War Machine dropped in early March to become the most popular movie on Netflix for several weeks running. It’s about an unnamed soldier played by Reacher’s Alan Ritchson training to become an Army Ranger. When he and his team are sent out on a final training exercise, they run into an alien craft that hunts and kills several of them, until only a few are left who can stop it.
Combining a sci-fi movie with a war movie is an idea that’s been done many, many times before, because it works. If you enjoyed War Machine, you owe it to yourself to check out some of these films that scratch the same itch.
7 brilliant sci-fi movies under 90 minutes you can finish tonight
Whether you want something fun and accessible or dense and difficult, there’s a short sci-fi movie out there with your name on it.
Predator
One ugly war machine
War Machine’s has great action, a great monster to fight, and a commanding lead performance from Ritchson, whose brawny charisma recalls other great cinema strongmen, including the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger. If War Machine were made in the ’80s, Schwarzenegger would have been perfect in the lead role.
The closest he came was 1987’s Predator, which parallels War Machine in many ways. Instead of an Army Ranger trainee, Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch is a U.S. Army Special Forces Major. Instead of running around the mountains of Colorado, he’s skulking through the jungles of Central America. And instead of fighting a technologically advanced alien robot, he’s fighting an extraterrestrial outfitted with all kinds of high-tech gear who hunts people for sport.
Predator is War Machine from another decade. And if you enjoy Predator, you’ll be happy to know that the franchise is currently thriving, with great new releases like Predator: Badlands still lighting up cinemas today.
- Release Date
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June 12, 1987
- Runtime
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107 minutes
- Director
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John McTiernan
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Arnold Schwarzenegger
Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer
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Kevin Peter Hall
The Predator / Helicopter Pilot
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Elpidia Carrillo
Anna Gonsalves
Battle: Los Angeles
Like War Machine if it were set in LA
Aaron Eckhart stars as our soldier hero du jour in 2011’s Battle: Los Angeles, an intense war movie that sees Eckhart’s Marine Corps Staff Sargeant do his part to fight a massive alien invasion taking place all over the world. As in War Machine, many of Eckhart’s colleagues die before they finally find a weakness, and the movie ends with the promise of more fighting ahead.
While War Machine takes some time to build up the characters before getting into the action, Battle: Los Angeles throws us right in to the thick of things. It’s not the best reviewed movie on this list, but it’s a solid action thrill ride that does a good job putting us in the shoes of the combatants.
- Release Date
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March 8, 2011
- Runtime
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118 Minutes
- Director
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Jonathan Liebesman
Pacific Rim
War machine vs kaiju
What if we had the war machines for a change? In Pacific Rim, humanity builds giant fighting robots called Jaegers as a way to fight back against monstrous Kaiju monsters that emerge from a portal on the ocean floor and attack coastal cities. Eventually, we learn that the Kaiju are created by an alien race trying to take over Earth, so whether they’re coming from outer space or an alternate dimension, extraterrestrials are always giving us humans a hard time.
But rarely do we find so stylish a way to fight back as in Pacific Rim. The giant robot-vs-giant monster battles are a lot of fun to watch, and the movie comes up with interesting rules for how the Jaegers operate. This 2013 action movie still holds up today, and led to a sequel as well as an animated series on Netflix.
- Release Date
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July 12, 2013
- Runtime
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131 minutes
- Director
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Guillermo del Toro
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Charlie Hunnam
Raleigh Becket
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Idris Elba
Stacker Pentecost
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Starship Troopers
Taking the fight to the aliens
1997’s Starship Troopers changes the formula up a bit, since this time humanity is fighting the extraterrestrial species of the moment — the Arachnids, or Bugs — all over the galaxy, not just on Earth. The violence in Starship Troopers is pulpier and broader than it is in War Machine, but still fun. The movie also digs into what it’s like to train recruits in the age of galactic travel, recalling the earlier sections of War Machine.
What Starship Troopers has that no other movie on this list does is a deliberate political point of view. Starship Troopers delights in the violence of war so much that it goes way over the top and everything starts to feel kind of absurd and funny. The movie has often been interpreted as mocking the sort of bellicose military culture other war movies celebrate, but you can still watch and enjoy it without engaging with those dimensions.
- Release Date
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November 7, 1997
- Runtime
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129 minutes
- Director
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Paul Verhoeven
Edge of Tomorrow
Live. Die. Repeat.
Tom Cruise may be nearly a foot shorter than Alan Ritchson, but he brings just as much charisma to the role of Major William Cage, a soldier who’s fighting against an invading extraterrestrial army of creatures called Mimics. The twist here is that when Cruise kills an Alpha Mimic, some of its blood gets mingled with his and he finds himself stuck in a time loop, waking up back at the start each time he dies. Not only does this tell him something about how the Mimics operate, but it allows him to become a better soldier with each new cycle, eventually leading a team to take out the head Mimic.
The time travel conceit in Edge of Tomorrow is very clever. The action scenes aren’t just fun to watch, they’re also part of a puzzle you get to put together as the movie goes on.
- Release Date
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June 6, 2014
- Runtime
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114 minutes
- Director
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Doug Liman
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Brendan Gleeson
General Brigham
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Bill Paxton
Master Sergeant Farell
The Tomorrow War
Tomorrow’s war today
We again mix war, sci-fi, and time travel in 2021’s The Tomorrow War, where Chris Pratt plays a former Green Beret who gets drafted into a fight against an invading extraterrestrial force (this time it’s the Whitespikes). The twist is that the war is happening in the future, and the military comes back in time to collect him.
Once again, The Tomorrow War is part war thriller and part puzzle box mystery. We have to piece together how everything fits together as Pratt’s character does, sussing out how he could use the information gained in the future to perhaps prevent this war from ever happening in the first place. The action scenes are fun, but the imaginative story gives The Tomorrow War a little extra something.
- Release Date
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July 2, 2021
- Runtime
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138 minutes
- Director
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Chris McKay
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Yvonne Strahovski
Colonel Muri Forester
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J.K. Simmons
James Forester
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Betty Gilpin
Emmy Forester
Ender’s Game
Battle school is in session
Ender’s Game is a classic sci-fi novel that finally got adapted into a movie in 2013, with Asa Butterfield headlining as a young prodigy who gets drafted into an effort to attack an enemy planet. Unlike War Machine or any of the other movies on this list, the cast of Ender’s Game is mostly very young, which is part of the point; watching young kids play out war game scenarios is both exciting and kind of creepy, which makes us reflect on the nature of war, terrestrial or otherwise.
Ender’s Game has other probing questions to ask before it’s over. It’s one of the less bombastic movies on this list, but one of the most thoughtful.
- Release Date
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November 1, 2013
- Runtime
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114minutes
- Director
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Gavin Hood
War Machines
If you want a war movie more grounded in reality, you can’t go wrong with World War II films. Over on Prime Video, the movie Tank has made a huge splash, despite some controversial elements.
Otherwise, you probably won’t have to wait that long for a sequel to War Machine. The movie ends by setting up future films, and we’ll almost surely get them now that it’s a huge success.
