War Machine Movie Review – Alan Ritchson’s Predator Meets Transformers Film Sparks Franchise Potential

For a few years now, Alan Ritchson has established himself as an action star in the mold of someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a big dude, charismatic, and a lot funnier than most people give him credit for. In Netflix‘s War Machine, he might have just found his equivalent to Predator.

Ritchson plays 81 (his real name is never revealed in the film), an Army Rangers recruit. Years earlier in Afghanistan, his brother (Jai Courtney) dreamed of them becoming Rangers. The day they agreed to do it together, they were attacked by enemy soldiers. 81 survived the attack, but his brother didn’t. Driven by trauma and a sense of honoring his fallen sibling, 81 runs the gauntlet to become a Ranger. As part of the final test, the Regiment hopefuls have to embark on one last mission. However, everything goes wrong when they discover an alien ship that turns out to be an unstoppable killing machine.

Director and co-writer Patrick Hughes, who handled The Expendables 3, could have easily gone for the big and dumb approach here. However, War Machine proves to be surprisingly deeper than anticipated. Even though there’s a murderous alien warcraft on the rampage, this story centers on the topic of survivor’s guilt and how 81 copes with the trauma of his past. This affects how he handles the situation, especially since he still feels responsible for his brother’s death. Okay, this isn’t Saving Private Ryan by any means, but this narrative layer elevates the film from being just another generic sci-fi actioner.

What Hughes also does well here is that he doesn’t try to overexplain or complicate the presence of the alien ship. In the same vein of ’90s sci-fi films like Independence Day, this warcraft arrives on Earth and annihilates everything in its path. That’s it. There’s no need for a 20-minute flashback sequence of how 81 once farted in the wind and the protein-crusted smell found its way to Mars to offend an alien’s senses. Instead, this is a simple setup and conflict, allowing for the focus to remain on 81 and Co. while leaving threads for further motivations to be unpacked in future films.

War Machine also has another trick up its sleeve: Since the recruits were in the middle of a test, they have no real weapons on them. To survive, they have to use their environment and what they have learned, as well as placing life-and-death trust on each other to avoid this warcraft, which annihilates anything within its range. Resultantly, this culminates in several pulsating, heart-in-throat scenes that push anxiety to the limit.

From an acting perspective, this is the Alan Ritchson show – and he continues to cement himself as a legitimate star of the action genre. If War Machine doesn’t convince James Gunn to cast him as the next Batman, then nothing will. It isn’t only in his physical feats, which are outrageously impressive, but also in the more complex emotional moments that demonstrate his underrated range as a performer. He shares a few moments with the impressive Stephan James, who plays 7 in the movie, that confirm internal damage can sometimes be more severe than what happens externally.

War Machine provides sequel-bait at the end, and why shouldn’t it? Unlike Transformers that appears to have morphed into a gigantic question mark, this film chooses simplicity and tidiness over throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. In turn, this gives it both a high rewatchability quality and clamor for a sequel. Now, this is how to build a new franchise in 2026.