Netflix Just Quietly Released The Most Creative Sci-Fi Thriller Of The Year

There’s a comfort in the familiar, especially with movies. When you start a sci-fi alien invasion movie, you know what to expect. When you watch a military thriller, you know there’s going to be a gritty hero with a tragic backstory trying to do the impossible. But Netflix’s latest thriller, War Machine, manages to combine both into a twisting tale of the military’s finest dealing with an extraterrestrial threat.

War Machine was born from a nightmare director Patrick Hughes had one night. “I was floating around this idea in my head, I knew I wanted to tell a story about the last 24 hours of the simulated mission as part of the Army Ranger selection program,” he tells Inverse. “Then I had this horrific nightmare where I was being stalked in a forest with rain and lightning, and I just saw the foot of this giant metallic beast, and it was stalking me, and it had this laser that was sweeping over.”

Those two parts form the whole structure of the movie. For the vast majority, we follow the candidates for the Army Ranger selection program, referred to not by names but just numbers. Our hero, 81 (Alan Ritchson), is determined to make the cut in memory of his brother (Jai Courtney), but the sergeants in charge are unsure if he has the mental fortitude that it takes, even if he breezes through all the grueling obstacle courses.

Mission: Impossible’s Esai Morales plays Officer Torres, one of the leaders behind this process. “I can see who looks like they’re going to be a problem and who’s not,” Morales tells Inverse. “Who’s a good soldier? Because these are life and death stakes. And so for me, my character, I love sinking my teeth into this role, going hardcore.”

For the first hour or so, the most impressive element of the film is the sheer amount of stunts done by star Alan Ritchson. “It was exceptionally difficult to bring this character to life in a physical sense,” Ritchson tells Inverse. “We were pushing my body to the very absolute limits of what it was capable of just to try to capture what a lot of these Army Rangers go through in real-world day-to-day life.”

But that realism is thrown out of whack when the final handful of candidates tackle a field exercise. They think it’s just their final exam, but it’s actually a terrifying metal alien set on hunting everyone down. Suddenly, a fight to make the cut morphs into a fight for survival.

That’s when a third genre is added to the “military” and “sci-fi” mix — a survival thriller. “It’s a big action sci-fi we’re making, but it’s also a survival thriller,” Hughes says. “And if we look at films like Deliverance or Revenant, they were massive inspirations for this. And ultimately, that you can’t make a survival film without it leaning into horror because of the isolation.”

Calling War Machine a genre-bender is a massive understatement — it’s all the greatest hits of each of its discrete parts, meaning all facets of a thrilling story get to shine.

War Machine is now streaming on Netflix.