Anyone who knows me knows that I have a huge soft spot for what I call “nerdy scientist movies”. These movies are always terrible, but the plucky and endearing scientist characters make the movies worth watching. Think: Twister, The Core, andJurassic Park (though Jurassic Park is also awesome because of the dinosaurs, obviously). The science is always bad, the scientists are always kind of lame, and the movies always suck, but I love them anyway. Hacker movies fall into this category for me as well– and I had the pleasure of watching a new one last night.

Wargames: The Dead Code is a remake/reboot of the original WarGames, which came out in 1983. This new movie comes out July 29th, but I have a hacker buddy who downloaded it early, so I got to watch it last night. My review, after the jump

Obviously I wasn’t expecting this movie to be a total gem. It’s a hacker movie, and hacker movies are never good. However, I was expecting some endearing awkwardness, some frantic and sweaty code-crunching, some snarky tech know-it-all one-liners, and some general hacking badassery. Ultimately, this movie had little to none of any of those.

The main character is a high-school kid, who is obviously smart and has gotten into trouble for computer-related hijinx before. The film opens in his bedroom- he is fiddling around with wires, his best friend is trying to cajole him into various scams, he is fiddling with some phone phreaking equipment- it seems promising. However, the opening scene is really the only time we see nerd-in-his-element geekery. From this point on, we enter a world of fake software, talking computers, bemused “hackers”, dumb video games, and annoying guys in suits– essentially, everything of substance in the movie is glossed over and boring. There was certainly the potential to have goofy-but-lovable characters, impressive hacking magic, and massive computer-controlled webs of conspiracy and intrigue. The movie could have been totally awesome. Unfortunately, the characters are all flat, the plot is predictable, and the ‘hacking’ is just playing a lame video game. This movie gets a thumb down from me.