War Machine: one-paragraph review

Alan Ritchson as unnamed recruit #81 in what's supposed to be Colorado but is actually Australia

Alan Ritchson, known for his role as Jack Reacher in the Amazon series Reacher, stars in the 2026 Netflix movie War Machine, a story about RASP trainees at an Army Ranger camp in Colorado who suddenly find themselves faced with an alien invasion. The title could be a reference to Ritchson's unnamed character (He's a war machine!) or to the alien device that morphs from an aircraft to a tank before wreaking havoc on the team of Ranger finalists who had thought they were simply on their final training mission. The first part of the movie is about our main character, who joined RASP in memory of his brother (Jai Courtney, cameo), who had wanted the brothers to become Rangers together. Our protag joins the program to fulfill a promise to get "across that finish line." Taciturn and antisocial, our RASP trainee, now known as 81 (all the soldiers in the program are given numbers), refuses opportunities to lead and simply wants to complete the program. Prior to RASP, he had been on a mission in which his brother was severely injured, but after trying to carry his brother back to base, he had passed out short of the base's perimeter; he was rescued, but his brother proved too injured to save. This guilt at not making it to the finish line is what drives 81 now, and the incident also explains his reluctance to lead since he had been platoon leader in the attack that had killed his brother, a fellow soldier. During the final RASP exercise, the team of recruits stumbles upon unfamiliar wreckage that looks to them like some kind of DARPA device but turns out to be an alien walker that immediately targets the troops and begins to eliminate them one by one. The rest of the story follows a formula you've seen a thousand times before in movies like Aliens and Predator, with our hero having to figure out ways to defeat the mysterious machine without any hi-tech weaponry (for the final mission, his team had been given rifles with blanks). War Machine is pure sap and formula; with most of the characters sporting numbers instead of names, it's hard to bond with anyone and equally hard to care when they die. The movie ends on a grim note: it turns out that the wave of machines that had landed all over the planet was merely the vanguard of a massive attack by some malign intelligence. We never discover the aliens' purpose, nor do we learn whether the deadly flying/walking machines have organic pilots; they could be drones for all we know. For me, the most ridiculous aspect of War Machine is the alien's utter obsession with finding and destroying every last member of 81's team. True, the mountainous region depicted in the movie isn't exactly a target-rich environment, so maybe the alien is just bored. In all, I'd say that War Machine isn't worth your time. It also stars Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales as sergeants leading the RASP exercises, but like Jai Courtney's character, they appear mostly as bookends, with most of the plot being devoted to RASP training and human-alien violence. With so little information about the aliens given to us, and with so little information about the human players aside from 81, the entire movie is hard to relate to. Give this one a pass.