Rangers Lead the Way

There’s a nascent genre of films that effectively cover stories that suddenly switch into being something else halfway in. The easiest and most effective way to describe these movies is “like Predator, but…” simply because Predator is a film that best exemplifies this tonal shift. It starts off as a big, bombastic, 1980s action movie about beefcake soldiers heading into a jungle to kick ass and take names, all before an alien creature shows up and turns the action film into a slasher flick. Predator’s shift is sudden, but it also works well when you consider that it’s playing as a kind of hyper-aware parody of the action genre: these are the guys you always think of as the big-dick predators of their films. Now watch them get killed off by a real predator…

Plenty of other films have played with the idea of suddenly, and sometimes shockingly, switching gears halfway into their runtime. The second best example is From Dusk ‘til Dawn, which starts off as a very Tarantino gangster film (he co-wrote the screenplay) before morphing quite suddenly, and out of nowhere, into a vampire film. One Cut of the Dead is a zombie horror film before pulling back and showing us, halfway in, that the movie we just watched was actually a film-within-a-film, and it becomes a glorious comedy about people trying to make a low-budget, one-take zombie film.

Now we have another entry for this genre about films that suddenly shift genre, War Machine, an action film released by Netflix (which is, in no way, related to the Marvel Comics character, Warmachine). It is, perhaps, the most faithful film I’ve watched yet to take the “like Predator, but…” concept and make a film out of it. Hell, it stars big, burly dudes heading out on a mission, only to get picked off by a creature from space. It sticks so closely to the formula in so many ways that it almost feels like a bas relief rubbing of the 1987 action-horror film. That doesn’t make it bad, though. It feels comforting, in a way, because this is the kind of film where you know kind of what’s going to happen so you can just kick back and enjoy the senseless action.

The film stars Alan Ritchson as a career army staff sergeant (his character is never given a name, just a number, 81, later in the film). Working a mission in Afghanistan, the staff sergeant handles machinery, getting vehicles working and running errands out to fix broken engines out in the field. He’s called to one such site where he runs into his brother (played by Jai Courtney). The two have some fun catching up while our hero staff sergeant fixes a broken jeep, and his brother cajoles him into applying, with him, to be an Army Ranger. Soon after, though, their convoy is attacked and everyone other than our guy is killed, including his brother.

Two years later we find our staff sergeant on his way to Army Ranger training camp, following up on the promise he made to his brother. Given the number 81 as his name (as everyone in the training camp leaves their names behind), he shows excellent skill and ability whenever anything physically tough is thrown at him. When it comes to team bonding, or learning to rely on others, though, 81 fails. He’s not personable, and he doesn’t work well in the unit. This puts him on the outs with leadership, who are ready to shitcan him out of the program. They give him one last chance, though, putting him in charge of the squad on their final mission before graduation. They have to go out into the field, find a target, blow it up, and then come back without getting caught by the training officers out in the field. The only problem is their directions lead them not to their intended, safe target but a weird machine in a crater on the ground. And when they try to blow it up, all they manage to do is wake the machine, and once it’s awake it’s coming for them all…

Functionally, War Machine is what happens if you take Predator and swap out its lethal, biological space killer for a lethal, mechanical space killer. Its design is different, its tech is different, its function is the same. The goal of this story is to take a sci-fi killer and put it up against elite warriors to see who wins. Very few of the squad will survive, because this isn’t really the story of a team pulling together; it’s the mission of one big, beefy, brawny dude who might be the only one that could ever survive a threat like this.

Of course, as much as the film swaps one space killer for another it also swaps one slab of beefcake for another. Alan Ritchson is one of the biggest, brawniest dudes around and it’s easy to think that if he’d been alive and worked forty years earlier he would have been one of the action movie rivals for Arnold and Sly. He has the body type as well as the action star bona fides and the charisma to match. He’s been playing Reacher for the last few years and whatever you might say about that show, no one has ever complained about his performance. He looks and acts the part perfectly. Swapping him into the Arnold role in this film just makes sense. Hell, if they ever decided to go back and remake the original Predator (or recast Dutch in some kind of sequel), Ritchson is the only guy I could think of to take on the role.

Not that the tone of this film matches Predator one-to-one. That movie was a gleeful action romp that becomes a freaky slasher film, while War Machine plays far more towards the drama of PTSD. 81 is a broken character who lost his brother and has never recovered. The weight of that loss keeps him up at night, and it pushes him through every decision he’s made since. Completing Army Ranger training is his whole world. He has to do it for his brother, and for himself, and he’s spent two years trying to prove he could. Just because the mission changes, and suddenly it goes from a training exercise to a life-or-death escape from a seemingly invincible killer, that doesn’t change his goal: he has to come back and finish the mission.

It’s a simple story, one that very much narrows the character of 81 down to a singular trait. But then most of the characters around him are pretty singular, too. The few characters in his squad we do get to know can be described as the loud mouth or the female soldier or the nerdy guy. They don’t get much beyond that, but then the setup of the film forces it to be that way. These are all soldiers that have been stripped of their names and reduced down to grunts so that the training will rebuild them. We aren’t supposed to get complex character narratives for each of the soldiers; they’re meant to be nameless grunts that die off as the machine comes by.

But then the robot they’re fighting isn’t exactly a complex character, either. It’s a slasher killer by a different breed, a bot with no personality (and a stripped down, functional design). Its only mission is to kill, and we don’t even get a reason for why beyond “space invasion”. That’s it. There’s as much personality in this bot as the aliens from Independence Day. You don’t need much because the threat they impose is all the motivation the film needs, but you have to think there’s more going on that could be explored eventually.

It’s effective, and it works, but only within the confines of this film. I like it here, keeping the focus on the mission, on 81’s inner turmoil, and on what comes next. But I do have to admit that while the stripped down, bare storytelling of the film works this time, the team will have to give us more if we get any kind of sequel after. The production team has said there’s a sketch of ideas for future films, assuming War Machine does well enough on Netflix, and you could see how Ritchson’s character could be trotted out to fight more of these bots, or other robots and aliens, to keep the series going. But to do that we have to get more, not just bigger action and more robots but actually more from the character. He had his stripped down story; the next time he has to be a real person.

I liked War Machine. It’s a focused military drama that suddenly becomes a bombastic action sci-fi film, and its pieces work well. It’s a little big Predator, a little bit military Dad Rock, but it functions well and does exactly what it sets out to do. If all you want is a film about big, beefy dudes getting taken down by a killer from space, this film provides it, and then some. It’s not deep and it doesn’t really care to be, but that works for this film as it stands now. I’ll want more from it in the future, if sequels come out, but as a one-and-done story. War Machine kicks a fair bit of robot ass.