. And then dot com ?"
"duh"

A long time ago, ISPs commonly gave a kind of "Internet basics" booklet when people signed up. Now people are supposed to figure it out as they go. Obviously that approach does not work.

Re:my proposed slogan for the new film

[spun]

Can't you come up with anything better than that? Face it: the country is not on your side anymore. Everyone hates Bush, everyone hates this war. You lost, give it up. Snide, idiotic comments like this just prove you are a sore loser with too much hate in your heart.

Liberals under-reacted. Based on what has actually happened, they should have reacted much more. If you think we aren't torturing people, would you mind if I cam over and waterboarded you? Are you really equating Clinton's fuck-ups with Bush's? Not that Clinton did the right thing, but they are orders of magnitude apart. Plus, Clinton admitted he did the wrong thing and apologized, which Bush is incapable of doing. The majority of Democrats were LIED TO BY BUSH! Finally, the last statement reveals the true depths of your ignorance and bigotry. Who attacked us? Shiite or Sunni? Do you even know the difference? What country were they from? Do you even care? Or is it all just evil brown heathens to you?

Does it burn knowing you are in the minority? Does it burn knowing the world does not share in your hate-fest? I certainly hope so, people like you are one of the root causes of suffering in the world. We would all be better off without you. FOAD.