To be honest, my expectations from War Machine weren’t very high, and my primary reason for viewing it was Alan Ritchson. I’m happy to report that War Machine doesn’t come out all guns blazing, and that’s precisely what makes it such an adrenaline-filled ride.

Unlike Brad Pitt’s satirical slow-burning movie with the same name from 2017, this War Machine is relentlessly thrilling. Director Patrick Hughes (The Hitman’s Bodyguard) has delivered big muscles, bigger explosions, and an unstoppable alien death machine hunting soldiers through the wilderness. 

Alan Ritchson leads the film as a combat engineer-turned-Ranger recruit known only as “81,” He is a man driven by grief for his fallen brother and fueled entirely by the kind of stubborn, jaw-clenched determination that could move mountains. In a physically demanding role, Ritchson proves once again that he is currently one of Hollywood’s most compelling action anchors. The physical demands of the role stretched his limits. ‘I am the most tired I’ve ever been, ’ he mentions while talking about how exhausting the shoot was.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching a man pushed to the corner fight against a seemingly unstoppable enemy. And War Machine gives him full permission to do exactly that for 106 glorious minutes. Dennis Quaid plays a superior officer with the right growl and screen presence. However, Esai Morales doesn’t have much to offer in his limited role.

The setup is sharp: during the final grueling stage of Army Ranger selection, the recruits stumble across a downed alien object. Mistaking it for a classified experimental aircraft, they detonate it, which awakens something truly terrifying. The menacing contraption doggedly pursues the unarmed recruits across hill and dale, unleashing its otherworldly arsenal in a sequence of surprisingly convincing, CGI-heavy encounters. 

Sure, the Predator DNA runs deep here, and Hughes wears that influence as a badge of honour rather than hiding it. War Machine stages a series of enjoyable encounters, including a mountainside slaughter, a perilous river crossing, and a frantic APC chase. Once it gets going, it is hard not to get swept along with it.

Cinematographer Aaron Morton filmed across Victoria, Australia, and Queenstown, New Zealand. This gives the wilderness a genuinely hostile, cinematic scale that elevates the whole production above typical fare. Some sequences, like one in a muddy terrain, stand out in terms of their ruggedness.

To his credit, Hughes does not lose sight of the human factor amidst all the explosions. The ability of the human spirit to push against all odds is a message he delivers in multiple scenes. But at no point does this seem forced into the script. Ritchson mentions the same in an interview when he says, “The big hook for me was just the amount of heart that this movie had.” “ I loved the spirit of “81” so much that I went and got an ’81” tattoo before we even had this thing fully set up,” he added.

Admittedly, the script has its clunky moments. But War Machine isn’t trying to win awards. It’s trying to pin you to your couch on a Friday night. In the end, it points out how a human, not an alien robot, is the true “War Machine”.

War Machine is now streaming on Netflix.

By Suvajit Banerjee

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