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I’d love to see a true satire written by the incredibly smart David Michod . “War Machine,” now on Netflix, isn’t really a satire. I’d love to see a white-knuckle war movie shot by ace craftsman Dariusz Wolski . Believe it or not, “War Machine” isn’t really a war movie. I’d love to see a drama about a man essentially defeated by the system that he helped create. That thread may be in there, but “War Machine” isn’t really a drama either. It is all of these things, and none of them at the same time. It has moments of stand-out greatness, but it’s a scene here and there, a choice by an actor, a great line of dialogue, etc. And it becomes even more frustrating as the scenes that work almost defiantly refuse to work together, like the suits and the soldiers in Michod’s script who never see eye to eye. Critics have a habit of calling movies tonally inconsistent, but this should now be the textbook example, a film that veers wildly from war movie to character drama to satire to history piece to a blended gray of nothing.

Based on journalist Michael Hastings ’ The Operators: The Wild & Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan , “War Machine” tells the story of the days of the war in Afghanistan after Barack Obama ’s election, when the world was basically just waiting for the conflict to end but people on the ground still had a war to fight. Michod’s script works to convey the complete confusion that must have dominated days in which Obama was sending troops over to Afghanistan and telling the country at the same time that the war would be over soon. What kind of message could that possibly send to soldiers, especially the ones just being sent? And how could the people in charge of planning to win such a war possibly do so when it seemed like everyone involved just wanted them to leave?

Brad Pitt plays General Glen McMahon as something of a heightened macho caricature—it’s a risky performance that has already divided audiences who saw the film at Cannes. In some scenes, it feels like a broad stereotype, an absurdist take on the determined war general with gritted teeth and square jaw. This is a guy who answers to the nickname “Glenimal,” a throwback to another era of war in a new era in which we call it a conflict instead. When McMahon is asked to advise on how to proceed in Afghanistan, it’s hoped that he’ll basically guide the pullout of troops from the area. He asks for 40,000 more. He’s told straight out that “You’re not here to win, you’re here to clean up the mess,” but McMahon didn’t become a soldier to clean up. He’s a leader with nowhere to lead people.

Michod tries to replicate his protagonist’s confusion and the general speedbumps of wartime bureaucracy through the structure of his film, which cuts together episodic moments in McMahon’s quest for validation and support. Consequently, while there are moments that really work—including an early disagreement with a soldier played by Keith Stanfield and a conversation on a plane with a suit played by Alan Ruck —they don’t link together in a coherent way. It’s a disjointed collection of scenes more than a film, as if Michod and Pitt never completely figured out what story they were trying to tell. On one hand, there’s something almost admirable about making a frustrating film about a frustrating time and person, and I do think some of the tonal inconsistencies are purposefully designed to relay that frustration to the viewer, but it makes for a disappointing experience overall. “War Machine” is one of those films that you keep waiting to get going, to figure out what it is, to start clicking. It never does.

Well, I should say it almost does. There’s a third act sequence that I won’t spoil that completely gets away from the conference tables and suits approach of the previous 90 minutes; it totally works and reminds one of the human cost of all of this nonsense. It’s what’s been missing from the rest of the movie, a sense of realism and relatability—Pitt’s broad choices, while admirable, never allow you to forget that this is a “performance.” And, again, it’s about the eighth movie within a movie that the overall incoherent “War Machine” becomes during its running time. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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War Machine (2017)

120 minutes

Brad Pitt as Gen. Glen McMahon

Tilda Swinton as German Politician

Anthony Michael Hall as Greg Pulver

Will Poulter as Ricky Ortega

Topher Grace as Matt Little

Ben Kingsley as President Karzai

Keith Stanfield as Cpl. Billy Cole

Alan Ruck as Pat McKinnon

Emory Cohen as Willy Dunne

John Magaro as Cory Staggart

Griffin Dunne as Ray Canucci

Meg Tilly as Jeannie McMahon

John Magaro as Cory Burger

RJ Cyler as Andy Moon

Pico Alexander as Trey Wandella

Daniel Fritz as German Hotel Clerk

Scoot McNairy as Sean Cullen

• David Michôd

Writer (book)

• Michael Hastings

Cinematographer

• Dariusz Wolski
• Peter Sciberras
• Warren Ellis

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Review: ‘War Machine’: Brad Pitt Has Met the Enemy. He Just Doesn’t Know It Yet.

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By A.O. Scott

• May 25, 2017

Bluff and bowlegged, with a neat side part in his hair and a spine as straight as a schooner’s mast, Brad Pitt strides into “War Machine” in a gust of masculine self-assurance. The sardonic tones of the accompanying narration — voiced by someone whose identity will be revealed later on — are an early indication that Mr. Pitt may not be the hero of the story. Glen McMahon, the four-star general he is playing, has no doubts on that score. McMahon, a man of many macho nicknames (the Glenimal, for example) is a man’s man, a soldier’s soldier, a warrior with the soul of a poet — the walking embodiment of just about every cliché in the book.

But the particular book that inspired “War Machine,” “The Operators” by Michael Hastings, is a sharp, nuanced deconstruction of the modern military mythology. The book grew out of a notorious Rolling Stone profile of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was put in charge of the war in Afghanistan in 2009 and proceeded to blow up his own career. Mr. Hastings, who died in 2013 , sketched a rollicking, damning portrait of a commander in over his head, enthralled by his own hype and in less than perfect control of his mouth. That’s the guy Mr. Pitt is supposed to be.

In adapting Mr. Hastings’s journalism, David Michôd, the writer and director of “War Machine,” also streaming on Netflix, has taken some risks of his own. The movie is fiction, but it hugs the shore of reality, occasionally running aground on the facts. It’s a bit awkward — though not unusual — for semi-invented characters to brush up against real people. Anthony Michael Hall plays a volatile colleague of McMahon’s who seems to be based on Gen. Michael T. Flynn, whose more recent adventures may provide fodder for a sequel. The actual President Obama appears on a television news clip, and is played later in a brief scene on an airport tarmac by an actor named Reggie Brown. Ben Kingsley wickedly impersonates Hamid Karzai, at the time the president of Afghanistan.

That is a brilliant piece of casting. At its best, “War Machine” crackles with irreverent wit, even if American political craziness circa 2009 looks tame compared with the 2017 version. It takes a while to get going, though. A raft of secondary characters is introduced via voice-over, but most of them fade into the desert-camo background. The few that stand out — Mr. Hall’s fireplug, Topher Grace’s glib fixer — make the labored introductions superfluous. And as you follow McMahon through the first stages of his new assignment, you may wish for a speedier, snappier rhythm.

Mr. Michôd’s satirical intentions call out for something like the rapid-fire cynicism of Armando Iannucci , creator of “Veep” and director of “In the Loop,” or the gonzo iconoclasm of David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.” But after a sluggish and chaotic start, “War Machine” finds its groove and becomes its own thing: a mordant, cleareyed critique of American war-making that is all the more devastating for being affectionately drawn.

McMahon may be a blowhard and kind of an idiot, but he’s not a bad guy. His judgment can be questioned, but not his sincerity. He is beloved by most of the men in his charge and unflinchingly committed to them. Their belief in him is exceeded only by his belief in himself as a legendary, larger-than-life figure. Everyone knows that he runs seven miles every morning, sleeps four hours a night and eats one meal a day. He his devoted to his wife (a wonderfully sly Meg Tilly) even though, as she points out over an anniversary dinner, they have spent 30 days in each other’s company over the past eight years.

McMahon is no tomcat, but no choirboy either. His attractive qualities of bluntness and loyalty are offset by a propensity for passive-aggressiveness in his dealings with civilian authority and a dogmatic attachment to some pretty dubious ideas. He is convinced that the war can be won and that he is the man who can win it. His hubris would be tragic if his overestimation of his own abilities were not so farcical.

Mr. Michôd, whose previous films include “Animal Kingdom,” a gamy crime drama, and “The Rover,” a dusty post-apocalyptic thriller, gestures toward the grim futility of the war on the ground. A subplot involves a young marine (Lakeith Stanfield), who questions the strategy he must nonetheless carry out, with terrible consequences. But most of the action is far from combat, consisting of hushed meetings and heated arguments.

“War Machine” effectively rebuts the evergreen notion that military leaders are held back from victory by politicians and bureaucrats. It’s not that the political and diplomatic aspects of American policy are excused, but rather that failure, to reverse the old saying, has a thousand fathers. McMahon, clinging to his faith in the dubious doctrines of counterinsurgency, chases after an illusory victory that his allies, colleagues and bosses don’t really believe in any more. Is he ridiculous or noble? A little of both, perhaps.

But “War Machine,” as its title hints, is not entirely about him. Mr. Pitt’s performance is engaging and complicated — somehow recalling both the wily and ruthless Aldo Raine of “Inglourious Basterds” and the lethally stupid Chad Feldheimer of “Burn After Reading” — but the film’s most memorable words are none of the jargon that comes out of McMahon’s mouth. In one indelible scene, a German member of Parliament (Tilda Swinton) delivers a calm, respectful and unsparing demolition of the American position. It is too long and complicated to quote here, but in another scene an Afghan villager offers a three-word summary: “Please leave now.”

War Machine Not rated. Running time: 2 hours.

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War Machine (2017)

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Review: Brad Pitt’s canny allusion to Gen. Stanley McChrystal is at the heart of the nervy satire ‘War Machine’

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American movies are traditionally of two minds about our military might, celebrating it in John Wayne epics and mocking it in everything from “MASH” to “Dr. Strangelove.” But “War Machine” has decided, with exceptional results, that it wants it both ways.

Starring Brad Pitt and written and directed by the gifted David Michôd, “War Machine” is on the one hand an assured, nervy black satire on America’s involvement in Afghanistan and on one particular soldier, commander of U.S. forces and four-star Gen. Glen McMahon, a.k.a. Big Glen or the Glenimal.

Yet while “War Machine” makes it clear that McMahon made a hash of things in Afghanistan in any number of in-over-his-head ways, the general can also be viewed as the most sympathetic character in the film. He’s an idealistic individual who meant well but, oblivious to everything but his own earnest goals, became stubbornly disconnected from reality with ruinous results.

“War Machine” is the first of Australian filmmaker Michôd’s three films (after the brilliant criminal drama “Animal Kingdom” and the post-apocalyptic thriller “The Rover”) to have a dominant sense of humor. What unites it with its predecessors is Michôd’s fierce intelligence and formidable directing skill.

FULL COVERAGE: Cannes 2017 »

Michôd’s starting point was the late Michael Hastings’ “The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan,” a nonfiction book that grew out of a Rolling Stone article that so embarrassed Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal he resigned his Afghan command in 2010.

Though Michôd has lifted certain details from McChrystal’s lifestyle, including his routine of running seven miles a day and sleeping but four hours, “War Machine’s” McMahon feels like an off-beat riff on the idea of the general rather than a disguised portrait.

In this, he’s been helped by some very deft work by Pitt, whose combination of comedic skills and movie star persona is put to excellent use here. His canny but doltish McMahon has the difficult task of being in effect a cartoon character placed in real-world places where his decisions get people killed. Places like Afghanistan.

Bringing us up to date about McMahon as he heads out in 2009 from his previous posting in Iraq to take command in Afghanistan are the words of an unseen and initially unidentified narrator. He turns out to be journalist Sean Cullen (Scoot McNairy), a whip-smart and wearily cynical individual who knows a lot but has come to understand that no one cares what he thinks.

McMahon, we learn, is a former Ranger who was both a straight-A student and a troublemaker at West Point. He’s a man of formidable drive but no visible sense of humor, author of a well-regarded book called “One Leg at a Time Just Like Everyone Else” and an officer beloved by the men who serve under him because he isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty.

First among equals in this man’s Army are the general’s reverential inner circle, a handful of men known as the Bubble that both pump up his ego (“We have a warrior at the helm” is a typical comment) and insulate him from too much contact with the real world.

Smartly cast by Francine Maisler and Des Hamilton to include such expert actors as Topher Grace, John Magaro, Anthony Michael Hall and Emory Cohen, this group enables Michôd to deftly skewer the ritualistic way these men talk to each other as well as the traditional norms of male camaraderie the military specializes in.

The general, it turns out, mightily distrusts civilians, believing, narrator Cullen tells us, “they hadn’t earned their power, they got it through charm and seduction, qualities he lacked.” Which means that McMahon’s interactions with U.S. Ambassador Pat McKinnon (Alan Ruck) are less than satisfactory.

Though he sincerely wants to involve them, the general has only marginally better luck with the wary Afghans, including the country’s wily leader Hamid Karzai (a sly Ben Kingsley), more interested in hooking up his Blu-Ray player than buying into McMahon’s dream.

For one of the endearing things about the general as he goes about his business is that he might be the only person in the entire country who believes that the stated American mission of nation building, even at the point of a gun, can be accomplished. If he’s at the helm.

So while McMahon is uncomfortable with the mechanics of this new kind of war (described by Cullen as fighting “regular people in regular people clothes”), he understands counter-insurgency enough to know “you can’t help them and kill them at the same time.” But his response — for instance, giving soldiers medals for “courageous restraint” (a real McChrystal suggestion) — only confuses the troops.

As intensely masculine as this deranged, absurdist situation is, Michôd has managed to create a pair of notable roles for women.

Meg Tilly is on point as the sweetly suffering wife (known as Mrs. Boss) that the general truly loves, and Tilda Swinton is expert as a German legislator who tells McMahon, “I do not question the goodness of your intention. I believe you are a good man. I question your belief in the power of your ideas.”

The general doesn’t agree with her, but the savvy and involving “War Machine” definitely does.

--------------------

“War Machine”

Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

Playing: iPic, Westwood; Laemmle’s Monica Film Center, Santa Monica

Streaming: Netflix starting May 26

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Review – War Machine

What is War Machine , exactly?

Based on the title, you’d assume it’s a war movie. A proper, boots on sand, bullets in brains, red-hot, white-knuckle, ooh-rah war movie. And based on the presence of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, you might hope for that. War Machine isn’t a war movie.

Look at Brad Pitt. He plays four-star general Glen McMahon as an amped-up macho caricature. He’s bowlegged and mast-straight, hands half-clenched into claws. He blows into the movie like an angry lobster. He’s a man’s man, a soldier’s soldier. “The Glenimal”, people call him. Surely, then, War Machine is a satire?

Not exactly, no.

A biopic, maybe? The movie is based on a book, The Operators , by Michael Hastings, which grew out of a notorious 2010 Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal. The article helped lose Gen. McCrystal his job as commander of all NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan; the book deconstructed modern military mythology. Brad Pitt’s general is supposed to be that one. War Machine is fiction, ultimately, but it runs a careful, cautionary finger along reality, especially that which surrounded the essentially-unwinnable war in Afghanistan in the months following Barack Obama’s election. Not a biopic, then, but War Machine certainly has a twist of the genre’s condemnatory DNA.

I don’t really know what War Machine is, and I suspect nobody else does, either. It’s all of these things, sometimes, all at once or one at a time, but it’s also often none of them. More than a coherent movie, War Machine is an assemblage of scenes. Some are aimless and unnecessary; others are wonderful. There are actor’s flourishes and great lines of dialogue that suggest one of the smartest, most bitingly satirical deconstructions of foreign policy that I can recall, but the defiance with which the things that work refuse to do so alongside the things that don’t reposition War Machine as a picture more frustrating and unfathomable than legitimately effective.

I should say that I love this movie, almost in spite of itself, and in spite of Pitt’s absurdist take on the stereotypical square-jawed general, who’s despatched to Afghanistan to effectively supervise the troops’ pulling out from the area and requests another 40,000 to bolster his counterinsurgency campaign. Writer-director David Michod is telling a frustrating story about a frustrating person during a frustrating conflict, but I find it unlikely that all of his film’s tonal inconsistencies are attributable to that. The way the scenes are structured, arranged and directed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that wartime bureaucracy is not only the subject of War Machine , but the environment within which it was made.

Pitt’s performance is at the centre of it all, and he makes enough of a meal of it to feed all the troops under his command. His close-knit circle of confidantes would gobble it all gladly, and that’s one of the things about War Machine that made it, for me, at least, so thoroughly likeable. The movie treats this ludicrous man with such fairness and understanding that your natural inclinations are to pity, root for and admire him; to see the logic in his outdated machismo, and the possibilities of his bonkers plan to win the favour of the local populace by wresting control of the most troubled provinces from the Taliban. War Machine manages to touch on some of the fundamental absurdities of the war in Afghanistan. There are so few scenes of traditional fighting because the war’s being fought in boardrooms and schools and the homes of local leaders, one of whom, played by Sir Ben Kingsley, is almost as much of a caricature as Pitt’s cocksure general.

Netflix has coaxed stars before, but none that glimmer like Brad Pitt, and you have to wonder if his casting was a promotional decision rather than an artistic one. Wherever you stand on his performance, the question of whether its right for this particular movie never goes away. The supporting actors fare much better, though, and all the scenes that do work do so mostly because they’re bolstered by familiar, welcome faces. Anthony Michael Hall plays McMahon’s second-in-command, Topher Grace his media advisor, Meg Tilly his long-suffering wife. Will Poulter and Lakeith Stanfield are on-hand as rank-and-file soldiers; Scoot McNairy scoffs and scribbles as the Rolling Stone reporter embedded with the team. There’s a part for Aymen Hamdouchi as McMahon’s Afghan aide-de-camp (when he arrives at the base, he’s stopped by security on suspicion of being a suicide bomber). Even Tilda Swinton turns up for a show-stealing turn as a German politician who detonates McMahon’s ideology. She’s there for one scene, but its War Machine ’s best, and when she leaves she takes the movie with her.

McNairy’s narration often parrots lines from McMahon’s (made-up) memoir, One Leg at a Time , the title of which is supposed to refer to how even world-saving military heroes put their pants on just like everyone else. It can feel silly, and it often is, but there’s something about that notion that Pitt’s performance, and the movie overall, really maintains. You’re invited to laugh at McMahon, and you probably will, but you might find yourself liking him, too. He’s committed to his ego, but also to his men, and to the people of Afghanistan, and his ideals. And in a performance so over-the-top, so comically absurd, what’s most impressive is that he never comes across as anything less than completely sincere.

Article by Jonathon Wilson

Jonathon is one of the co-founders of Ready Steady Cut and has been an instrumental part of the team since its inception in 2017. Jonathon has remained involved in all aspects of the site’s operation, mainly dedicated to its content output, remaining one of its primary Entertainment writers while also functioning as our dedicated Commissioning Editor, publishing over 6,500 articles.

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War machine, common sense media reviewers.

Uneven war satire has violence, frequent cursing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Anti-war sentiment. Details comic inadequacies of

Satirized leading characters (military officers an

Late sequences only. Fierce gun/explosives battle.

Frequent profanity :"s--t," "goddamnit," "Jesus H.

Multiple scenes show troops drinking, with some dr

Parents need to know that War Machine is a Netflix Original movie. It's a re-imagined, thinly disguised comedic portrayal of events that took place in Afghanistan in 2009-2010. An army general, designated commander of US forces, touted as "the finest of warriors and leader of men" arrives in the war-torn…

Positive Messages

Anti-war sentiment. Details comic inadequacies of the U.S. "war machine." Comments upon fruitlessness of a counter-insurgency strategy; reliance on an over-confident, clueless leader; and the dangers of lack of quality control in wartime.

Positive Role Models

Satirized leading characters (military officers and governmental liaisons) are set up as either political dupes, egotistical blowhards, or clueless. Hapless troops are portrayed as innocents caught up in events in which they have no control. Ethnic diversity. No females.

Violence & Scariness

Late sequences only. Fierce gun/explosives battle. Hand-to-hand combat. Deaths. Bodies revealed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent profanity :"s--t," "goddamnit," "Jesus H. Christ," and many forms of "f--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Multiple scenes show troops drinking, with some drunkenness. Reference to heroin as source of income in Afghanistan. A reference to being "high all the time."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that War Machine is a Netflix Original movie. It's a re-imagined, thinly disguised comedic portrayal of events that took place in Afghanistan in 2009-2010. An army general, designated commander of US forces, touted as "the finest of warriors and leader of men" arrives in the war-torn territory to turn around a long, grueling, mostly unsuccessful effort to rid the country of its "insurgency" and the Taliban. Unfortunately, as depicted in this satire, that general is ill-prepared for the impossible task that he's been given, and, sadly, too pompous and clueless to recognize that fact. One lengthy battle sequence toward the end of the movie is suspenseful and violent; scenes with guns and explosions are graphic; people (including innocents) are killed. Profanity is heard frequently, including "s--t" and many uses and forms of "f--k." Soldiers drink and get drunk in multiple scenes; heroin is mentioned as a cash crop in the country, and a player is referred to as being "high all the time." Not for kids. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

As WAR MACHINE opens, the United States is involved in a six-year maelstrom of fighting against an insurgent enemy in Afghanistan. President Obama hasn't been able to extricate the country from a war he inherited. Victory isn't yet in sight. Americans have had enough. Into this setting comes the lauded and popular military hero, General Glen McMahon ( Brad Pitt ). Filled with bravado and confidence, the general, along with his staff of gung-ho yes-men, undertakes the task with gusto, if not insight. What follows are clashes between McMahon's team and those who've been on the ground before them, misunderstandings between McMahon and D.C. government officials, and continuing difficulties in determining which civilians are on which side. McMahon's single-mindedness, based on nothing resembling the current predicament, makes a bad scene even worse. When a zealous Rolling Stone reporter boosts the narcissistic McMahon's ego with the prospect of a tell-all article for the magazine, it's a story destined to spin out of control. As seen here, war is hell. But some of those upon whom all the innocents of the world count are the devils who rule.

Is It Any Good?

Nothing's harder than finding the fine line between satire and caricature, and though director and cast aren't fully up to the task, the film still scores some strong points about both ego and war. The foundation of the story told in War Machine is true. A year in Afghanistan from 2009-2010. Eager, cowboy-general moves in to take the town; reality rears its head and upends his path to glory; and finally, blind narcissism sends him packing. The messages -- about the impossibility of war in situations like modern Afghanistan, Syria, and multitudes of other countries steeped in chaos, and the hopelessness of rallying the locals against who knows who and who knows when, what, and where -- are clear. The tale of one general's self-destructive undoing is worth telling. Still, every character is one-dimensional ( Anthony Michael Hall 's performance is particularly grating); every situation is expected; and, for those familiar with the real Rolling Stone article, the "Oh My God" factor happened long ago. Too much violence and swearing for kids.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about movies like War Machine that treat serious topics, like war, with humor. What are the desired outcomes of such movies? What is the meaning of the phrase: "laughter is the best medicine"?

What is this film's attitude about the U.S. participation in war in Afghanistan? What is the film's attitude about war, in general?

All movies, even comedies, have the potential to be learning experiences. How did this movie enrich your understanding of the terms "insurgency" and "counter-insurgency?"

Was this film's writer-director, David Michod, able to find the right balance between the drama and the comedy in War Machine ? In what ways, if any, was he successful?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : May 26, 2017
• Cast : Brad Pitt , Anthony Michael Hall , Ben Kingsley
• Director : David Michod
• Inclusion Information : Indian/South Asian actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Comedy
• Topics : History
• Run time : 122 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

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War Machine Reviews

Given the story, the potential for biting satire, the cast and filmmaker, War Machine is disappointing for its toothless and unfunny result.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 4, 2022

War is Hell, but War Machine is frustrating.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

America's disastrous peace mission in Afghanistan has been turned into a sharp, satirical comedy starring Brat Pitt.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 4, 2021

The Netflix satire War Machine is a forceful work that depicts the futility and madness of war in general and the war in Afghanistan in particular.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2021

It left me deeply unsatisfied, and I kept pondering why.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

While War Machine never gets all guns firing, it nevertheless provides a biting commentary on a war effort that goes from the dark to the absurd.

Full Review | Oct 30, 2019

Pitt's General spends most of the flick growing increasingly frustrated that nothing is happening -- and I know the feeling.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2019

Underusing countless charismatic performers in his ragtag bunch of what one assumes should be colourful characters, Michôd hasn't created a satisfying film so much as a series of impressively lifeless scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 4, 2019

There's just no consistency throughout its two-hour examination of the behind the scenes machinations of the military-industrial complex.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2018

The meandering military story fails to win hearts or minds.

Full Review | Aug 28, 2018

Wildly absurdist, it works well as a satire of militaristic bureaucracy, but it's very inconsistent in its voice. It's surprising that it was written and directed by the same person because it feels like it was crowdsourced.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 20, 2018

It's hard to get past the feeling that there had to be a better movie there.

Full Review | Mar 28, 2018

What could have been an important denunciation of those responsible behind the longest war in which the United States has participated, remains an attempt at an antimilitarist film from which it is difficult to draw conclusions. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Dec 29, 2017

You walk away from War Machine with more questions than answers, unfortunately.

Full Review | Dec 19, 2017

Though the real-life events of McChrystal and his team are ripe for satire, War Machine gets too caught up in the fog of war to give its audience anything to latch onto.

Full Review | Dec 18, 2017

Brad Pitt isn't particularly very good in War Machine, delivering a performance so far into cartoonish military caricature that it's tough to buy into the absurdist humor and satire being leveled at the whole disaster of the Afghanistan war

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 5, 2017

...the military satire contains solid acting performances even as it misses on some levels.

Full Review | Nov 26, 2017

He deftly explores how cycles of human delusion help fuel failing foreign policies and rampant governmental hubris.

Full Review | Nov 7, 2017

Don't be surprised to hear about award nominations on this one, and make sure to add it to your watch-list as soon as it's out.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 1, 2017

Brad Pitt's Netflix movie, War Machine, probably didn't play out as well as anyone hoped.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2017

‘War Machine’ Review: Brad Pitt Goes Runaway-General Gonzo in Over-the-Top Satire

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

“Why is a general talking to Rolling Stone in the first place?” That the question asked near the end of War Machine, a film loosely based on “The Runaway General,” a National Magazine Award finalist for excellence in reporting by Michael Hastings. (The same article, it should be mentioned, that helped lose Gen. Stanley McChrystal his job as commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.)

Hastings, who died in a car crash four years ago at 33, expanded his 2010 profile of McChrystal into a 2012 book-length expose called The Operators. He caused a furor by reporting comments from the general and his staff that were critical of Obama’s war policy, saying it would lead to “Chaos-istan.” Long story short: The man talked shit about the President and got shit-canned for it. But there’s more here than hubris. The real story at the core of Hastings’ reporting remains the war machine and how it operates. That’s why Rolling Stone is talking to him in the first place.

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And that should be why Hollywood and Netflix decided to make a movie. There’s certainly dramatic conflict to spare in the story of a rogue general who decides he can win the war even as Obama announces dates for the withdrawal of troops. Brad Pitt stars as the military man, here dubbed Gen. Glen McMahon for reasons best known to litigators. The star can be great in go-for-broke roles ( 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, Snatch, Burn After Reading, Inglorious Basterds ), but he pushes the character too far into caricature. Pitt goes big and blustery when what his performance needs is more stealth and danger. The general believes he can win the war through counterinsurgency. He believes in the men who soldier on for him. As much as he believes in his own personal glory? Probably not. But there are three dimensions to this ramrod. Pitt and the script give us one.

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David Michôd, the talented Australian writer-director of Animal Kingdom and The Rover, loses his way in the byzantine byways of global warfare. His movie wants to be savagely satirical – a sort of millennial Dr. Strangelove. But he lacks Stanley Kubrick’s keen eye for the skull beneath the skin. The filmmaker delights in showing Obama snubbing the General on every occasion, especially on an airport tarmac. Afghanistan’s democratically-elected leader, Hamid Karzai (Sir Ben Kingsley), is shown obsessing over DVDs. And one scene, at a Paris restaurant, with the general watching his master plan unravel before his eyes, achieves a high level of farce.

But the too-blunt comedy defangs the film. As does the irritating voiceover from the Rolling Stone reporter, played Scoot McNary, which breaks a cardinal rule of filmmaking: show, don’t tell. In “The Runaway General,” Hastings wrote of McChrystal: “His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.” Damn, I would have liked to see that. And I bet Pitt could have shown it to us – but not in this movie. Somewhere along the way, War Machine forgot that world leaders and policy wonks don’t mean a thing if they’re not flesh and blood.

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Movie Review – War Machine (2017)

May 27, 2017 by Robert Kojder

War Machine , 2017.

Written and Directed by David Michod. Starring Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Anthony Michael Hall, RJ Cyler, Topher Grace, Anthony Hayes, John Magaro, Emory Cohen, Meg Tilly, Alan Ruck, Will Poulter, Aymen Hamdouchi, Daniel Betts, Lakeith Stanfield, Nicholas Jones, Justin Rosniak, Josh Stewart, Kola Bokinni, Griffin Dunne, Pico Alexander, Derek Slow, Tilda Swinton, and Ben Kingsley.

An absurdist war story for our times, writer-director David Michôd ( Animal Kingdom ) recreates a U.S. General’s roller-coaster rise and fall as part reality, part savage parody – raising the specter of just where the line between them lies today. His is an exploration of a born leader’s ultra-confident march right into the dark heart of folly. At the story’s core is Brad Pitt’s sly take on a successful, charismatic four-star general who leapt in like a rock star to command NATO forces in Afghanistan, only to be taken down by a journalist’s no-holds-barred exposé.

If all Afghanistan war films have left to say about the flaky endeavor is that it wasn’t a good idea and was mismanaged by everyone from presidents to political leaders to military generals, then it’s probably time storytellers realize that as much as possible has been mined from the premise. War Machine (directed by David Michod who is most known for The Rover and Animal Kingdom , and based on Michael Hastings’ novel The Operators )) stars Brad Pitt leading a group of military personnel in and around Afghanistan vainly attempting counterinsurgency, which is basically Americans trying their damnedest to convince the civilians of the country that they’re the good guys in the ongoing war and win their trust, rather than sitting idly by with the neutrals potentially joining the enemy.

General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt sounding like he’s been chain-smoking for 25 years and  indulging a bit too much in portraying the satirical side of the leader’s non-defeatist, self-aggrandizing, overly confident personality) is surrounded by a team with each individual given a cliché specialized field (Topher Grace plays the publicity guy, RJ Cyler of the recent Power Rangers reboot is the token tech wizard, Anthony Michael Hall is the shortsighted and F-bomb happy brute ironically given the Director of Intelligence title, and so on), except no one supporting character is really given much material to work with or stands out. I mean, Topher Grace does, but that’s more because it’s impossible to get the distinguishable voice of Eric Foreman out of one’s head.

Instead, War Machine seems to abandon the concept of camaraderie and humorous banter (those looking for a military comedy will be somewhat disappointed as the movie surprisingly tends to lean on the more dramatic side of satire) to focus on General McMahon’s ups and downs. The script attempts to wrestle with his (and every general’s) true duty during war, his pride blocking rational thinking and the inner workings of handling the Afghanistan situation (a sizable section of the movie sees McMahon attempting to leverage former yet then President Obama into providing him with 40,000 more troops to accomplish what he feels needs to be done to win the war). Even Mrs. McMahon is implemented into the narrative during a visit to France, and while I admire the direction successfully presenting that Mr. McMahon’s passion and duty to the military has greatly strained their relationship, it’s hard to shake the feeling that David Michod (he also wrote the script) is taking the film into various directions without any real understanding of what it should be or what he wanted it to be.

The real killer in all of this is that Brad Pitt isn’t particularly very good in War Machine , delivering a performance so far into cartoonish military caricature that it’s tough to buy into the absurdist humor and satire being leveled at the whole disaster of the Afghanistan war. Oddly enough, the few attempts at comedy that are present (especially Ben Kingsley playing President Karzai as a buffoon more interested in hooking up his high-definition television than performing his duties, most likely because his wishes are already irrelevant in the presence of the American military) land, subsequently feeding the sensation that War Machine could have been great, and possibly even broke through the current generic trappings of Afghanistan war centered flicks, if David Michod had settled on a singular working tone.

And speaking of drastic tonal shifts, War Machine decides to give audiences a full on battle sequence towards the end (some notable names like The Revenant ‘s Will Poulter appear here in combat gear and give serviceable performances) that authenticity and stellar direction aside, seems to be attempting to say something about the nature of who an enemy is (calling back to a much earlier conversation between General McMahon and a corporal soldier played by  Lakeith Stanfield regarding the confusion in deciphering the difference), but in execution it just comes across as out of place. War Machine is an exercise in a film morphing into something else consistently every 30 minutes. 

Brad Pitt aside (who once again misses the mark on his performance here), the acting along with a few heated conversations are enough to carry War Machine through its two-hour running time without ever feeling like too much of a slog. The fatal flaw here is that you can deduct all the movie has to say just from reading the title; the war machine will keep on spinning regardless of who succeeds or fails, and society likely won’t learn from their mistakes. Can we get something refreshing for this genre, please? Now War Dogs , that was an underrated step in the right direction

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder – Chief Film Critic of Flickering Myth. Check here for new reviews weekly, friend me on Facebook, follow my Twitter or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Film Review: Brad Pitt in ‘War Machine’

Brad Pitt is cartoonishly miscast as the U.S. general delusional enough to believe he can win the war in Afghanistan in big-budget Netflix misfire.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Everyone has a different idea of what’s funny, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being amused by “ War Machine ,” a colossally miscalculated satire about a U.S. general who thought he could “win” the war in Afghanistan at precisely the moment President Obama announced he would be pulling troops out of the country. A costly flop from Netflix’s newish “Originals” division, “War Machine” stars a cockeyed Brad Pitt — who spends the entire film with his left brow cartoonishly arched and his right eye squinched half-shut — in the sort of role that really ought to have gone to John Goodman, or some comparably gifted character actor.

But bless their hearts, the execs at Netflix still believe in stars, which is sort of a radical notion in an era when the old-school studios have consistently hyped visual effects ahead of the interchangeably handsome hunks selected to play Spartan warriors, superheroes and whatever passes for leading men these days (precious few of whom would qualify as stars in the classic sense). Opening in select theaters amid a minefield of CG tentpoles, “War Machine” may be a dud, but it’s the kind that ought to be encouraged regardless, if only because it attempts to deliver the kind of relevant-to-our-times adult entertainment Hollywood once provided — and because it serves up a real, flesh-and-blood character for an actor of Pitt’s abilities to sink his teeth into, even if Pitt himself was the wrong choice.

Pitt plays Gen. Glen McMahon, a can-do, shoot-from-the-gut Army Ranger who fancies himself a modern-day Patton — except he was born too late to swoop in and take charge of such clear-cut conflicts. These days, war is messy, and heroism is complicated (where talk of a “courageous restraint” medal honors those who don’t fire their weapons). Over the course of McMahon’s career, America has put its foot in one unwinnable quagmire after another, complicating his shot at personal glory — and that , argues writer-director David Michôd (and the Tilda Swinton-puppeted mouthpiece he gets to say as much), is what the otherwise retirement-ready general wants.

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Michôd’s message couldn’t be more obvious, though satire represents an ungainly change for the director, a sharp, punchy Australian whose take-no-prisoners thrillers “Animal Kingdom” and “The Rover” don’t flinch in the face of uncomfortable situations. “War Machine,” on the other hand, appears to be tiptoeing through a minefield of its own making: On one hand, it’s a harsh critique of the perceived absurdity of America’s ongoing involvement in Afghanistan, while at the same time, the film is sympathetic to the servicemen themselves. Michôd doesn’t mind taking jabs at Obama (who appears out of focus, jive-walking down a formation of top-ranking advisors) and Afghanistan’s democratically elected Hamid Karzai (alternately wise and buffoonish, as played by Ben Kingsley), but changes the name and much of the personality of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, on whom Pitt’s character is based.

Loosely adapted from “The Operators,” reporter Michael Hastings’ book-length exposé of how the McChrystal-led coalition forces conducted themselves in Afghanistan, “War Machine” struggles to find a balance between empathy and outright criticism. Military strategy is too complicated to be reduced to something as glib as Michôd sees it — although there’s truth in the notion that officers find purpose amid unrest, while their commanders in chief want to give peace a chance. Like an animation studio that must lay off half its work force between productions, the American military apparatus is a pipeline that feeds on conflict, not “completion” — and McMahon’s idea of the latter is to stir up more trouble.

The film opens with a shot of the general’s boots seen beneath an airport bathroom stall, followed by the sound of the can flushing. It’s a curious way to introduce a decorated officer — basically, the polar opposite of a respectful salute — though it’s consistent with the title of McMahon’s (made-up) memoir, “One Leg at a Time,” which implies that save-the-world military heroes put their pants on the same way you and I do, though it might as well be “Everybody Poops.” What follows is meant to function as a feature-length dressing-down of a self-important general, but someone has pulled “War Machine’s” teeth, assuming the movie ever had them to begin with.

Upon his arrival in Afghanistan, McMahon is briefed by a bunch of Washington bureaucrats, who make one thing clear: no more troops. Naturally, McMahon takes a flash appraisal of the situation and decides he needs 40,000 more soldiers to secure the most dangerous, Taliban-infested region of the country. Only then, he reasons, will the local population believe in the occupying forces’ ability to protect them. But if the enemy are insurgents — “regular people in regular people clothes” — how are American soldiers supposed to identify them, one demoralized corporal (Lakeith Stanfield) wants to know.

We may question McMahon’s motives, but as portrayed by Pitt, he’s committed to both the local people and the rank-and-file soldiers tasked with protecting them. Early on, McMahon insists on having an Afghanistan advisor on staff — an idea so foreign that civilian Badi Basim (Aymen Hamdouchi) is treated as a suspected suicide bomber when he arrives on foot for his first day of service. Our own impression of McMahon is shaped by heavy (and heavily biased) narration from the Rolling Stone journalist (played by Scoot McNary) whose “The Runaway General” profile forced McChrystal to tender his resignation to Obama, with whom he’d had next-to-zero direct interaction prior.

McMahon is itching for battle, but first, he must go to Paris to sell the coalition countries on his plan — and this is where Michôd might have doubled-down, but instead backs away from the comic absurdity of it all. By this point, Netflix audiences will probably be asking themselves why a movie called “War Machine” doesn’t feature more fighting (it has a wee bit of that, but hardly enough to qualify as a war movie). No, this is policy movie, and unless Netflix has intel the rest of the world doesn’t — like, how modest-earner “Charlie Wilson’s War” went on to become the most-streamed movie on their service or something — it looks like the kind of bomb that Hollywood, not Washington, specializes in making.

Reviewed at Netflix screening room, Los Angeles, May 8, 2017. Running time: 122 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release and presentation of a Plan B Entertainment production. Producers: Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Ted Sarandos, Ian Bryce. Executive producer: James W. Skotchdopole.
• Crew: Director, writer: David Michôd. Camera (color, widescreen): Dariusz Wolski. Editor: Peter Sciberras. Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis.
• With: Brad Pitt, Emory Cohen, RJ Cyler, Topher Grace, Anthony Michael Hall, Anthony Hayes, John Magaro, Scoot McNairy, Will Poulter, Alan Ruck, Lakeith Stanfield, Josh Stewart, Meg Tilly, Tilda Swinton, Ben Kingsley.

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Brad Pitt’s “War Machine” Stays on the Surface of American Politics

By Richard Brody

Brad Pitt’s new vehicle, “War Machine,” written and directed by David Michôd, is a political satire that grapples with its subject only half-acidly. (It’s available on Netflix, which financed and distributed the film and is also giving it a minimal theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles.) The movie is a dramatization of the 2012 book “ The Operators ,” by the late Michael Hastings, which was itself an expansion of Hastings’s 2010  Rolling Stone _ _profile of General Stanley McChrystal, who at the time had recently been named the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The article, which exposed behavior on the part of McChrystal and his staff that ranged from cavalier to insubordinate, quickly cost McChrystal his post. (That, too, is fictionalized in “War Machine.”)

It’s hard to imagine that a film based on such material and endowed with such a talented cast (including Anthony Michael Hall, Ben Kingsley, Lakeith Stanfield, Meg Tilly, Emory Cohen, Tilda Swinton, and Topher Grace, along with Pitt) wouldn’t be at least baseline engaging, and so it is, for the most part. But it’s no mere entertainment; it addresses such mighty matters as the war in Afghanistan, the American way of war, the diplomatic glue of international relations, and the role of journalism in the political order, and does so only superficially. In dramatizing the oblivious frivolity at the core of the American command, it takes on some of that frivolity, fluctuating in tone between antic comedy and earnest realism, and achieving neither with any uninhibited precision.

Pitt stars as General Glen McMahon, a hands-on soldier as well as a military scholar, a master administrator as well as a skilled strategist, who was brought in to handle a seemingly impossible situation: to win an unwinnable war. “War Machine” dramatizes McMahon’s own devotedly single-minded efforts to win it nonetheless—and the intellectual gymnastics involved in his own deluded and self-deluding efforts to define that elusive victory (or to define it down). As part of the political side to his work—and a not-unconnected taste for his own newfound celebrity—McMahon allows a  Rolling Stone  reporter named Sean Cullen (Scoot McNairy) to embed with his command. Sean observes and reports on McMahon and his staff’s contemptuous remarks about President Barack Obama and his Administration, as well as some out-of-control partying on a business trip in Europe that was intended to secure additional troop commitments; soon after the article appears, Obama fires McMahon. (This, of course, is what happened to McChrystal, too.)

The movie is full of portraits à clef, including McMahon’s second-in-command, a general named Greg Pulver (played by Hall), who is a stand-in for Michael Flynn; a diplomat named Dick Waddle (Nicholas Jones), who, as the late Richard Holbrooke did , makes a point of not wanting to be called Dick; and even a surrogate for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (There’s also a brief impersonation of Barack Obama, by the actor Reggie Brown.)

I’ve seen the film both in a screening room and on my computer, and watching it on the small screen wasn’t any less of an experience—or, rather, seeing it on the big screen wasn’t any more of one. The most significant and imaginative thing in the movie is a voice, namely, Sean Cullen’s—the entire movie is narrated from the perspective of the journalist, who shows up midway through the action and stays onscreen only briefly, but whose reporting and perspective inform the whole story. Michôd’s meshing of the voice-over with the onscreen character is admirably deft but ultimately insubstantial, offering too little of the character behind that voice—of Sean’s own character, interests, and motives—and none of the passion and discernment behind the report.

As General McMahon, Pitt chews and growls his words, strutting and glowering with an air of authority that he rarely actually conveys. It’s a movie that depends on the embodiment of voices, the conversion of plans and orders into action. Most of the movie is people talking on camera in the middle distance, as Michôd shows the behind-the-scenes wrangling among officers and between military and civilian authorities, but he doesn’t find much physicality in those voices and rarely makes the cinematic word flesh. His direction is, for the most part, functional and blandly inexpressive, but he allows (or encourages) his cast to do plenty of conspicuous expressing, which hardly helps Pitt, whose fervent stolidity is an ideal trait for the role of McMahon. (A director better attuned to the blend of subject matter and personnel would have located pathos in the compact tension of a sincerely, even passionately, misguided warrior.)

The movie interweaves many strands of absurdity, starting with the ongoing American and international military presence in Afghanistan, continuing to the vagueness of the mission there, and including the contrast between the serious import of military might and the office-bound bureaucratic impracticality of military policy, as well as the earnestness of military service and the frivolity of military life, and the detachment of military life from that of civilians. The best touches in the film make much of those contrasts in the pathos of secondary characters—in the bumbling but painfully self-aware figure of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai (Kingsley); in the anguish of a brave and talented soldier, Billy Cole (Stanfield), who is involved in a monstrous and misguided mission; and, above all, in the sacrifices endured out of the spotlight by McMahon’s wife, Jeannie (Tilly), whose steadfast support of her husband comes at the high price of solitude, pain, and silence.

That’s why the movie’s flatness, its superficial approach to its material, is all the more disappointing. For instance, though gender plays such a striking role in the film’s emotional temperature, there are no women serving at the base that McMahon commands; it’s a man’s world, even more than in a Second World War battlefield drama, and Michôd can’t be bothered to wonder why that is so. Race is a factor—only Cole (one of just two black soldiers with roles in the outfit) raises doubts about the mission—but Michôd doesn’t approach this fact dramatically, either. Above all, however, the movie’s failure is due to more than any particular dramatic omission; it’s due to an over-all (and fairly common) misconception regarding both screenwriting and direction—the failure to take into cinematic account the essential differences between nonfiction and fiction. It’s enough for a journalist such as Hastings to observe events and to describe in insightful detail what he sees, experiences, and learns. The virtue of fiction is to go beyond the events. That’s especially necessary in a film such as “War Machine,” which is no mere sketch of actions within the director’s immediate purview but a political and intellectual study of rot at the core of American politics, in one particular group of officers—and at the core of one particular officer of outsized character and outsized power, whose great virtues and great vices seem inseparable. While considering what was missing from the film, I recalled a passage from the great cinematographer Arthur Jafa, whose 1992 essay “Black Visual Intonation” offers a critical touchstone of directorial imagination:

I like to think about films and the kinds of things that are possible. For example, I want to do Martin Luther King’s life in the style of “In the Realm of the Senses” (Nagisa Oshima’s amazing hard-core feature). I want to do Malcolm X’s life as a series of moments—Malcolm arriving home at two o’clock in the morning and looking at his little girls asleep. . . . And I would like to know what kind of version of Little Richard’s life Andrei Tarkovsky would do.

In “War Machine,” the absolute absence of intimacy, of psychology, of characters’ self-revelation in thought and desire, is a failure of form and style as much as of content. Michôd takes on an enormous subject that calls for enormous imagination, enormous creativity, enormous audacity, and he renders it anecdotal, ordinary, trivial.

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By Adam Iscoe

• Entertainment

'War Machine' review: Brad Pitt satire lacks killer instinct

Netflix enlists its biggest star yet, but the satire never quite snaps to attention.

Brad Pitt goes to war -- if the bureaucrats will let him.

Ten- hut! Brad Pitt is back in uniform in "War Machine", a new anti-war satire from Netflix .

I wanted to love "War Machine". There's a lot of potential: Pitt is directed by David Michôd , who helmed the stunning "Animal Kingdom" and blisteringly sparse "The Rover". Anthony Michael Hall , Ben Kingsley and Meg Tilly enlist for excellent (although pretty fleeting) performances. The music is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. And it takes aim at the complex and troubling conflict in Afghanistan, a situation ripe for scathing satire. Unfortunately it's not quite worthy of a medal.

Pitt's fictional General McMahon is based on real-life Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was unceremoniously relieved of his senior post in Afghanistan in 2010 after he and his men made the mistake of criticising then-President Barack Obama in front of a Rolling Stone reporter. Journalist Michael Hastings' article and subsequent book "The Operators" inspired this film.

By fictionalising these true-life events, the flick goes into battle against the absurdity, hypocrisy and bureaucracy that goes into a war no-one knows how to fight -- a war in which the weapons are leaks, PR scoops and incomprehensible diagrams on whiteboards rather than bullets and bombs.

"War Machine" never quite snaps to attention. Michôd's script dishonorably discharges the old filmmaking maxim to show rather than tell. The 2-hour movie leans heavily on an intrusive and interminable voice-over that introduces every character and explains every little detail. For the first third the film, Pitt's newly-arrived General wanders around Afghanistan sitting in rooms while the voice-over explains who he's talking to and and what's going on, rather than giving the scenes and the characters permission to speak.

The template for this voice-over-driven storytelling is Martin Scorsese's urgent and compelling montage editing in classics like "Goodfellas" and "Casino". There the voice-over is packed with fascinating detail that draws you into the world on screen, paired with visuals that counterpoint and challenge the narration. "War Machine" isn't sharp enough in its juxtaposition of voice-over and visuals, and it could do with a bit of Scorsese's dizzying urgency. Pitt's General spends most of the flick growing increasingly frustrated that nothing is happening -- and I know the feeling.

"War Machine" reminded me of Netflix's other real-life drama "Narcos", also saddled with an overly explanatory voice-over. Neither is quite dramatic enough to work as a piece of fiction, but they're just fictionalised enough to make you wonder how much is reliably true.

There are some neat satirical touches in "War Machine", like a scene in which the General learns Afghan farmers are still growing heroin because they're not allowed to compete with the American cotton trade, or when Pitt tries and fails to explain the situation to angry marines. But the movie lacks the sharp, cutting edge of good satire and it's missing details that might teach you something about war.

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It doesn't help that Pitt musters a distractingly oddball performance, going straight to full-auto compared with his earlier uniformed turns in the war-weary "Fury" or even the gleefully bloodthirsty "Inglourious Basterds". His General is a glowering, growling caricature with a silverback's waddle and a cartoonish squint. Pitt's eccentric interpretation marches out of step with the more subtle performances around him, like Alan Ruck 's oily civilian mandarin or Meg Tilly's restrained turn as the General's wife.

The fluctuating tone veers most wildly in the final third when "War Machine" finally becomes a war movie. Specifically, it turns into Netflix's other recent military film " Sand Castle ", a worthy but familiar look at US troops in Iraq.

Headlined by arguably the most A-list star Netflix has yet recruited, "War Machine" is the most high-profile Netflix movie to date. It's not a total bomb -- stick with it for a genuinely laugh-out-loud closing salvo -- but it won't be doing battle with streaming rival Amazon at the Oscars .

"War Machine" is on Netflix everywhere now.

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War machine.

An absurdist war story for our times, writer-director David Michôd (Animal Kingdom) recreates a U.S. General's roller-coaster rise and fall as part reality, part savage parody - raising the specter of just where the line between them lies today. His is an exploration of a born leader's ultra-confident march right into the dark heart of folly. At the story's core is Brad Pitt's sly take on a successful, charismatic four-star general who leapt in like a rock star to command NATO forces in Afghanistan, only to be taken down by a journalist's no-holds-barred exposé.

Netflix Original Movie Review: War Machine Is a Voyage Into the Absurd

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David Michod directs Brad Pitt in Netflix's big original summer movie release War Machine.

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War Machine Review

I’m not exactly sure what all the bitching and moaning was about (56% at Rottentomaotes – are you kidding me?!), but from where I sit and view cinema, the new Netflix original movie War Machine, from hot-shot director David Michod (Animal Kingdom, The Rover) is a pointed, extremely funny, and often times sad commentary on the war in Afghanistan and how the American military simply could never fully understand the ramifications of doing what they’ve done in the middle east. Brad Pitt is absolutely terrific as General Glen McMahon, a fictionalized version of General Stanley McChrystal, a take no nonsense commander who was given the unenviable task of “fixing” the situation in Afghanistan, something that he could never possibly have done, as he very quickly learned. One thing leads to another in this wild and woolly tale, and one of the things that I admired most about the film is that it carries a persistent “This is Fucked” vibe that’s both startling and humorous.

Pitt and the excellent ensemble cast, including Alan Ruck, Scoot McNairy, Anthony Michael Hall, Emory Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Topher Grace, Meg Tilly, Will Poulter, and Tilda Swinton, who gets one of the best and most ferocious scenes of the film with her reporter character going straight for the jugular, were clearly in match-step with one another, as Michod’s script, which was based on the book The Operators by Michael Hastings, is filled with sly yet upfront humor that rolls off the tongue, with an especially lacerating quality in various key spots. The outright hubris that was demonstrated on the parts of various government officials during these stages of the “War on Terror” is ridiculous to note, and the backwards and reductive approach to troop involvement is very much shown on screen. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (The Martian, Dark City) shoots in a straight forward fashion, never calling attention to the images, but still giving the film a very polished and stylish look.

I absolutely love topical filmmaking and seeing stories about our current geopolitical conflicts. I’m not a “too soon” cry-baby (United 93 is and always will be a masterpiece) or someone who is easily rattled by Hollywood taking poetic license with the facts. Movies are movies, documentaries are documentaries, and when I watch something that’s ripped from the headlines, I can accept the fact that filmmakers have to change certain things around, condense characters and situations, and approach the material with a strong viewpoint in order to get their message across. War Machine is the sort of film that would have been funded by a major studio in past years, but because it doesn’t fit the current franchise-driven corporate mold and isn’t a safe “Oscar bet”, Netflix took action and made a relevant and smart piece of entertainment that sadly not enough people will check out. This is definitely not an empty-headed action picture, but rather, a film that has something on its mind that’s worth saying.

What Michod does so well in War Machine is present the absurdity of the situation, while piling on incident and conflict, with characters who shuffle in and out of the narrative who don’t ever have a full idea as to what’s truly going on around them. I don’t want spoil anything as there’s any number of scenes that are outrageous in their content and deeply funny because of the absurdity on display. The varied musical score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis plays up the comic uncertainty of the entire operation while still getting tense when required, while Peter Sciberras keeps a fast pace via tight editing; look out for a hilarious cameo during the final scene for one last kicker. And hey, if this isn’t your cup of tea and stories cut from the world around you aren’t of interest, the latest and greatest in CGI-idiocy is playing down the hall or available to stream on various platforms.

Review by Nick Clement

To see more Back to the Movies reviews CLICK HERE

• War Machine

A pointed, extremely funny, and often times sad commentary on the war in Afghanistan and how the American military simply could never fully understand the ramifications of doing what they’ve done in the middle east. I’ll take a bitter, ruthless, smarty-pants satire like this any day of the week, as War Machine further cements Michod’s arrival as a new and distinctive cinematic voice to take note of.

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Nick Clement

Nick Clement is a freelance writer, having contributed to Variety Magazine, Hollywood- Elsewhere, Awards Daily, Back to the Movies (of course), and Taste of Cinema.

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• Pop Culture

War Is Hell, Ain’t It?

For a movie that set off a firestorm with its trailer, Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ is surprisingly bereft of any major commentary—choosing instead to merely drop the viewer into a war zone and see what happens

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“What’s so civil about war, anyway?” asked Axl Rose back in 1990, when he and his band had the world’s ear. Nobody would accuse Guns N’ Roses of being a political act like, say, U2, but releasing a single that paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr. while critiquing America’s misadventures in Vietnam was a risky move, especially considering the core demographics of their fan base. For extra pop-cultural cred, “Civil War” sampled the villainous prison warden played by Strother Martin in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke , whose ominously drawled warning of “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” became a sort of sinister catchphrase —a euphemism suggesting progressive rhetoric wrapped around authoritarian brutality like barbed wire. It’s less that Martin’s character is worried about being understood than that he doesn’t want his charges to talk back.

Alex Garland’s Civil War is a movie with a failure to communicate, though not for lack of trying; its maker understands the visual and rhetorical language of agitprop, but he has such a limited vocabulary as a dramatist—and such a narrow agenda as a provocateur—that it doesn’t matter. There is a significant difference between movies that are polarizing because they ask difficult questions and ones that are simply designed to be divisive, and Civil War belongs decisively in the second category. Not only does the film’s depiction of a near-future America smoldering in the wreckage of its own colliding kamikaze ideologies feel borrowed from a number of other sources, but it also rings hollow, precisely because its vision of violent social collapse is so derivative. In attempting to make a movie largely about the ethical dimension of image making—a dilemma experienced by a group of war correspondents wandering through a country that’s become its own private twilight zone—Garland succeeds mostly in exposing his own limitations. He’s a pulp merchant, a purveyor of high-toned exploitation trying his best to strip-mine an anxious election-year zeitgeist while there’s still time.

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Officially, Civil War is an original screenplay, just like 2014’s Ex Machina , the wryly funny, sexily technophobic Bluebeard riff that positioned him as, if not the new Stanley Kubrick, then at least a worthy pretender. Like a lot of successful genre filmmakers—including his countryman Christopher Nolan—Garland is an inveterate magpie, subsuming aesthetic and conceptual material from a range of sources into his own vision. And whatever one thinks of films like Annihilation or Men , they are movies with a vision—carefully engineered acts of world-building suffused with atmosphere and punctuated by striking, unsettling moments. Which is why it’s all the stranger that right from the very beginning the storytelling language of Civil War feels so totally borrowed, including a pair of brazen allusions tilting toward copycatting more than homage. The first is a prologue nodding to the opening of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in which the president of the United States (Nick Offerman) nervously rehearses a none-too-convincing victory speech from behind barricaded doors; the more he talks about his government’s impending triumph over insurgent forces—specifically, a coalition led by the state governments of Florida and Texas—the more he looks and sounds like a cornered rat. The second reference is even more on the nose: At a rally in downtown New York City, a suicide bomber clad in an American flag ignites a booby-trapped backpack, resulting in carnage whose gory imagery and stylized, ear-ringing sound design are indebted to Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men .

It’s worth noting that Fahrenheit 9/11 and Children of Men are keynote works of what could be called post-9/11 cinema— an early-millennial period when both serious and satirical American filmmakers were aligned in trying to criticize (or, in Moore’s case, outright topple) the Dubya White House. With his smug frat-boy countenance and aides who dated back to Nixon, Bush II was the poster boy for “America: Fuck yeah” and a perfect symbolic scapegoat for filmmakers running the gamut from Gus Van Sant to Sacha Baron Cohen. Two decades later, Hollywood obviously still leans mostly to the left, but the terms of engagement have changed. One thing that Barack Obama and Donald Trump had in common was that while their presidencies were both lightning rods for extremist criticism, they didn’t yield much in the way of memorable or great cinema. The closest thing to a cogent popular political allegory in that period was the ever-reliable Purge franchise, which imagined a silent, seething majority perpetually counting down the hours until a preordained, murderous, insurrectionist return of the repressed.

There’s a potentially great, cathartic dark comedy to be made about the psychology of an event like the Capitol attack of January 6, or about the dangers of unchecked autocracy manifesting as common-sense, anti-woke populism (among his myriad outrageous policy moves, Offerman’s commander in chief apparently opted to gift himself with a third term). Garland, though, is not the guy to thread that particular needle: Where a director like Jordan Peele is able to channel seriousness through sketch-comedy absurdism (including Get Out ’s earlier and superior three-term president joke), Garland doubles down on the idea that he’s doing important work. The strain is palpable. In interviews, the director has explained that Civil War was originally written before January 6 but that the shadow of the insurrection still fell over the production; talking to Dazed , he admitted that he could “detect [it] around the set” and that the bad vibes gave the production “a greater sense of anger.” It’s an interesting observation insofar as the finished film doesn’t so much seethe with rage as ooze a kind of cynical resignation—the sort that comes when a filmmaker either considers himself to be above his subject matter or isn’t being honest about his relationship to the material.

There’s certainly some kind of irony in a guy whose best work—2012’s Dredd , which Garland cowrote and produced with director Pete Travis—is an (exhilarating) exercise in hyperbolic carnage suddenly producing a sanctimonious statement against violence, but otherwise, Civil War doesn’t seem to come from a particularly personal place. Garland’s fascination with female protagonists over the years is laudable, but, as in Annihilation and Men , he can seem to conceive women only in terms of lack: The main character here is a veteran shutterbug named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) who’s grown so inured to the sight of death and decay—and her role in sharing it with an increasingly information-starved public—that she’s basically a zombie. If that’s not enough of a cliché, she’s been given a younger kindred spirit as a combination apprentice and surrogate daughter: Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-ish wannabe war correspondent whose lack of worldliness is her defining characteristic. Jessie isn’t a character, but a device; her job will be to carry the torch for journalistic integrity after her mentor (inevitably) meets her demise in the line of duty.

Lest that last bit seem like a spoiler, Civil War is the sort of movie in which hard-edged professionals grimly sit around prophesying their own fates. And although Lee’s arc is predictable, the flatness of the role is no fault of Dunst’s; like Jessie Buckley in Men , the actress inhabits Garland’s barren idea of dramaturgy so fully that she occasionally draws us all the way in with her. Spaeny, meanwhile, is livelier than she was as an anesthetized princess in Priscilla , yet Jessie isn’t much more than a cipher—a device through which we witness a series of showdowns between characters of different allegiances or tableaux testifying to the sheer photogenic brokenness of the social contract. In structural terms, Civil War is a road movie, with Lee and Jessie traveling from New York to Washington in the company of two other members of the fifth estate: a hard-drinking (and, it’s implied, possibly sexually predatory) reporter, Joel (Wagner Moura), and an ex-op-ed specialist, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), both of whom have inside information on the embattled president’s location and hopes of scoring a final interview before he’s toppled once and for all.

Civil War has been set up so that each successive rest stop bristles with a different kind of anxiety. Stopping for gas means encountering a garage’s worth of bloody strung-up dissidents, displayed like trophies for rubberneckers. Despite traveling with the word “press” emblazoned on their van and flak jackets, Lee and her merry band aren’t insulated from the surrounding dangers, and on a few occasions, they even go looking for trouble: A firefight in an abandoned apartment complex eventually finds Jessie growing into her point-and-click instincts. (The juxtaposition of different kinds of “shooting” in this movie is relentless, a pale imitation of motifs developed in Full Metal Jacket , which, like all of Kubrick’s provocations, understood the relationship between savagery and satire.)

A couple of the set pieces are effective, like an idyll in a Lynchian small town whose smiling inhabitants seem oblivious to the larger conflict (the punchline is Garland’s best and shiveriest sight gag), or a pitched battle between snipers whose worldview no longer extends beyond their own scopes. But there are also risible bits, like a nighttime drive through a forest fire where the floating, burning embers are meant as signifiers of some terrible, fatalistic beauty—a scene that, however well shot, practically vibrates with banality. And then there’s the bit featuring a wandering platoon of disillusioned, trigger-happy soldiers—a device Garland used as far back as 28 Days Later —led by a deadpan Jesse Plemons, clad in red heart-shaped shades that mock the idea of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. “What kind of Americans are you?” he asks our heroes, who, having found themselves on the wrong end of the barrel, don’t know how to answer.

The failure to communicate is ominous, but the question (and its consequences) might be even scarier if we knew what kind of America Civil War took place in. Last month at South by Southwest, Garland got in some trouble when he said that “left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state” and that he didn’t consider either to be “good or bad.” The statement may have been twisted in bad faith by the media (another irony considering the film’s faith in journalists as truth tellers), but at a minimum, it still suggests a filmmaker who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty with such crass things as sociopolitical specifics.

It may be that trying to fill in the blanks of how the sort of scenario depicted in Civil War could come to pass is a fool’s errand—an invitation to criticism that would weaken an already rickety conceptual infrastructure. (Exhibit A: a fleeting mention of “The Antifa Massacre,” which sounds more like a band name than a possible flashpoint.) But would it really be worse than using America’s current political strife as a coy structuring absence? Would it be worse than Garland acting as if such avoidance makes him the adult in the room? The ostensibly outrageous climax, meanwhile, features sequences of urban warfare meant to drop jaws, but these scenes point in such an obvious direction that the suspense is flattened while the audience is simply flattered into acquiescence. There are a number of genuinely profound movies whose thesis boils down to “war is hell,” several less expensive or pretentious than Civil War , but typically they arrive there honestly, and only after challenging their audience. Civil War , which is somehow simultaneously pedantic and frictionless, feels weirdly like a movie of the moment that won’t last—a victory lap around an observation that was already made by Axl Rose.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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• Entertainment

‘Civil War’ review: Alex Garland’s dystopian vision of America horrifies

Movie review.

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is essentially a horror movie, one in which the horrors feel uncomfortably close to home. In this vision of America, the country is divided into two violent factions: one led by a fascist three-term president (Nick Offerman, in a small but vivid role), the other an armed rebellion against the government. Four journalists — photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her reporting partner Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and young aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) — travel across hundreds of miles of this war zone to reach Washington, D.C., in the hopes of getting one last interview with the president. 

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It’s a strange, terrifying journey, punctuated by bodies and blood and an eerily deafening soundscape. They drive past empty streets, abandoned cars, urban buildings with curls of smoke rising. They bargain, at a remote gas station manned by hostile men toting guns, for fuel (their offer of $300 is scoffed at, until Lee clarifies that it’s $300  Canadian ). They witness a firing squad, a bloody riot on a city street, a load of bodies in a dump truck, snipers on the roof of an idyllic-looking small-town street. And they run toward all of it — taking pictures, asking questions, documenting, remembering. If “Civil War” wasn’t so utterly horrifying, it could be a superhero movie, with journalists wearing the capes. 

But in its quieter moments — you wish there were more of them — the film becomes the story of an impromptu family: four people united by a common goal. No one is saintly here: Lee, hardened and weary from years of war reporting, bickers with Joel about not wanting to take responsibility for the inexperienced Jessie, and makes it clear that Sammy is a burden; he’s old, she says, and can’t run. But ultimately they take care of each other, in sometimes surprising ways, and the actors let us see that bond. Dunst, whose Lee seems hard-wired to expect danger at every turn, beautifully lets us see the faintest of meltings as she becomes a reluctant mentor to Jessie. And Henderson shows us an aging man full of stories, even those he didn’t want to tell; he’s still seeking one last byline, somehow. 

“Civil War” creates the sort of dystopian world in which little flashes of normality seem startling: water bottles, newspaper vending boxes, a dress shop open for business, a quiet hotel room. They’re tiny islands of calm for these characters, racing through a war zone, not knowing how long they can stay alive. Lee, at one point, muses on her career documenting violence around the world. “I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this,” she says. The words hang in the quiet for moment, soon drowned out by gunfire. 

With Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman. Written and directed by Alex Garland. 109 minutes. Rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images, and language throughout. Opens April 11 at multiple theaters. 

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The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

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Fantastic Machine review – whirlwind history shows how cameras dazzle and deceive us

From fake news in 1902 to livestreaming a man asleep – and everything in between, the big picture gets a bit lost

A lthough being distributed in the UK with the title Fantastic Machine, this documentary about the camera through history originally had the much more prolix, pretentious and charming moniker And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine. The line is a quote attributed to Edward VII who is said to have reacted with awe when he saw a film of his own coronation – although the footage in question was not of his actual coronation but filmed by French director Georges Méliès with French actors in a Paris studio in advance, the first example of “fake news”.

That is fitting because here directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck explore the camera and the moving image’s ability to dazzle, deceive and delight through history. That said, their thematic intent seems to be a slippery thing as the film shifts its attention across all manner of phenomena and subjects. Sometimes it feels like a cross between a film studies lecture and what happens when you leave YouTube to keep autoplaying while the all-powerful algorithm suggests more and more content.

And so there are clips from Islamic State videos showing the terrorists forgetting their lines and cracking up which is both amusing and chillingly bizarre. In another clip, one of them shows how to make a bomb in a kitchen, like some test kitchen content. Elsewhere we hear about people who livestream their lives, one of whom grew his audience when he fell asleep on camera, and sprinkled throughout are clips of people doing crazy stunts like hanging off high-rise buildings or Base jumping. (Those who get sympathetic vertigo should be forewarned.)

The big picture gets a little lost, although the film-makers seem to know that’s a risk which is why the almost final image is the biggest of big pictures, a view of Earth looking no bigger than a speck, taken by the Voyager probe just before it moved to a range from which the home planet would no longer be visible.

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