John Badham · 1983 · overland

A Seattle teenager war-dialling for a games company reaches a NORAD supercomputer instead, starts a round of Global Thermonuclear War, and cannot stop it - so he is arrested, taken inside Cheyenne Mountain, escapes, and crosses the country to find the one man who might know how to make the machine stand down.

1. 1
   Seattle

   David Lightman's home, his high school and the arcade - a bright, unmotivated teenager with an IMSAI 8080 who changes his grades on the school district system and then war-dials Sunnyvale looking for a games company.

2. 2
   Colorado Springs

   NORAD inside Cheyenne Mountain, where he is brought by the FBI after the news tells him what he has done - and where McKittrick decides he is working for the Soviets and charges him with espionage.

3. 3
   Grand Junction

   He walks out of NORAD by joining a tourist group, gets a bus west across Colorado, and rings Jennifer from here - which is the moment the film turns from a thriller about computers into a chase across a continent.

4. 4
   Goose Island

   Stephen Falken living as Robert Hume on an island in the Oregon river country, reached on the last ferry of the day - the man who built the machine, lost a son called Joshua, and thinks nuclear war is as inevitable as tic-tac-toe.

5. 5
   Colorado Springs

   Flown back to the mountain with Falken, and the ending - WOPR playing itself at noughts and crosses until it works out that the only winning move is not to play.