War Machine director says practical FX was “paramount” to make the sci-fi action movie feel as real as possible: “We set off a bomb in the quarry that was 550 feet high”

War Machine director and co-writer Patrick Hughes says the upcoming Netflix sci-fi action thriller needed to feel like a nightmare come to life.

“To me, it was paramount,” Hughes tells GamesRadar+, when asked how important it was to make the movie feel as realistic as humanly possible. “And that was part of the push. Obviously, we have a visual effects VFX component to the film, but everything else was just 100% real, which meant it was real world locations in the real world wilderness, with real world actors doing real world stunts, and then being able to combine that then, we had a lot of gags on set where we’d be knocking trees over in camera and sort of dust machines and gravel and rocks and stuff that that interaction.”

Directed and co-written by Hughes, the movie stars Alan Ritchson as a U.S. Army Ranger known only as ’81’ who must lead his quad of hopeful trainees against an unknown (and seemingly alien) entity. What’s supposed to be the final exercise in their rigorous training camp turns into all-out war with something that just can’t be killed… and it’s some of the most stunningly impressive FX I’ve seen in a minute. You can check out the absolutely incredible War Machine itself in the trailer, which gives us some serious War of the Worlds meets Predator vibes. Interestingly enough, the idea for the movie came to Hughes in a nightmare (which makes a ton of sense once you’ve seen the film).

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The movie begins in a sort of desert setting before we head into a rigorous training camp that eventually takes them right into the wilderness, and it’s out in the woods where they encounter a giant metal killing machine. Ritchson himself told GamesRadar+ that it was the most physically demanding role he’d ever taken on, and we believe him. The stellar ensemble cast also includes Dennis Quaid, Stephan James, Jai Courtney, Esai Morales, Blake Richardson, Keiynan Lonsdale, and Daniel Webber.

“So there’s just a lot of layers that go into it,” Hughes continues. “Even the explosions were real. We set a bomb off in the quarry that was 550 feet high. There’s a mushroom cloud. We had three of them, too. Essentially, because, at the end of the day, it’s a big action sci-fi, but it’s also fundamentally a survival film, and that, to me, was just really important that we go out into the wilderness.”

War Machine lands on Netflix on March 6. For more, check out our picks for the best sci-fi movies of all time.

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