I watched Wargames: The Dead Code (2008) ... / 2009-01-19

I watched Wargames: The Dead Code (2008) this weekend. I'm not the movie reviewing type, but for this time I'll write something reviewish.
Why? The original: WarGames (1983). It must be the movie that influenced me most. It got me more interested in computers, taught me about modems, which led to BBSes, which led to Internet. I must have seen the original Wargames at least 30 times, if not more. Once in a movie theatre (probably in 1983/1984) but years later I taped it from TV and that tape was wearing out by the time I bought it on vhs tape and a few years later I bought the DVD.
This (Wargames, the dead code) is a weak remake. The original may not be a cinematographic masterpiece but this one has a lot less of a story. They try to build a number of parallels with the original but on some occasions that starts to look quite artificial.
At the end the big storyline is the same: big computer tries to take over US air defense and is about to cause total annihilation, hacker kid makes the computer think again by running a high number of simulations and finding out the best strategic move is not to play.
Transplantation from the 1980s to 2008 was done ok: cold war threat and parents that were unaware of their kids situation because of two jobs were replaced by terrorism threat, a father gone under suspicious circumstances and a single working mom. A lot of the 'the computer is watching you' stuff seemed to me right from 'Enemy of the state'.
I really missed a high-ranking officer saying "I'd piss on a sparkplug if it would do any good!"