Political Satire 'Atropia' Skewers the Past Without Informing the Present
In the Mojave Desert, the United States military built a cluster of Iraqi villages on the grounds of army base Fort Irwin. Here, hundreds of civilian roleplayers (often of Middle Eastern descent) were paid to pretend they lived in Iraqi, Afghani, and Russian villages after an American military invasion – one of the largest being Medina Wasl. In the 2000s, soldiers were trained to liaise with Iraqi natives, endure the local conditions, and engage their enemy of (roleplay) insurgents before they were deployed in the War on Terror. Watching footage of Medina Wasl, a state-funded sandbox of ideology, immediately prompts questions about its construction and function; the dulled, throbbing absurdism underpinning the training site is amplified in Hailey Gates’ Atropia, a war satire starring Alia Shawkat as Fayruz, an Iraqi-American actress looking to be talent-spotted in Medina Wasl – known as “the Box” – and Callum Turner as Tanner, an Iraq veteran who uses the terrorist alias “Abu Dice” to train up real soldiers.
Based on a short film also starring Shawkat, Atropia just scooped up the US Dramatic Prize at Sundance, and it’s easy to see why Hailey Gates’ debut feature has attracted a high degree of attention. The premise sets up a film that needs to be seen to be believed – inside a make-believe space of ugly, livewire politics (which still exists to this day), we see a parodic depiction of “terminal actor brain” failing to register the strangeness of their precious gig – until she meets a grounded, handsome co-star whose honesty recalibrates her fictional reality and the real one underpinning it.
The proximity of Fort Irwin to the entertainment industry means a lot of Hollywood talent is called upon to train America’s infantry, and the friction between jobbing actors, not-in-character prop-makers, and military personnel contributes to the film’s probing of Bush-era foreign policy. Ensuring young soldiers feel prepared for their Iraq tour does a lot to affirm that they’re supposed to be there in the first place, even though, during their stint in Medina Wasl, they are deployed in a fake war to prepare for an equally manufactured one.
