SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for War Machine. If you have not yet watched the film, proceed at your own risk!
When director Patrick Hughes’ War Machine kicks it into gear, things get hardcore. The film is a showcase for the action star charisma of lead Alan Ritchson as he does battle with a heavily armed extraterrestrial robot, and there is tension and gore aplenty. As cool as all that is, however, the Netflix blockbuster doesn’t get to that point until after it slyly camouflages itself as a grounded military drama, and it’s the authenticity of that material which convinced Esai Morales that he wanted to be a part of the production.
War Machine is now available to stream with a Netflix subscription, but I did a virtual interview with Morales earlier this month in the days prior to its arrival online, and the first thing we discussed was the script and his experience reading it for the first time. He had a personal connection to the material off the bat because he has a family member who was in the military, and he was impressed by the depiction of the protagonist’s journey to become a member of the Army Rangers. Said the actor,
Article continues belowI read it, and I was riveted because it was so realistic. You know, the process that they go through in the beginning. I have a family member that was a super soldier, and so all these roles for me are very much an homage to his fighting spirit and the kind of mentality and discipline and self-sacrificing spirit that you have to have to make a good soldier. And I just thought, 'Wow, this isn't like your average sci-fi.'
There are other movies that blend together sci-fi and military genres (some titles that immediately pop into mind include Aliens and Starship Troopers), but War Machine has a different narrative tactic than most. In the movie, Alan Ritchson plays an unnamed Sergeant who enlists in the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program to honor his dead brother (Jai Courtney). As First Sergeant Torres, Morales is an authority who sees the protagonist’s potential and carves a path for him toward a leadership position in the elite unit.
And then aliens show up in the middle of the final training exercise.
I personally watched War Machine without reading anything about it, allowing me to be totally surprised by the sci-fi twist – and Esai Morales told me that matched his experience first digging into the screenplay. It dedicates itself just long enough to totally sell itself as a non-genre drama, with the characters given time to express their personalities, before the chaos starts. Or as Morales put it,
It's so based in reality that when the s--- hits the fan, you buy it and you're just, 'What is going on?' You engage because you really care about the characters, not only Alan Ritchson's character 81, but the rest of the cast. You see how they came together, and then, people you're starting to love all of a sudden they're dying and this wasn't part of the plan. And so who's gonna die next? It's very riveting in that respect.
And it seems like it may just be the start of the story too: Alan Ritchson's 81 reunites with First Sergeant Torres at the end of the movie to learn that the whole world is at war with the aliens. That revelation plus the big numbers War Machine has been putting up on Netflix suggests that we could eventually learn about a green light for War Machine 2… but we're not quite there yet.
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