I tend toward suspicion on remakes in general, but when it comes to WarGames, I actually think it makes a lot of sense. Even if nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction no longer hold pride of place in our foreign policy challenges (though they’re hardly irrelevant), the Internet’s obviously become much, much more important in a more direct way, whether it’s Egypt cutting off the internet during the revolution earlier this year, the perceived importance of Twitter in getting information out of and supporting protest in Iran, Chinese hacking into American institutions, or the Obama administration’s efforts to create internet and cell phone networks it can make available to dissidents that won’t be vulnerable to shutdowns by their government.
So the interesting thing is who the intrepid teenage hackers encounter out there, and what the consequences of their actions are. Maybe they make contact with budding dissidents somewhere in the Middle East without being aware they’re real and, pretending to be agents of the U.S. government, promise support they don’t actually think they’ll have to deliver, only to find themselves on the hook for a revolution that’s actually taking place? There’s a lot to explore there about responsibility and identity on the internet now that it’s a social and widely-used tool.