ATROPIA – Review by Nadine Whitney
Actor and journalist Hailey Gates initially set out to make a documentary about Californian desert military bases that were set up as enemy towns so soldiers could train with role-players acting as potential insurgents. The towns are real fakes, they exist, but the U.S. Military weren’t keen on Gates potentially revealing sensitive information. Thus, the scattershot fictional satire Atropia came into being. In her debut feature Gates manages to hit some targets with comedic, and at times, sincere barbs. However, when it comes to the film as a whole the comedy and satire goes through the attrition of repetitiveness and the sincere concerns about the ludicrous nature of putting army cadets through such a misguided and useless exercise gets lost in the mix.
Alia Shawkat plays Fayruz Abbas an aspiring actor who takes the goings on in Medina Wasl a fake Iraqi town inside “The Box” more seriously than most of the other role-players. It’s 2006 and anti-Arab sentiment in America continues to make life difficult for people of Middle Eastern backgrounds. One of Fayruz’s fellow role-players, Noor (Zahra Alzubaidi) bemoans the fact that she’s reduced to being there considering she has a PhD – she also notes that many of the “Iraqi” villagers are played by people who simply pass as “generic-brown” such as Gloria (Priscilla Garita) who is from Mexico. Most of the male insurgents are played by soldiers who have returned from tours of duty in Iraq.
It’s one such soldier, Abu Dice (Callum Turner), who turns Fayruz’s head and vice versa. A fetishistic romance blossoms between the two; there is really no need to go deep into the scene where they have sex in a porta-potty in proximity to unflushed excrement, except to say it’s as awful as it sounds. Confused and mostly uninterested cadets wonder why they’re there and what any of it has to do with the reality facing them. A drill Sergeant makes one of the cadets carry around a potted plant as punishment, another is forced to wear his iPod on his helmet and sing on demand. At the cost of $20 million per three week stay in “The Box” it’s fair to say that they’ll come out of the program no wiser and no more ready for war than when they went in.
Atropia not-so-subtly skews Hollywood’s relationship to war and propaganda. “The Box” exists in proximity to Hollywood where professional set designers, costumers, make-up artists, and FX crews give Medina Wasl a questionably authentic sheen (most times the bombs going off are at best little smoke farts). An unnamed Hollywood star (Channing Tatum) is allowed in to research a role for an upcoming movie. He tries to “out act” all the role-players in one of the more amusing scenes. Fayruz is desperate to get her audition reel to him so she can get a real acting job.
Two embedded news crews “Box News” and “Al Jazzer” dish out the kind of reporting their real equivalents are known for. Nancy (Jane Lee) the Box News journalist is a pretty blonde managing to wear her press vest “sexy.” While that might raise a giggle, as will the naming of areas of “The Box” situated in Barstow, California after John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, too much of the satire about the outrageous spending of the Military Industrial Complex on wars – and their corporate sponsors, in this case Glade scents falls down. After some pivotal and fun scenes as the two Army and possibly CIA personnel overseeing Atropia (played by Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevingy in parts that should have been expanded) fly in sushi to keep their budget, or tell a real Iraq veteran that she can’t work as an amputee role-player because there’s this thing about “possible re-traumatisation” getting in the way, almost everything else that can be said about how profoundly stupid the whole thing has been said.
Alia Shawkat does commit as much as she can to the absurdity of her character and the situation and her real-life father, Tony Shawkat, delivers a forlorn line which does touch on the heart, “We’re helping grown-up teenagers to invade our homeland in a more gentle way.” But no matter how hard Alia tries she can’t overcome the inert script and sell the romance between herself and Callum Turner.
Atropia doesn’t push hard enough to have real bite, especially when it comes to the proliferation of “War of Terror” blockbusters (Warfare being a recent example) and how Hollywood and the Military Industrial Complex make handshake deals bargaining with the lives of people it barely understands nor cares for. Fodder is fodder for satirical fodder and Hailey Gates misses most of her marks.
