War Machine

 Preliminaries occupy about half of the Netflix picture War Machine.  The last half of the movie is a gory, but effective, combat picture.  In form and structure, War Machine follows the pattern set by movies like The Sands of Iwo Jima and Full Metal Jacket.  The hero is trained for special operations combat by brutal and exacting taskmasters.  The training regimen is dehumanizing and cruel -- about 150 applicants for special operations as Army Rangers are subjected to abuse until their number is culled to about 15 or 20 soldiers.  The ranger applicants have to hump it up sheer mountain slopes, run with mountainous packs on their shoulders, and beat one another silly in boxing matches; they are tossed with fettered hands and feet into the deep end of a swimming pool  Sometimes, they have to march along the bottom of the pool carrying big weights in their hands, an exercise that almost results in the insanely determined hero drowning.  They practice with machine guns and crawl around under strands of razor wire in mud.  (All of this takes place in an astonishingly beautiful Alpine landscapes of glaciated peaks, deep gorges, and torrential rapids roaring through canyons.)  The recruits are given numbers instead of names.  The hero, a burly man-mountain with folds of muscle corrugating the back of his neck, is called 81.  The other applicants don't like the rough, tough, and taciturn 81 -- he is older than the other men, has a chip on his shoulder, and is already a Silver Star combat hero.  He also has something to prove to himself.  During an earlier campaign in Afghanistan, specifically Kandahar, his unit was ambushed and wiped-out to the last man -- the only survivor of the rocket attack was 81.  In that massacre, 81's brother was mortally wounded.   Just before the explosions, 81 and his kid brother mused about attending Ranger training and qualifying for special operations.  In the battle, 81 took  a piece of shrapnel through his thigh, yanked it out of the muscle, and, then, carried his unconscious and dying brother ten miles back to base.  Before reaching the perimeter, he collapsed and his brother bled out.  81 has now decided to apply for Ranger training, although he's middle-aged, to honor his brother.  He has the letters DFQ tattooed on his biceps, the acronym standing for "Don 't Fucking Quit."  Against all odds, he wants to do his dead brother proud by successfully completing the hellish ranger training and crossing a literal finishing line inscribed in the gravel with the scroll of the ranger logo.  This is War Machine's set-up, it's situation, in which our hero will be tested to the limits of his courage and endurance by actual combat.  There are different variations on this simple and fundamental plot:   in Full Metal Jacket, all of the abuse from the Drill Instructor merely equips the recruits with idiotic slogans and unrealistic expectations that result in the death of most of the characters -- training has made the Marines literally psychotic and they don't do too well when confronted by a teenage Viet Cong girl sniper.  In the traditional form of this story, represented by John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima, the tough sergeant's training pays off in actual battle and men succeed in their mission precisely because their instructor was so relentlessly harsh with them.  War Machine is a hybrid between the two narrative types:  all of the gung-ho training and motivation is pretty much useless when your adversary is a robotic killing machine built by sinister space aliens.  As in the Kandahar raid, the Rangers get wiped out to the last man, except once more for 81, who staggers across the finish line badly wounded and hauling the mangled recruit number 7 on his back.

The second half of the movie is a straight-forward, gruesome chase --the giant robot, a bit like one of the Transformers, stomps around slaughtering the soldiers.  After their initial encounter with the machine, about half of them are dead.  The rest succumb during the next forty minutes.  The premise is that the Ranger candidates who have reached this advanced stage are sent on a mission into the enormous and unpeopled wilderness -- their task is to avoid ambush by what is called the cadre (other troops), blow up a crashed plane, and, then, extract a POW from an enemy camp.  In this war game, 81 is called upon to lead the unit, a task that he abhors because he keeps suffering flash-backs of the massacre in Kandahar.  The men reach a crashed craft  (it is sleek and ultra-modern) which they interpret as the plane they are supposed to blow up.  81 tours the woods a few hundred yards away and finds that a smashed airplane is lying in a clearing.  Meanwhile, the other troops have set up explosive charges on the space-craft believing it to be some kind of classified bomber.  (The presence of the alien craft in the wilderness is motivated by various color-by-number plot points that are not worth detailing.) The charges are detonated, an explosion that really pisses off the War Machine.  It rears up, lumbers around and blasts the Rangers into bloody gobbets.  7 gets his leg blown apart and has to be hauled around on a stretcher.  This is a severe inconvenience when the men are cornered, have to cross a raging river, and get swept over a waterfall.  Somehow, 7 survives this.  By this time, most of the recruits are not just dead, but blown to  pieces or impaled on sharp tree stumps or burned to a crisp.  The War Machine has laser guided guns; it acquires its targets by scanning the landscape under foot, visualizing somehow the soldiers, and, then, blowing them up with rockets.  Sometimes, it fires round bowling ball bombs up into the air so that they rain down on the troops like mortar shells. The action ends, more or less, with a kind Mad Max Furiosa chase involving an armored personnel carrier in which the few surviving rangers are fleeing and the machine that is hot on their heels, showering them with fire.  Only 81 and the disabled 7 survive this attack.  81 hoists 7 on his back and staggers into the camp where the soldiers are mustering to repel the alien war machines.  It turns out that hundreds of them have beset the planet and are shooting it out with the earthlings.  81, no longer shy about leadership, gives an inspiring speech about fighting the machines and the movie ends with the troops gathering for the inevitable ultra- violent sequel.  I think it's called War Machines in the plural, a bit like Alien was followed-up by Aliens.

The movie is well-made nonsense.  It's stupidly gung-ho.  The action sequences are exciting and there are lots of well-staged explosions and stunts.  The movie is entertaining for its two hour length but disturbing.  Another picture that War Machines resembles is Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, a cartoon movie about amiable fascist troops battling space bugs.  Starship Troopers, based on a right-wing novel, by Robert Heinlein is brilliantly made with spectacular combat scenes with the space bugs -- it's innovation, compared to movies like the Star Wars franchise, is to take the combat seriously and show the soldiers ripped to pieces by the insect warriors -- peoples' limbs are torn off, they are beheaded, disemboweled, skewered, reduced to puddles of entrails and body parts.  The same applies to War Machine:  the ranger recruits are splashed into the sky, horribly burned, and wounds gush arterial blood.  It's fantastically gruesome and, so, the viewer feels a bit unclean -- the awful fascination of watching the human body reduced to bloody fragments is part of the movie's appeal.  This would be bad enough but, as I watched War Machine, I was conscious of the fact that American bombers and ballistic missiles are at this exact moment destroying Iranian targets, and killing hundreds of people -- real war makes a picture like this seem obscene and indecent.