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<\/p>\nIt\u2019s 2006. A veiled woman ambles through a dusty street, exchanging glances with men in keffiyehs as sinister music plays in the background. In rolls a Humvee, and out pours a team of soldiers, rushing to assess the situation. Tensions rise, one soldier points a gun at the woman, and an explosion ripples through the block. Shock, fear, shaky cameras.<\/p>\n
The soldiers scramble, chased by insurgents shouting \u201cAllahu akbar\u201d and \u201cDeath to America.\u201d\u00a0 The woman wails to the sky, only to be interrupted by a director\u2019s megaphone. The donkey bomb didn\u2019t detonate, so they\u2019ll have to run it back from the top.<\/p>\n
This is Atropia, a new film that\u2019s part rom-com and part war on terror satire, an interesting take on the disconnect between Americans and the not-so-long-ago wars fought in their name. The title refers to a fake, oil-rich dictatorship constructed within a real U.S. military training facility in the California desert, where the story unfolds.<\/p>\n
Inside the facility, actors play civilians and insurgents in an immersive simulation to prepare soldiers for deployment. Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) is an Iraqi American actor searching for her big break. As she stumbles into a romance with a recent veteran cast as an insurgent, Fayruz begins to grapple with the moral complexities of, as her coworker puts it, \u201chelping a group of teenagers\u201d to invade their homeland \u201cin a gentler way.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Atropia debuted at Sundance in January 2025, it won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. drama. But the critical response was tepid, saying the plot was scattershot, the satire too surface-level, and revisiting the Iraq War felt futile in a world upended by U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s second term.<\/p>\n
But after a brief theatrical run in December, Atropia\u2019s digital release arrived at an unexpectedly timely moment: Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran. Against the backdrop of Washington\u2019s latest military venture in the Middle East, the film\u2019s portrayal of manufactured consent and the abstraction of foreign suffering is smart, incisive, and all too familiar.<\/p>\n
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A soldier in a camouflage uniform, helmet, and sunglasses stands in the foreground, looking to the right. In the background, a thick plume of gray and white smoke rises from a damaged vehicle in a desert landscape, with a building featuring a green and white minaret visible under a clear blue sky.<\/p>\n
A soldier takes part in a war game at Medina Wasl, the simulated Iraqi village at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, on Aug. 22, 2007. Ruaridh Stewart\/ZUMA Press via Reuters <\/p>\n
Fort Irwin\u2019s National Training Center<\/a> opened in 1981, after a series of conflicts revealed<\/a> that the United States could not rely solely on superior manpower or firepower to win. Later, it also became clear how unprepared the U.S. military was for combat in urban environments, where soldiers struggled to distinguish enemy fighters from civilians. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolded, the Pentagon invested heavily in training facilities meant to mirror the conditions of modern warfare.<\/p>\n In the film, enormous effort goes into the details of the simulation. The fake city is modeled on satellite imagery of Baghdad, down to the width of the streets. Videos inform trainees that the facility adds the \u201chighest level of realism to simulate the fog of war.\u201d Machines pump into the air the scents of chai, sewage, and burning flesh; producers dial up and down the sounds of barking dogs, crying babies, bleating goats, calls to prayer, and gunfire.<\/p>\n However, certain markers of authenticity are prioritized over others. Though some of the actors are recent immigrants or refugees from the Middle East, most are Mexicans whose skin color allows them to pass. Amputees can make three times as much as Fayruz for acting as victims of explosions\u2014but those who lost limbs in combat cannot be hired out of fear of \u201cretraumatizing\u201d them.<\/p>\n Guided by her Hollywood ambitions, Fayruz buys into this pursuit of realism and finds ways to justify her participation. But this confidence begins to waver. In a memorable scene, Fayruz finds herself hiding in a room filled with animatronic mannequins to make a phone call to her brother. \u201cEveryone else is making money off this war,\u201d she tells him. \u201cNext year they can invade somewhere else, and they won\u2019t be casting roles that I\u2019m perfect for.\u201d<\/p>\n As Fayruz says this, she examines one of the dummies\u2014his broken teeth, jagged fingernails, skin meticulously caked with dirt\u2014and seems to grasp just how much detail was dedicated to portraying Iraqis as backward, uncivilized, and fanatical. Putting a fine point on it, the mannequins begin glitching, repeating the phrase \u201cAllahu akbar\u201d in a sad, strange refrain.<\/p>\n This all reads like a straightforward send-up of Orientalism. Whether she\u2019s playing a chemist, a suicide bomber, or a grieving civilian, Fayruz is shown to be no less a prop than the mannequins, performing a stereotype in service of U.S. war efforts. Her love interest, Abu Dice (Callum Turner), is similarly constrained by the roles afforded to him. As an Iraq War veteran, he is caught between worlds: unable to return to civilian life, desperate to redeploy, and yet unsure about the morality of being in Iraq.<\/p>\n What makes the film thrilling are the ways Fayruz and the other actors subvert stereotypes to their advantage. Sometimes she breaks character when it benefits her; other times, she plays along when soldiers assume she doesn\u2019t understand English or even finds a deviant pleasure in playing an insurgent, firing her gun into the sky with an exuberant yawp. Abu Dice also unsettles expectations. He seems to know Iraq better than Fayruz does, showing a surprising intimacy with the country\u2014a closeness that she envies.<\/p>\n In these moments of reversal, when characters are allowed to defy the viewers\u2019 and their country\u2019s expectations of them, their performance becomes a tool of agency rather than subjugation.<\/p>\n Despite their honest efforts, the soldiers never quite understand the performances being put on for them. At a staged wedding, for instance, they believe they\u2019re being attacked when they\u2019re actually witnessing celebratory gunfire. In moments like this, the film becomes an amusing cat-and-mouse game of misinterpretation, where stereotypes and realities constantly slip out of alignment.<\/p>\n You can never truly understand another person, Atropia seems to say, especially if you\u2019re looking at them through the scope of a gun. Even if you could, there is no amount of cultural knowledge, immersion, or sensitivity that could render an invasion as gentle, moral, or benign.<\/p>\n A group of people stand outside on a dirt ground next to military vehicles. A man in a dark grey suit and blue tie is shaking hands with a woman wearing an embroidered tan robe. Other individuals in civilian clothing and a soldier in a camouflage uniform look on.<\/p>\n Former U.S. President George W. Bush greets Iraqi American trainers at the Fort Irwin National Training Center on April 4, 2007. Jim Watson\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n If Atropia had come out in 2006, which is admittedly hard to imagine, it would have likely been read as a critique of ongoing wars and an exploration of the profound displacement\u2014figurative and literal\u2014experienced by Iraqis, Afghans, and others in the post-9\/11 world.<\/p>\n If it had arrived in 2023, when it was filmed, the movie might have been a timely critique of the corporate-friendly liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration, in which surface-level rhetoric about diversity and human rights sat in increasingly uncomfortable tension with unconditional U.S. support for Israel\u2019s war in Gaza.<\/p>\n But when the film premiered last year, the mood had already shifted. The rhetoric of liberalism had begun to lose its moral authority. For a swathe of young leftists in the U.S. electorate, these narratives of anti-colonialism and self-determination were part of the dominant intellectual framework\u2014to say nothing of their international resonance. To some reviewers, Atropia felt like a redundant argument that audiences had already settled.<\/p>\n Watching the film amid Trump\u2019s war in Iran, however, the parallels are difficult to ignore. As Daniel Neep notes<\/a> in Foreign Policy, some narrative hooks of today\u2019s war resemble those of the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a \u201cloose interpretation of imminent threat, the specter of weapons of mass destruction, musings of regime change with no plan for the day after, the build-up of ground troops, and the very real risk of regional destabilization.\u201d (Other elements, Neep writes, echo the 1991 Gulf War.)<\/p>\n The topics explored in Atropia no longer feel retrospective, which gives the film a glaring dramatic irony. At one point, the soldiers are shown a message from George W. Bush: \u201cThe people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military. Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly\u2014\u201d before the training video abruptly cuts off.<\/p>\n Unlike the soldiers onscreen, the audience already knows how that story ended. Iraqis did not broadly experience the United States as a liberating force but as an occupying one. The promises of honor and decency collapsed under the weight of torture scandals, civilian killings, indefinite detention, and a war sold on false pretenses.<\/p>\n Likewise, in Iran and much of the Middle East today, the U.S. military is not perceived as a neutral guarantor of order but as an instrument of plunder and impunity. \u201cPeople in the region have lost nearly all confidence in a U.S.-led regional order\u201d and view the United States as morally compromised and less trustworthy than China or Russia, according to polling<\/a> by Arab Barometer.<\/p>\n Iranians have not been liberated from their oppressive regime\u2014they are rallying around the flag and developing<\/a>, through lived experience, the very hostility toward the United States that the Islamic Republic has sought to cultivate for decades.<\/p>\n A man and a woman stand next to a dark blue pickup truck parked on a dirt path. The woman stands on the left in a loose green jacket and dress, while the man stands on the right leaning against the open driver-side door. They are surrounded by dry, grassy hills and a grey sky.<\/p>\n Shawkat and Callum Turner as Abu Dice in Atropia. Vertical <\/p>\n In some respects, Atropia deserves its mixed reviews. At times, the film\u2019s provocations feel underdeveloped, and its satire can veer into caricature. But what it lacks in narrative precision it makes up for with inventive cinematography, an excellent performance by Shawkat, and a delightfully odd sense of humor.<\/p>\n There is one insight in the film that feels especially prescient, a thread connecting the first so-called forever wars to the present day.<\/p>\n Last year, the writer Mitch Therieau argued<\/a> that the White House\u2019s surreal social media output\u2014for instance, a deportation video set to a remix of Semisomic\u2019s 1998 hit \u201cClosing Time\u201d\u2014was about more than naked cruelty. These videos, he wrote, project a \u201cmore abstract power the Trump administration thinks it has: the ability to cancel and reverse meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n Atropia suggests the simulations in the desert were never just about combat readiness\u2014they were exercises in manufacturing meaning. The actors\u2019 performances were meant to condition otherness into soldiers\u2019 minds to dull the psychological distress of waging war against people who look, sound, and smell like them. They provided a narrative framework that made violence feel coherent, necessary, and palatable.<\/p>\n What is unfolding now feels like a distortion of that process, but perhaps a natural progression. Today, the Trump administration is deeply invested in the process of meaning-making\u2014or, more specifically, the deliberate perversion of meaning\u2014to serve its narratives about war. Watching official White House accounts troll, shitpost<\/a>, and disseminate AI-generated memes<\/a>, it seems that the administration is less concerned with constructing a coherent story about the Middle East than with desensitizing Americans to the moral consequence of wars waged on their behalf.<\/p>\n The United States may not have absorbed the moral lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it certainly remembers how to use the machinery of narrativizing them. Atropia is a movie about a country endlessly rehearsing war in the hopes of convincing itself and everyone watching that this time, it will be cleaner, smarter, and more humane than the last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s 2006. 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