An absurdist glimpse at workaday life within one of the very real, very strange U.S. military training grounds where role-players simulate foreign battlegrounds in order to prepare our troops for their time in the field, Hailey Gates’ “Atropia” is hardly the first American comedy set during the Iraq War, which was something of a terrible farce unto itself. Well-trodden territory as this might be, however, it’s been a long time since beloved masterpieces like “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and Larry the Cable Guy’s “Delta Farce” first put their stamp on the sub-genre, and the years gone by have made it possible for Gates’ feature debut — expanded from her 2020 Miu Miu short, “Shako Mako” — to go further through the looking glass than even Oliver Stone’s “W.” ever could.
Case in point: One early sequence in “Atropia” is built around a cameo by an extremely famous movie star who — in real life — once starred in a Very Serious film about the psychological trauma of being stationed in Tikrit. Like most of Gates’ scattered and schticky new satire, the sequence in question feels like it should be a lot funnier than it is, and yet as you watch [redacted celebrity] LARP through Atropia in preparation for an upcoming role, the meta-textual wrinkle of his casting refracts even the most slapstick jokes into a wild infinity mirror of sorts.
Once upon a time this actor embodied Hollywood’s idea of an Iraq War-era soldier, but his screen persona has evolved to the point that his presence alone now feels like a punchline. Here it makes for the most self-reflexive gag in a movie about the ouroboros of manufacturing consent. “Atropia” is determined to poke fun at the hopeless disconnect between America and the reality of the wars fought in its name, a gap that it explores with oodles of screwball energy and enough wit to sustain at least 90 of its 104 minutes, but also one that it maps without any clear sense of where it’s going or what shape might be formed by stringing together all of the pins it drops along the way.
Or is it just one pin stuck in 1,000 different places? For all the variety of its “M*A*S*H*”-like shenanigans (the film is dedicated to the great Joan Tewkesbury, a two-time screenwriter for Robert Altman as well as Gates’ maternal grandmother), the vast majority of them boil down to the same notion: America has become too solipsistic to do anything but play itself. Enter: Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), an Iraq-ish striver who came to California in the hopes of becoming a famous Hollywood actress. Instead, she wound up in “The Box,” playing an Atropian DVD seller or a bomb-making chemist who the soldiers might find if they sweep a certain room of the set (it’s all very Donald Rumsfeld meets “Sleep No More”).
Fayruz doesn’t speak Arabic very well, but she understands it fluently, which she hoped might give her a leg up on the other members of the cast. Ironically, it’s the amputees who seem to get all of the juiciest parts (many of the scenarios involve a detonated I.E.D.), though Fayruz is also upstaged by a talented Mexican colleague who’s so good at crying on command that no one seems to care that she wails in Spanish. The Army talks a big game about Atropia being as realistic as possible (it even comes with its own competing TV networks, Box News and a fake Al-Jazeera), but “The Truman Show” it ain’t. If anything, the buzzing vests the soldiers have to wear over their combat uniforms make the whole experience feel like a game of laser tag on a Hollywood budget.
Of course, Atropia is meant to be even more immersive than a film set (the props department is proud of their pungency, which includes the ability to create the smell of burning flesh), but Gates’ film quickly grows bored of the scripts that Fayruz and her co-workers are meant to perform. Even Fayruz’s big screen dreams seem to fall by the wayside, as her plan to replace Atropia’s bootleg DVD market with her acting reel — introduced in the first act — isn’t revisited until a non-joke of a button after the end credits. True as it is that such military simulations were created with the explicit hope of seducing Hollywood to film on them and/or model its war movies on Atropia’s vision of reality, Gates only pokes fun at how America casts itself until she gets distracted by a cinematic fantasy of her own.
Like so many satires based on true events, “Atropia” fails the most basic test of its worthiness: It never feels more vital or interesting than it would be to watch a documentary on the same subject. Credit to Gates, she had fully intended to make one until the Department of Defense denied her the access she needed. Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, she pivoted to a scripted comedy, which soon came to involve a love story at Shawkat’s request.
Shawkat is terrific in “Atropia,” layering every joke and/or lie she tells with the lament of a second-generation immigrant selling out her past (“We’re helping a group of teenagers to invade our homeland in a better way,” she confesses at one point), and it’s a testament to how well she threads that needle that Fayruz’s Atropian rom-com works as well as it does. What starts as a flirtation with insurgent leader Abu Dice — a character played by a white American war vet who’s itching to be redeployed (Callum Turner) — soon develops into a hyper-silly base romance worthy of a French sex farce. Both of them are desperate to go to Iraq, and both of them have disappeared too deep into the roles that America has offered. Only one of them has a fetish for the fetid stink of porta potties, but the other one has their weird kinks too.
It’s all amusing enough on its own terms, but it’s also among the least trenchant or rewarding of the countless different places that “Atropia” could take its premise, and every new wrinkle that Gates introduces to it — including a “Badlands”-esque subplot involving a raid on some new recruits and a thematically overbearing visit to the plaster canals of the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas — only takes the movie further away from the reality it’s trying to play against. Other threads tie themselves into similar knots, or would if “Atropia” gave them enough material to do so. Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny have some fun as the glorified camp counselors in charge of the roleplay, Jane Levy is a blast as the Box News reporter looking for a big scoop, and there’s a consistently enjoyable character who functions as a human iPod, which is something that more movies could use.
Be that as it may, exactly none of what happens inside the Box is a fraction as interesting as the Box itself, and the sobering footage that Gates cuts into the action — much of it taken from Iraq documentaries like “Gunner Palace” — is too clumsily introduced to have the sobering effect it’s so eager to exert on this material. If “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” as the Ambrose Bierce quote reads at the start of the movie, then perhaps the movies have become Americans’ way of teaching the world what they’ve learned. “We’re all just set dressing,” one of the characters in “Atropia” says. But in this particular movie, the set has more to say than any of the people trying to act their way out of it.
Grade: C
“Atropia” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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