Atropia review – military roleplaying satire is a frustrating jumble of ideas

The Guardian

28-01-2025

There can be a cavernous distance between the discovery of a topic worthy of expansion and the understanding of how best to then go about it. Too often, a five-part series should be a 90-minute film and even more often, a narrative feature should be a documentary. For first-time writer-director Hailey Gates, a model and former Vice journalist, a longtime interest in the odd world of military role play compounds led her to Atropia, a satirical Luca Guadagnino-produced comedy premiering in competition at this year's Sundance.
She had initially considered a documentary and had even thought about working as an actor within a real facility, but over a four-year research period finally opted for heightened fiction over grounded truth. It's a decision that Gates can never quite justify, at least in the form of a full-length feature, a deadening jumble of ideas, tones, motivations and genres that just doesn't coalesce into much of anything. It gives one the frustrating feeling of emptiness despite such a rich subject.
Because why wouldn't we be interested in learning more about the elaborate mock Iraq towns created in the US in the 2000s to train soldiers? One can appreciate the details that Gates has learned along the way – the choice of wafting chai or burning flesh scent, the hierarchy of roles offered and the battle to get them, the disinterest in specific authenticity (Mexican participants easily slotted in for Iraqis) – but brief huh, interesting observations do not a film make. It's an initially compelling 'you wouldn't believe' story told to you at a party that goes on for 97 minutes.
She focuses the film on Alia Shawkat's struggling actor, striving away in a position that doesn't demand the depth of effort she wants to give that will also never leave her with any valuable credit or recorded proof. It's an interesting type on paper (taking on the kind of job Cary Dubek might have had in The Other Two) but the details afforded to the setting aren't given to the characters, who also include Callum Turner's haunted yet horny soldier, Jane Levy's constipated fake journalist and small roles for Chloë Sevigny and Tim Heidecker as cartoonishly awful military higher-ups.
It's unclear what the rules and limits of the compound are and even less clear as to why we're watching a 2006-set comedy about the globally dangerous awfulness of the US military post-September 11 in the year 2025. Films set during this era, as well-intentioned as they may have sometimes been, have largely fallen flat and too much of Gates's script is based around rather dated and predictable commentary about situations that have been commented on so much by this stage. The aimless and unfunny shenanigans of Atropia never really lead to anything and they certainly don't lead us anywhere that demands the sudden level of dramatic seriousness that the ending brings about. The targets here are easy but the attacks are too surface-level and obvious to land, summed up most accurately with a misfiring cameo from Channing Tatum playing a cartoonishly dumb action star, the joke starting and ending there.
The act of being a soldier, something most of us have grown up seeing onscreen, can be about learned performance, of what these young men have seen in sensationalist films and TV and how many of them might then have been seduced or tricked as a result. There is something worth exploring there, Gates casually playing with the uneasy relationship between real and filmed war as a path to follow. But she's never really sure where to go or how far to go or what she should or shouldn't take on and her actors seem similarly unsure, Shawkat especially struggling to find the right balance between sitcom and satire. The world of Atropia is a fascinating one to explore but Gates just can't find the right way in.
Atropia is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution