War Machine

dir: Patrick Hughes

2026

War Machine is set somewhere in the States, but I can tell you right now, for free, that much of it was filmed in Victoria. Some of it was filmed in New Zealand / Aotearoa, but mostly Victoria.

That makes for a somewhat strange viewing experience, especially for those cursed Victorians. You’re watching soldiers clamber around on hills and mountains, and you think “have I been there? That looks vaguely…familiar.” It has the odd aspect of taking you out of something you’re watching, even when it’s science fiction, like this.

This doesn’t have an intriguing premise: it is two different stories wedged together. The War Machine of the title is either man mountain Alan Ritchson, who is such a soldier that the other soldiers either want to be him or want to have sex with him (not sure which), or it refers to a machine that appears after around 40 minutes that starts killing everyone relentlessly.

It is, despite the trappings, the exact same premise as Beast of War that came out last year: first part is soldiers going through basic / training stuff / bonding, next part is them being picked off one by one by a relentless, remorseless, emotionless killing machine.

The first part is meant to make you care about the characters, the second part makes you feel bad when they get mangled / feel happy when they escape.

In theory. That’s the intention. The reality is, though, we’ve seen this shit a million times. If you get attached to these kinds of disposable characters that not only barely have any distinguishing characteristics, but who don’t even have names (they have numbers instead), then the fault lies not in the stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.

And yet, I’m exactly that kind of sucker.

In the greatest implausibility in a film that has an extra-terrestrial killing robot killing humans in the hills of the Victorian countryside, Alan Ritchson plays a guy who desperately wants to get through Ranger training to honour the brother (Jai Courtney) whose life he couldn’t save when they served together in Afghanistan. As if it was his fault, and not the fault of the Taliban, but anyway.

Despite being in his forties, 81, which is the number they’ve allocated to him, is determined to survive a training regimen that sometimes kills hyperfit guys twenty years younger than him, just so he can get his “scroll”, being the patch insignia commonly worn by Army Rangers. The psychological depth they are granting this character is that he doesn’t want this thing for his own pride, or to get back at someone who snubbed him, or to get back at an ex, which is the motivation for what most people do in movies. It’s just so that if he gets across that finish line, metaphorically and literally, then it will somehow make up for his brother dying.

As such, because it also somehow means his character knows what’s coming for the other members of the brutal selection course, he doesn’t get to know or spend any time socialising with any of the other recruits. He knows they will all be dead soon, so what’s the point?

It would be a waste of time, his and theirs. He doesn’t tell them, though, but just acts shy and standoffish.

Ritchson’s biggest claim to fame is playing the main character in the Amazon Reacher series based on the Lee Child’s books, obviously. I mean, he’s no Tom Cruise, but he does somehow embody the character, and he does a reasonable job playing this always calm, supremely capable homeless guy who never gets angry and never comes across as too arrogant. It’s why it’s the favoured television / streaming watching of dads everywhere. Reacher always knows everything about everything, can fix anything, can calmly explain everything to anyone, and wins every fight no matter how many opponents confront him.

He doesn’t play the role like that here. There’s none of the calm, supreme confidence. I mean, he’s still a mansplaining know-it-all, but he’s sad, and remorseful, like Reacher never is, and explicitly not a leader.

And he also knows that the War Machine will kill everyone except one person, being 7 (Stephan James), who 81 will have to do every implausible thing imaginable to save in order to do what he couldn’t do at the start of the movie.

There is a (hilarious, only to me) scene early in the film when the two hardasses in charge of the Ranger training, ably played by Esai Morales, who’s great as a less-sweary R. Lee Ermey type, and Dennis Quaid as a sergeant major, they tell 81 that they’re going to fail him, kick him out of the program. It’s not because he’s too old. It’s not because he’s too handsome. It’s not because he nearly died during an exercise because he was too determined to not come up for air in a pool. It’s because he doesn’t talk to the other trainees, and is carrying too much trauma.

Boo hoo, too much trauma. 81 doesn’t cry. Those tear ducts can’t sneak moisture past his muscular eye sockets. No fucking way.

It’s not even because of the terrible knee injury that would have definitely disqualified him from continued service, let alone any chance as an Army Ranger.

For whatever reason, instead of booting him, they decide that he’ll be the leader when the remaining trainees go on an exercise in the wilderness, instead of 7, who is a natural leader, who likes the other trainees and has gotten to know them, and who inspires them to do their best.

You’re a danger to yourself and the people around you, but we’re going to make you the leader who everyone will depend on for their survival.

No wonder they all die. The machine, the alien machine, is, as you would expect, a relentless killing machine made only to kill humans, apparently. It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether it was just a robot killing machine, or an AI killing machine with a personality, or whether there maybe was an alien inside operating it, or whether it was remote controlled. What difference would that make, I hear you ask, in my delusional state? Well, not much of a difference at all, I guess.

It’s just maybe if it was an autonomous drone type of enemy we could maybe see this as a satirical critique of the drone slaughter mentality of the world’s militaries that are relying on these kinds of machines on the battlefield more and more for their killing needs. You know, of the kinds of idiots that think they can ‘win’ a war if they just deploy some machine somewhere and kill a few hundred / thousand / tens of thousands of people. You don’t even have to risk your own personnel’s lives, so it looks “clean”, in the media, at least on your side.

On “their” side there’s nothing but carnage, slaughter and genocide, but on “our” side everything is “epic”.
But nah, it’s nothing like that. It picks people off like a shark, like a giant croc, like an angry dinosaur, like a variation on every other type of initially unkillable enemy you can think of, just without the music from Jaws on the soundtrack.

Mostly, I have to say, it’s a competently handled film, of this type of action / sci-fi / thriller type of thing. Director Patrick Hughes has made one good film before (Red Hill, from ages ago), and several shitty films, but this lands in the “okay” basket, surely. There are parts that made me laugh that perhaps weren’t intended as such, but for the most part I was on board for these shenanigans.

It’s funny that having a very tenuous personal connection to something can make me feel more positive towards a movie. Openly admitting my biases here. I won’t go into why, or how, but I have been to the locations used in the flick and know them pretty well, and find it amusing the way they tried to make them look like parts of Fort Benning, in Georgia (the Southern state, not the former Soviet republic). And I also got to meet Dennis Quaid, who was perfectly charming, despite what reputation he has now as a MAGA fuckhead. But don’t say shit about the orange slagheap emperor, and I guess things remain nice and polite.

Just don’t mention the wars either, eh? Any of them.

His character makes no sense either, because if you’re a 71 year old man and you’re a sergeant major non-commissioned officer in the 75th Ranger regiment, that means… you’ve been in the Army for like 50 years? And that’s the highest you got? They mock Ritchson for being almost too old to apply for ranger training, yet Quaid’s character has been coasting along for, what, 30 years or so, at the same rank?

That’s more unlikely that the killer robot from outer space. Incompetence is often promoted, so what other excuse is there?

The action is handled reasonably well, the actors die in brutal ways, the commitment to killing them all off is admirable / depressing, and 81’s stick-to-attive-ness eventually wins the day against the implacable machine, yet all victories, like all things in existence, are transitory.

If they make a sequel, and I really hope they don’t, I’ll probably watch it, though I won’t be happy about it (unless I’m somehow in it as a homeless guy that the robots go after for property values or something).

7 times Alan Ritchson better not stop making Reacher episodes if he knows what’s good for him out of 10

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“Thermodynamics, motherfucker.” – tsk tsk, such language from a role model - War Machine