Alan Ritchson wears a Casio G-Shock

In the rain, candidate 81 hangs upside down from a rope strung across a river, hauling himself over hand by hand while the cadre watch from the bank. On the wrist doing the work is a small black watch, a digital face on a fat resin strap. Alan Ritchson plays 81 in War Machine, a staff sergeant who signs up for Ranger selection after his brother is killed in Afghanistan and then spends the film known only by the number taped to his kit. Patrick Hughes directed it. The course is RASP, the training real and brutal, until the exercise is broken up by something that fell out of the sky: a machine, not of this world, that starts hunting the candidates through the trees.

The watch is the cheapest thing in the frame and the surest. Black resin, a digital face, the kind of strap a soldier can soak and freeze and forget: it reads as a Casio G-Shock, the workhorse soldiers have worn for forty years, though the film never holds on a logo long enough to lock the model. Everything else on screen is enormous. The armored trucks, the optics, the alien itself, a thing built to kill that no army on Earth has a manual for. The watch just keeps time.

That is the joke the title keeps. War Machine is the alien, the machine no one can fight, and it is the men too, ground down to numbers on their placards, 81 and 7 and 44. The one machine in the movie that asks for nothing and never fails is the block of resin on the sergeant's wrist. Netflix released the film in March 2026, and it became the most-watched thing on the service that year. Tens of millions of people met candidate 81. None of them needed his name, and none of them could name his watch.