But Netflix’s latest thriller, War Machine, manages to combine both into a twisting tale of the military’s finest dealing with an extraterrestrial threat. For the vast majority, we follow the candidates for the Army Ranger selection program, referred to not by names but just numbers. “It was exceptionally difficult to bring this character to life in a physical sense,” Ritchson tells Inverse. That’s when a third genre is added to the “military” and “sci-fi” mix — a survival thriller. “It's a big action sci-fi we're making, but it's also a survival thriller,” Hughes says.