Based on her 2020 short “Shako Mako,” Hailey Gates writes and directs “Atropia,” a unique war satire about western views of the Middle East. While both its lampooning of U.S. militarism and its central character drama lack follow-through, the film contains bright comedic sparks in its keen observations about American media. It’s a self-reflexive work that, though eventually petering out, proves amusing enough in the way it holds a mirror to Hollywood war films.
Like Gates’ short, “Atropia” opens with a near-identical scene of an Iraqi woman played by Alia Shawkat, witnessing U.S. troops rolling through her hometown in pursuit of a suspect right as an IED goes off. It is utter chaos; limbs are flung helter-skelter as Iraqi villagers yell “Death to America!” These familiar tropes emanate from the modern war cinema playbook, from the soldiers having their suspicions immediately confirmed, down to the Orientalist music compositions, which hint towards an imagined conception of a place, rather than a feeling. It’s immediately uncomfortable and outdated — which is why it’s such a relief when this is revealed to be a highly-coordinated, VFX-heavy exercise on a sprawling set, bringing into immediate focus how common (and expected) such portrayals happen to be.
The year is 2006 and this is Atropia, a fictional country in California, used as a stand-in to train new cadets for deployment to wherever America happens to be invading (in this case, Iraq). It’s a real place that functions like a sprawling, immersive movie set; Gates’ film treats it as such. It has logistics coordinators akin to assistant directors (June Carryl), a grizzled special effects head (Sal Lopez), a dialect coach (Tony Shawkat) and even executive military personnel who give orders from a boardroom (Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny). Tongue-in-cheek training videos help quickly establish a wry tone that jabs in the direction of the mid-2000s “War on Terror” as a mostly-meaningless, repetitive exercise, like a day spent in Westworld. Meanwhile, the reductive approach to populating the town speaks to Hollywood’s own complicity in spreading falsehoods and manufacturing consent.
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Shawkat’s character, the struggling actress Fayruz, is one of the few participants of Iraqi origin, as well as one of its few Arabic speakers. She’s completely dedicated to her part, if only to get noticed by a visiting movie star (a secret cameo involving a hilarious send-up of Hollywood’s battlefield melodrama). Other performers, like Fayruz’s co-worker Gloria (Priscilla Garita), are more proficient in Spanish; many of the “Iraqis” in Atropia are Latin American. In contrast to Fayruz’s borderline Method acting approach, the recent Arab immigrant Noor (Zahra Alzubaidi) simply goes through the motions in order to obtain a Green Card, just as the town’s numerous disabled and amputee actors seem happy enough to have been hired. Like actors on actual sets, every extra here has their own struggle.
The film’s setup is immensely detailed, creating an appropriately warm, dusty and lived-in simulacrum, including numerous disabled and amputee performers. Fayruz, who uses the exercise to stay connected to some version of her homeland, tries to turn it into an audition by bending the rules. She’s inevitably confronted by an in-character Iraqi insurgent, “Abu Dice” (Callum Turner) — a white soldier with boots-on-the-ground experience — leading to sexual tension, blurring their fictitious lines in delightful ways. Theirs is an off-beat romance told through moments of excitement, though it quickly hits a plateau when it becomes clear that the secrets and complications they keep from one another don’t actually complicate things.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the exercise is the way its young soldiers move through it. They’re mostly teens, some of whom have enlisted in order to get a free ride through college; none of them have a concrete idea of why they’re being deployed to Iraq in the first place. This idea is broached early on in the film, allowing it to place its political cards on the table, though it’s seldom explored from there on out.
However, the contrast between meek, nervous individual soldiers (captured in intimate close-up) and their boisterous battalion as a group (as seen in ludicrously-staged group shots from afar) is revelatory. It hints at the kinds of young people — naïve, desperate or over-eager — who get subsumed by hyper-masculine U.S. military culture, from its nicknames to hazing rituals. The movie isn’t interested in excusing anyone for participating in an imperialist invasion, but it does harbor a sense of curiosity about what may have led them there.
These ideas make for a solid foundation, even though the movie is often scattershot. Jokes are usually emphasized by dramatic music cutting out (à la comedy movie trailers), a trick that overstays its welcome. Meanwhile, minor characters who seem like they might add new dimensions to the proceedings, like a constipated mock reporter (Jane Levy), simply function as extraneous setups to other people’s raunchy punchlines.
While few Hollywood war movies have so directly confronted the flaws in the U.S.’ “Forever Wars,” the observations on racism and the military in “Atropia” are seldom explored beyond the first time they’re introduced. Gates’ film often feels a pass or two away from truly biting satire, but at each turn, it stops just short of expanding its purview.