Review: A Sci-Fi War Movie About the Pentagon’s Inscrutable Budget

Amid a lot of patriotic rah-rah, predictable writing, and subpar acting, the Netflix movie War Machine manages to convey at least one interesting point about America’s bloated military budget.

Director Patrick Hughes’ film stars Alan Ritchson as an Army staff sergeant who watches his brother get killed in action in Afghanistan. The death inspires Ritchson’s character to honor a pact he made with his brother and become an Army Ranger himself.

To graduate from Ranger School, Ritchson and the other final candidates must complete a mission together in the wilderness—a mission that goes awry when a strange, robotlike machine appears from outer space and begins eviscerating the team with lasers.

Much of the ensuing action is quite improbable, but one realistic moment stands out. As the candidates speculate about the origin of their sci-fi opponent, one prospective Ranger suggests that the machine must be a military R&D project. That’s right: The Pentagon’s budget is so vast and obscure that a soldier believes it’s conceivable the extraterrestrial machine shooting lasers at them is American taxpayer–funded.

Honestly, who can blame him? It took the Pentagon 28 years to comply with a federal law requiring federal agencies to produce annual financial statements, and it still has yet to pass an audit. (The Defense Department will take its 11th swing at a complete audit in 2028.) But this hasn’t stopped the Pentagon from spending millions of dollars on things that don’t protect national security, including misinformation campaigns for Arab dictators and technology that has been used to track U.S. citizens.

Despite its corniness, War Machine is an entertaining watch that asks an important question: Should we be surprised if the military did create a laser-shooting robot?