"Keep your eyes open." Uh yeah, especially when you've got to deal with some extraterrestrial killing apparatus with nasty rays coming out of it. Yikes! Oh and said apparatus is totally untraversable and a real pain in the dairy air. Double yikes!
Anyway 2026's War Machine does involve war and the machine in question, well it's designed to get the viewer to get their veritable War of the Worlds on. Unrelenting bustle, bloody barbarity, special ops, brute military swag, D. Quaid in his golden years. It's like "Machine's" director (Patrick Hughes) saw every action horror flick from the late 80s and decided to throw the term "dated" out the window. "Whatever that thing is, it's hunting us." Have nose will hunt my brother. Have nose will for sure hunt.
So yeah, as a flick about some soldiers hellbent on becoming US Army Rangers only to discover that their final stage involves dealing with an alien life force that looks like something straight out of an H. G. Wells novel, War Machine is akin to stuff like Predator and Tigerland and Independence Day and all things Julien Leclercq oh my! So basically it's a boot camp movie, or a mishmash-of-genres movie, or a streaming slickster, or a total cinematic mutt. Hey, the boys at Relativity Media called and well, they want their freaking concessions back. Natch!
Starring Alan Ritchson, Dennis Quaid (mentioned earlier), and Stephan James and distributed by good old Netflix (shocker), War Machine is entertaining to a fault. I mean it sneaks up on you, announcing itself as one type of vehicle only to turn the tables and get all celestial on the low. I dug the fast cut, lightning-quick editing, the never-tedious pacing, and the complete whisking from one action set piece to the next. Yup, no "rage against this machine."
Written by Jesse Burleson
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