Alan Ritchson’s ‘War Machine’ Netflix Thriller Breaks Military Action Norms

Spoilers for War Machine are below!

Netflix’s latest action thriller features Alan Ritchson facing off against an otherworldly robot that serves as the movie’s primary antagonist. The Reacher star leads an impressive cast, including Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, and Jai Courtney. War Machine puts a sci-fi twist on the standard military action movie, often feeling akin to classics like Predator. Still, even while fighting an alien hunter, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a distinct advantage over Ritchson and his team of recruits.

War Machine features a team of soldiers training to become Army Rangers. Their final mission puts them face-to-face with a massive robot that crash-landed on Earth, a machine engineered for combat and destruction. While that setup kicks off the movie’s action, it dares to break military combat tropes in one enormous way.

Military action movies come with a set of expectations. Whether it’s Platoon, Apocalypse Now, or even recent entries like Warfare, they all share distinct characteristics that viewers expect in military combat. Even the branch of armed services doesn’t matter, be it the Army, Navy, or Marines, military action movies deliver on the aesthetics, tactics, and battles. War Machine delivers on those aspects, but it also makes the ordeal much more difficult for its characters through a bold choice that has nothing to do with the hulking robot in constant pursuit.

‘War Machine’s Sci-Fi Threat Hits During a Training Mission

Plenty of military movies have featured training as part of the story, with films like Full Metal Jacket and Tigerland highlighting it. The first act of War Machine is fueled by Army Ranger training. Ritchson’s 81 is seen enduring all manner of grueling exercises, even drowning at one point, because he refuses to quit. When the recruits are whittled down to the final few, the last training mission begins, which kicks off the movie’s central conflict. The recruits are tasked with finding downed transport that they are meant to destroy. What they stumble upon instead is an alien robot that they mistake for their target. Their attempt to destroy it seems to wake it, and the killing machine quickly dispatches several recruits.

Ritchson and the other soldiers are put on the run, with the robot blasting them off a cliff and keeping close pursuit. They are, in fact, constantly on the run, down mountains, through forests, and across rivers. The robot has them outgunned and easily outmaneuvered, and they can’t fight back. While War Machine presents itself like a new take on Predator, at least those soldiers had guns. Any fan of military action movies would be expecting the soldiers to fight back with everything they have, be it guns, explosives, or even a radio, except they have none of those things. They lost the radio during the first attack, and the only explosives they had were for their training target, which did nothing to the robot. Because they were on a training mission, the soldiers didn’t have any ammunition, making their assault rifles useless. They literally can’t return fire at the robot.

In the clip below, the soldiers are seen in their initial mistaken-identity attack on the robot, with yellow blank-firing adapters visible on their rifle muzzles.

There is a point during the movie where the recruits find an armored vehicle with a machine gun turret. 81 also finds a grenade launcher in the back that comes in handy. This allows the soldiers to return fire during a short action sequence lasting only a few minutes. Outside that moment, the soldiers are left without weapons for much of the film’s runtime. War Machine is a movie about military combat that doesn’t give soldiers any weapons. There’s plenty of action, but even the finale sees 81 taking down the robotic enemy without a gun.

The expertise from the soldiers’ training and their determination shine through. Yet War Machine isn’t the average military action thriller simply because it takes away the weapons needed to truly fight the conflict with return fire. Ritchson’s latest proves to be a formidable genre entry, offering a distinct change from other movies that feature the military front and center.