Sundance 2025 Review: ATROPIA, The Iraq War Redux, With Less Feeling

Writer-director Hailey Gates' uproarious anti-war/anti-Bush satire, Atropia, arrives either a decade too late or, just as likely given the state of the world and its discontents, a decade too early.

 

Gates’ film brings audiences, willingly or not, back to the memory-holed Iraq War (or more accurately, a short war followed by a long occupation) and its corrosive, corrupting impact on American politics, culture, and society. Even as the Iraq War slipped out of the collective unconscious, its effects continue to be felt two decades later.

 

Atropia opens with a chillingly accurate quote from Ambrose Pierce, circa 1875: “War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.” What was true in the late 19th century remains true in the 21st: for all of the self-mythologizing of American exceptionalism, claims to lofty democratic ideals, and promise of prosperity and peace, the United States has a long (too long) history of foreign intervention all over the world, from the so-called Monroe Doctrine, which carved out a “sphere of influence” that included all of Central and South America plus the Caribbean, to two world wars in Europe, anti-communist actions in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

 

Invading Iraq, like the earlier invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, came with promises of safeguarding the world from so-called "weapons of mass destruction" and bringing Western-style democracy to Middle Eastern countries. The truth lay somewhere else on the other side of those promises, but once in Iraq, the U.S. had to train newly minted troops in the ins-and-outs of urban warfare. And what better way — outside of actual combat operations — than model villages or towns spread out across the California desert.

 

To make the fictional town of Medina-Wasl in the equally fictitious country of Atropia, the U.S. government needed live role players (i.e., cosplayers), drawing from locals who “fit” Middle-Eastern stereotypes. Those actors needed only brown skin (Arabic definitely, Central American, possibly) and a willingness to spend weeks isolated from their friends and family, as well as an ability to convincingly shout anti-American slogans and act surreptitiously around American troops.

 

Atropia centers on one such actor, Faruze (Alia Shawkat), a frustrated actress of some talent who, like every actor or actress of some or no talent, dreams of elusive Hollywood success, but instead settles for the role-of-the-day, a street vendor or bystander one day, a mustard gas chemist another. While Faruze waits for Hollywood to call, she hides her frustrations by proving herself a team player and coaching her fellow actors in tried-and-true acting exercises.

 

After one simulated war exercise goes sideways, Faruze gets her chance to prove herself in front of a Hollywood star slumming for the day. It doesn’t go Faruze’s way, but she finds herself repeatedly in the company of the town’s “terrorist” leader, Abu Dice (Callum Turner), an Iraqi War veteran eager to return to the war that left him compromised, uncertain, and confused about life stateside.

 

An unlikely (emphasis on “unlikely”) romance eventually brings Faruze and Abu Dice together, pushing the anti-military satire to the background, though rarely for long. For every decision Faruze and Abu Dice make that brings them closer, there’s a parallel development — or rather lack of one — as the most recent squad of recruits repeatedly prove, if not their all-around ineptitude, then their rawness and unpreparedness for the war that will soon dictate their futures, alive, dead, or wounded.

 

When it’s not focused on Faruze and Abe Dice’s burgeoning romance, Atropia shifts to the smug, self-entitled, egocentric military administrators (Tim Heidecker, Chloe Sevigny) who make the day-to-day decisions involving the faux town, up to and including potential reassignments for non-complying performers, trainers, or even members of the squad. Their middle manager attitudes, wringing every possible benefit this side of legal from their position, reads far closer to reality than not.

 

It mostly comes together in a finale that briefly unites Faruze and Abu Dice before reminding the audience of the exigencies of war: every life, American born or not, counts. The demands of the military-industrial complex and the nearby Hollywood dream factory that provides actors, props, and staff, however, simply count more. Ending on a stark, not-quite-hopeful note, Atropia might not give audiences what they want, but it’ll certainly give them what they need.