War Machine review: US Army Rangers confront a killer robot in Victoria

Filmed in Australia and with an Australian director, Netflix action movie War Machine feels like the future of action cinema. Just not in the way you’re thinking – but we’ll get to that.

After an attack in Afghanistan that left his brother (Jai Courtney) dead in circumstances that get even more tragic every time we’re told the story, our nameless hero (Alan Ritchson) is determined to fulfil the last dream they shared: making it through US Army Ranger training.

Despite a bung knee and clearly being too old for this shit, he finally gets accepted, is assigned the number 81 – you don’t get your name back until you make it through training or wash out – and promptly aces every test he’s up against. Problem is, being a remorseless military machine who can’t sleep doesn’t make you friends or turn you into a leader; despite his obvious ability, he’s constantly on the verge of being booted out.

As a last ditch attempt to make him into a real soldier, Sergeant Major Sheridan (Dennis Quaid, another glorified cameo) puts him in charge just in time for the survivors to face their final test. While the mission seems a fairly straightforward exercise (they have to sneak through the wilderness, blow up some stuff and rescue some people), everyone calls it ‘Death March’, as in ‘Welcome to Death March’, which is pretty funny.

Meanwhile there are all these background news reports about a mysterious asteroid passing by Earth that’s breaking up, but that obviously won’t have any relevance later on.

Out on the mountains, 81 is failing to inspire his team at every turn. Luckily his 2IC (Stephan James) is pretty good at motivational speeches and noticing when the men need a break, so things aren’t going too badly right up to the moment when they encounter a giant alien spaceship that turns out to be a Transformers-style killer robot. A bunch of them are wiped out almost immediately; pretty soon the living will envy the dead.

Director and co-writer Patrick Hughes (Red Hill, The Hitman’s Bodyguard) gives proceedings the kind of no-frills competence that’s always welcome in this kind of film. Much of the first third is basically just military training sequences, but the focus is always on the risks: we see a test, we see people fail, 81 crushes it, we move on.

War Machine: efficient and propulsive

Likewise, the action is efficient and propulsive. The relatively large number of would-be Rangers on the final mission means the body count starts out high and pretty much every attack after the first claims a few more victims. This is not a movie where you feel like punches are being pulled to keep characters alive – though the killbot is more like a very destructive walking tank rather than something able to wipe out city blocks at will.

This general vibe of efficiency extends to the script, which is largely constructed from parts of other, better action movies wrapped in an increasingly obvious redemption arc for 81. But the familiarity just means it’s easier to focus on what counts, which would be the action sequences – and again, they’re varied, effective and relentless.

For all their strengths, those action scenes don’t make this the future of action movies (though one car chase sequence is easily the equal of anything on the big screen in recent years). What does point the way to tomorrow is the way that, despite all the US flags waving back at base and constant affirmations that the US Army Rangers are the best of the best, this is a film that doesn’t really need the USA.

Isolated and without weapons (training mission, remember), once the unit gets out into the mountains it could be any country’s military fighting a giant killer robot. The filmed-in-Victoria landscape isn’t uniquely American, acting is an international business these days, and killer robots are a threat all across the globe.

More importantly, American flag-waving plays differently today than it did even a few years ago. As the days when the US military could be used in movies as a stand-in for ‘The West’ rapidly recede into the past, we’re looking at a future where presenting square-jawed American super-soldiers as unproblematic heroes may no longer be acceptable to the global audience Netflix targets.

War Machine ends with the world united against a common enemy: having the USA leading the way seems more like science fiction than any killer robots from space.

War Machine is available to stream on Netflix now.

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