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.”
