5 Years Before 'War Machine', Alan Ritchson Made His Own Cyberpunk Thriller With a Perfect Role for Himself

Image via Lionsgate Home Entertainment

Published Mar 12, 2026, 6:09 PM EDT

Sam Barsanti has written about pop-culture for 10 years, and his work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Primetimer, IGN, and Collider. He has also contributed to the popular daily Hustle newsletter, which covers tech and startup news.

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Netflix’s highly anticipated big-budget sci-fi action movie War Machine is finally available on streaming, giving Alan Ritchson fans a chance to see what it would look like if Reacher fought a Transformer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems to look pretty cool: War Machine is sitting just under 70 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (and just over 70 percent from user reviews). The movie is Ritchson’s biggest sci-fi film, but it’s not his first foray into the world of technological thrillers.

In 2021, Ritchson made his feature directorial debut with Dark Web: Cicada 3301, a lightly cyberpunk-flavored action thriller about an internet conspiracy. Dark Web: Cicada 3301 wasn’t received particularly well on its release, but it’s worth remembering for at least one great reason: Ritchson cast himself in the perfect, most obvious role, showing a level of filmmaking savvy and self-awareness that should serve him well as his Hollywood career goes on. Put simply, Alan Ritchson wisely gave himself the stereotypical Alan Ritchson role, which is pretty funny.

What Is ‘Dark Web: Cicada 3301’ About?

If you’ve spent a significant amount of time on the internet, you may have heard of “Cicada 3301.” That’s the name given to a series of mysterious puzzles uploaded to 4chan in the early 2010s that were supposedly designed to recruit highly skilled computer people for some unknown purpose — though, in reality, they were most likely just the result of bored internet users trying to do something fun and particularly nerdy. Despite rumors to the contrary, there’s really no proof that Cicada is part of a hacker conspiracy or even a covert recruitment tool for spy agencies.

But, of course, the movie takes all of that and runs with it for a conspiracy thriller. Dark Web: Cicada 3301 is about a man (Jack Kesy) who stumbles onto a Cicada recruitment game and starts solving the puzzles with his friends (comedian Ron Funches and Ritchson’s future Titans co-star Conor Leslie). As he gets closer to Cicada, the NSA starts pursuing him so he can help shut down the mysterious anarchic computer society, leading to action and chasing and a surprising amount of surprisingly childish humor. It’s all fairly straightforward, at least conceptually.

Who Does Alan Ritchson Play in ‘Dark Web: Cicada 3301’?

Let’s say you’re making a movie about a computer-savvy man and his two friends being pursued by government agents. Who do you cast Alan Ritchson as? He’s not funny enough to be the funny friend, he wouldn’t be believable as the female lead, and he’s too beefy to play a guy who is good at computers. The answer, then, is obvious: He plays a government agent. He wears a suit, he talks tough, he looks big, and sometimes he undercuts how big and tough he is by being silly. Put simply, again, he plays the kind of guy he always plays.

And that’s not a complaint, it’s a statement of fact. It’s also worth noting that Ritchson is very much a side character in Dark Web, which is something that most action hero actors wouldn’t do. Dwayne Johnson wouldn’t direct a movie where he plays a supporting tough guy. Chris Pratt wouldn’t direct a movie where he’s the butt of the jokes. It obviously didn’t work out perfectly for Ritchson or Dark Web, but he still deserves credit for the decision.