The streaming wars are waged in interesting ways, nowadays – and I think Netflix just exemplified this with a showcase of perhaps its most interesting upcoming movie. War Machine is what looks like a really straightforward sci-fi action film, with a group of Army Rangers facing off against a terrifying alien robot here on Earth.
It's really grounded, too – that robot being the only element that's actually sci-fi, and the many, many stunts are seemingly practical (as shown off in the behind-the-scenes featurette I've embedded below). What interests me most, though, is the film's star – Alan Ritchson, who's been a brilliant servant to Amazon Prime Video over the last few years.
Ritchson has become almost synonymous with Prime Video, in fact, thanks to his starring role in one of its biggest shows – Reacher. His casting in that series is some of the most accurate you could ever see, and he embodies the character phenomenally, but that's not all. He's also been in a few other Amazon-distributed movies, from The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to this year's Playdate.
So, there's no way Amazon's execs won't have raised an eyebrow or two when they discovered that he was making a big-budget action movie with Netflix, Prime Video's single biggest rival and many people's pick as the best streaming service going. It probably will have caused even more consternation to see that said movie looks pretty great.
The featurette uploaded to YouTube last week shows off the detailed stunt work that Ritchson and the rest of the cast and crew have been working on, including some really impressive commitment. It looks gritty and convincing, which is just what you want from this sort of film.
We'll know pretty soon whether it can convert that to actual filmmaking success, too, since the movie comes to Netflix on 5 March, in less than a month's time. One YouTube comment summed up the broad sentiment below the video: "Definitely cannot wait to watch this, looks freaking awesome!"
