Braxton Taylor
Imagine going through a difficult U.S. military special operations training school, such as the Army Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, for months on end. You endure sweat, fatigue and punishment to reach a skill level most soldiers could only dream of. Then just when you think it’s nearly over and time to graduate, those skills are put to the test against an enemy you’ve only ever seen in movies like “Predator.”
That’s the scenario in which a team of Rangers-in-training find themselves in the new science fiction action thriller “War Machine,” which is slated to begin production this week. The Rangers, according to the movie’s official description, are in the final 24 hours of “a grueling special ops boot camp” when they “encounter a deadly force from beyond this world.”
Produced by Lionsgate and Netflix, “War Machine” stars Alan Ritchson (“Reacher,” “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”), Dennis Quaid (“Midway”), Stephan James (“Selma”), Jai Courtney (“The Water Diviner”) and Esai Morales (“How to Get Away with Murder”). Blake Richardson (“He Ain’t Heavy”), Keiynan Lonsdale (“The Finest Hours”) and Daniel Webber (“The Punisher”) round out the cast.
In the movie, Ritchson portrays a team leader while James, Courtney, Richardson, Lonsdale and Webber are other soldiers in training. Quaid and Morales are their commanding officers, who we can only assume are either completely useless, die early on or are in cahoots with the otherworldly attackers. (The studios have given Military.com no reason to think this. We just came to this conclusion from personal military experience and watching a lot of military movies, especially ones from the 1980s.)
The screenplay was written by James Beaufort and Patrick Hughes, and Hughes is directing the film. “War Machine” is their first collaboration as writers, but the two have worked on other projects in the past, including “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” series and the action-comedy “The Man from Toronto,” which suggests this new film could have comedic elements. And let’s be clear: If there’s one thing military movies lack when it comes to realism, it’s random, dark and yet incredibly funny comments from the squad.
The characters’ lack of experience is what sets “War Machine” apart from similar movies. When Arnold Schwarzenegger led his team of special operators into the jungles of Val Verde in “Predator,” they were all Vietnam veterans with multiple missions under their belts; in “Aliens,” the Colonial Marines knew they were going up against an alien species. What’s exciting about the idea of “War Machine” is that these soldiers, although supposedly skilled Rangers, are newly minted special operators who have never actually been on a Special Forces mission together and have no idea they’re about to fight for real — and against something otherworldly.
The reason this movie could be so good is the nature of the real-world training that U.S. special operations forces actually endure. The culminating event for U.S. Army Special Forces training, for example, is called Robin Sage, an elaborate survival and guerrilla fighting exercise that involves hundreds of people across 15 North Carolina counties and can cause relentless confusion among even the Green Beret candidates going through it. Adding an extraterrestrial element to the mix could lead to either an epic action movie or comedic gold — or both.
“War Machine” is set to be distributed worldwide by Netflix in 2025 after a theatrical release.
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