But the director, John Badham, reduces the potential Pirandellian horseplay to a series of lame Tinseltown in-jokes.

NEWYORKER: The Hard Way

"WarGames" director John Badham also worried that people would eventually tire of watching Matthew Broderick reading aloud from a screen, so he pushed Mr. Parkes and his co-screenwriter Lawrence Lasker to devise a way to make the computer talk, like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey, " even though no such technology existed at the time.

WSJ: "Disconnect": From Talkies to Texties