Thirty minutes in, there was only one thing kept me from switching off War Machine: my students. See, this semester, I’m teaching Film Genres and my students are learning to identify the building blocks of genre movies and how these elements work together to create a particular genre. I figured that Netflix’s War Machine could be a contemporary case study. From the trailer it was obvious this was a military sci-fi mashup – and hybrid movies show their genre genetics clearest.
War Machine follows a basic, by-the-numbers plot. A nameless Staff Sargent (Alan Ritchson) joins the Rangers to fulfil his dying brother’s wish. He gets assigned the number 81 and becomes team leader. During a military exercise, they encounter a big metal something in the forest. Naturally, their first instinct is to blow it up. Turns out, this was an alien machine that crash landed. The machine gets mad (who wouldn’t?) and starts killing them. They run; it chases them through the forest, firing missiles and bombs at them. That’s it.
War Machine managed to tick most of the boxes for both a military and sci-fi movie. On the military front, the first ten minutes has plenty of tanks, army fatigues, and explosions in a generic desert. The Rangers’ training was a by-the-book montage of recruits running around obstacle courses and drill sergeants screaming like their only reference point was Full Metal Jacket. Honestly, while all this looked like a U.S. Army recruitment promo, I found Boots to be more inspirational military fare.
Once the alien machine pops up, things swing towards sci-fi for 81 and his team. The sudden genre pivot was what initially drew me to War Machine. Think of other movies that took the risk of combining genres halfway through. Cowboys & Aliens did it in 2011 with its unusual (some might say unholy) mashup of the western and sci-fi. Or Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), which starts as a family drama before veering beautifully into a high-concept sci-fi mystery.
War Machine had the same potential and could have been a movie from a whole different universe if handled with more skill by Patrick Hughes, who co-wrote, co-produced, and directed the movie. Unfortunately, Hughes seemed content to tell a perfectly linear and lukewarm story. The alien machine rampages; the recruits die one by one. 81 alone is impervious, protected by tank-grade plot armour and the fact that nothing can kill the sheer bulk of Ritchson/Reacher. Like any final girl, 81’s survival is guaranteed.
Hughes’s movie had a little of everything from sci-fi and a whole lot of nothing. The alien machine looked like a Temu version of the ED-209 from Robocop. It stumbled around, firing death at the recruits like the Tripods from War of the Worlds, but without the same visceral horror of bodies being vaporised by an unstoppable killer. This alien, and this movie, were neither homage nor tribute to any of the greats from science fiction or military.
Credit where it’s due, though, the action scenes were pretty good. Hughes packs in plenty of explosions and big set piece action sequences. Which were the only thing adding meat to a scrawny plot and even scrawnier characters. Too bad none of the recruits were fleshed out as actual people with any meaningful personalities or motivations. So when the machine (which also has zero personality or motivation) starts slaughtering them, it’s hard to care, especially when nobody has names.
The one good thing about War Machine, which I’m genuinely grateful for, is that the threat is firmly extraterrestrial. Too often we’ve seen the American military in movies fighting enemies from whichever real-world nation is currently on America’s (s)hit list of bad actor states. Hollywood isn’t helping tensions by cementing these geopolitical stereotypes on screen. So I’m glad that Hughes allows a small discussion where the recruits speculate if the alien is Chinese or Russian before putting the debate down.
In the end, War Machine wasn’t a bad movie. Neither was it a good one. It was a perfectly middling Netflix product that won’t leave any impression. It offered nothing original (not even its name!) despite having a potentially potent concept that blended two powerful genres. I won’t be recommending this to my students. They might end up accidentally watching Brad Pitt’s 2017 War Machine instead. Then again, they’d probably have a better time with that one.
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