War Machine

The Last Mission Before the Sky Fell

I didn’t expect to care about War Machine. Not really. Another military sci-fi flick, another squad of grunts with call signs and corny one-liners, another alien menace that looks like it was designed by a committee of 12-year-olds who just discovered Halo and Predator in the same weekend.

But somewhere between the mud and the blood and the way Alan Ritchson moves—like a man who’s been told he’s already dead and just hasn’t stopped to notice yet—I found myself leaning forward, gripping the armrests, muttering "oh come on" under my breath. That’s the thing about these kinds of movies: they don’t need to be smart. They just need to be alive.

And War Machine is alive in the way a wildfire is alive—relentless, destructive, and impossible to look away from.

The film’s opening act is a masterclass in misdirection. We’re dropped into what feels like a standard military training exercise—Ranger Assessment and Selection Program (RASP), to be exact—with all the usual beats: the drill sergeants barking, the recruits puking, the endless, soul-crushing runs through the mud. It’s Full Metal Jacket meets Platoon, but with a sheen of modern military tech and the kind of physicality that makes you wince just watching.

Ritchson’s character, Sergeant Cole, is the kind of leader who doesn’t just bark orders; he embodies them. There’s a moment early on where he’s dragging a wounded recruit through the rain, his face a mask of exhaustion, and you can see the weight of every step in the way his shoulders hunch. It’s not acting, not really.

It’s survival. And that’s before the sky opens up and something else comes down with it.

The pivot into full-blown alien invasion is so abrupt it’s almost jarring—one minute, the squad is arguing over who forgot the extra ammo, and the next, a massive, biomechanical horror is tearing through the trees like a combine harvester through wheat. The design of the titular War Machine is where the film’s ambitions start to show. It’s not just a generic CGI monster; it’s a machine, all jagged edges and hydraulic limbs, like if Metal Gear Solid’s Metal Gear REX had a baby with a combine harvester and then fed that baby steroids.

It moves with a deliberate, almost industrial menace, crushing trees and men with equal indifference. There’s a scene where it stalks the squad through a ravine, its glowing red optics scanning the darkness like a predator locking onto prey, and the sound design—oh, the sound design—makes it feel like the thing is breathing. Not in a literal sense, but in the way a furnace breathes, or a chainsaw.