Alan Ritchson's 2026 Sci-Fi Action Movie Streaming On Netflix Is A Spectacle Worth Watching

"Reacher" star Alan Ritchson has a new movie out on Netflix now called "War Machine," a film that was directed by Patrick Hughes ("The Expendables 3," "The Hitman's Bodyguard," "The Man From Toronto") based on a script that he's credited for co-writing with James Beaufort. As someone who has yet to climb aboard the "Reacher" train, and who's only seen three things on /Film's list of Ritchson's seven best non-"Reacher" projects, I don't have a ton of experience with him as an actor. And the bland "War Machine" title — weirdly, this is the second Netflix original film called "War Machine"; the other is a 2017 Brad Pitt movie that the Pentagon was once apparently obsessed with — didn't necessarily thrill me. 

Inexplicably, I clicked play on the movie anyway, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a sturdy action film with a solid Ritchson performance at the center of it. He plays a haunted Army Ranger candidate who leads a team of finalists on a training mission that turns dangerously real; in a twist that's revealed in the trailer, his team stumbles across a large bipedal alien machine that's crash-landed on Earth and begins attacking the humans that've stumbled upon it.

"War Machine" delivers the action beats you'd expect from a film like this, but it also has a defined beginning, middle, and end, with an understandable character arc for its protagonist and on-location photography that proves it wasn't merely filmed in a parking lot somewhere and filled everything in with CGI later. It feels like a finished movie, which is not something you can always say about Netflix films, especially the atrocious "The Old Guard 2" or the even-worse Gal Gadot spy flick "Heart of Stone."

This film is clearly indebted to John McTiernan's sci-fi action classic "Predator," with its beefed-up warriors facing off against an alien threat in the woods. This movie is no "Predator," to be sure (it doesn't have nearly the same charisma, excess, or humor), but it's not completely without ideas, either. The aliens are a pretty clear stand-in for the onslaught of artificial intelligence our world has faced over the past few years, and without spoiling the ending, the movie is thematically interested in fighting back instead of just saying it's "inevitable" and letting that technology take over the world.

Just a few days ago, the actual United States government used AI to illegally attack Iran, which casts this film and its anti-AI stance as even more of a fantasy than it would've been otherwise. But if you can get past the jingoistic attitude inherent to a story that centers Army Rangers, "War Machine" is basically the 2026 equivalent of a movie your dad would have watched 20 times on TNT during casual Sunday afternoons. It currently has a 3.2 rating on Letterboxd, and I'd personally rather have this than "Heart of Stone" any day of the week.