An absurdist glimpse at Workaday Life within one of the very real, very strange American military training places where role players simulate foreign beats to prepare our troops for their time in the field, Hailey Gates’ “Atropy“Is hardly the first American comedy set during the Iraq war, which was something of a terrible Farce for itself. Well -trampled territory like this may be, but it’s been a long time since loved masterpieces like “Whiskey tango fox trot“And Larry Cable Guy’s” Delta Farce “first put his stamp on the sub-genre, and the years that have passed have made it possible for Gates Feature-Debut-expelled from her Miu Miu card 2020,” Shako Mako-tread further through the stylish glass even even Oliver Stone’s “W.” ever could.
Example: An early sequence in ”Atropy“Is built around a como of an extremely famous movie star who – in reality – once played in a very serious film About the psychological traum of being stationed in Tikrit. Like most of Gates’ scattered and schticky new satire, the sequence in question feels like it should be much more fun than it is, and yet when you look at (edited celebrity) Larp through atropy in preparation for an upcoming role, the metate textual wrinkle of his casting break even the most slapstick jokes to a wild infinity mirror.
Once upon a time, this actor Hollywood’s idea of an Iraq War-Eer soldier embodied, but his screen persons have developed into the point that his presence alone now feels like a punchline. Here, it does for the most self -reflexive gag in a movie about ouroboros of Manufacturing Consent. “Atropia” is determined to stab fun at the hopeless link between America and the reality of war that is fought in its name, a gap that it explores with o -growers of screw -ball energy and enough width to maintain at least 90 of its 104 minutes, but also One that it maps without any clear feeling of where it goes or what shape can be formed by stringing all the pins it loses along the way.
Or is it just a pin fixed in 1,000 different places? For all different “m*a*s*h*”-as Shenanigans (the movie is dedicated to the great Joan Tewkesbury, a twice screenwriter for Robert Altman and Gates’ Grandma), the vast majority of them boils down to the same view: America Has become too solipsist to do anything but play yourself. Enter: Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), an Iraq-ish Striver who came to California in the hope of becoming a famous Hollywood actress. Instead, she ended in “The Box”, playing an Atropian DVD seller or a bomb chemist that the soldiers can find if they sweep a certain room in the set (that’s all very Donald Rumsfeld meets “Sleep No More”).
Fayruz does not speak Arabic so well, but she understands it fluently, which she hoped to give her a leg on the other members of the role. Ironically, it is amputated who seem to get all the juicy parts (many of the scenarios involve a detonated IED), although Fayruz is also up by a talented Mexican colleague who is so good at crying on the command that no one seems to care that she Wails in Spanish. The army speaks a big game that Atropia is as realistic as possible (it even comes with its own competing TV networks, box news and a fake al-Jazeera), but “The Truman Show” it is not. If anything, the buzzing vests that the soldiers have to carry over their combat uniforms make the whole experience feel like a laser brand game on a Hollywood budget.
Of course, Atropia is supposed to be even more engrossing than a movie set (the props department is proud of their scrotum, which includes the ability to create the smell of burning meat), but Gates film grows rapidly bored by the scripts like Fayruz and her co -workers are intended to perform. Even Fayruz’s big screen dreams seem to fall along the way, as her plan replaces Atropia’s Bootleg-DVD market with her actor-introduced in the first act-not going through until a non-joke of a button after the final credits. It is true that such military simulations were created with the explicit hope of seducing Hollywood to film on them and/or modeling their war films about Atropia’s vision of reality, Gates only funny on how America throws herself until she is distracted by a cinematic own fantasy.
Like so many satires based on real events, “Atropia” fails the most basic test of its dignity: it never feels more important or interesting than it would be to look at a documentary about the same subject. Credit to Gates she had completely intended to make one until the Ministry of Defense denied her the asset she needed. Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, she swung to a scriptful comedy, which soon came to involve a love story at Shawkat’s request.
Shawkat is fantastic in “Atropia”, layers every joke and/or lie she tells with the regret by a second generation immigrant who sells out her past (“we help a group of teens to invade our homeland in a better way,” she acknowledges at one point), and it is proof of how well she threads the needle that Fayruz’s atropic Rom-Com works as well as it does. What starts as a flirt with rebellious leader Abu Dice-a character played by a white American war game that itches to be redistributed (Callum Turner)-soon developed into a Hyper-Silly Basromantic worth a French sex Farce. Both are desperate to go to Iraq, and both have disappeared too deeply into the roles that America has offered. Only one of them has a fetish for the fat idea of Porta Potties, but the other also has its strange kinks.
It is all entertaining enough on its own terms, but it is also among the least trenchant or rewarding of the countless different places that “Atropia” can take its condition, and any new wrinkle that Gates introduces to it -incrimulation a “badland” – – Esque Subplot to involve a raid on some new recruits and a thematically strenuous visit to the plaster channels at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas – only takes the movie further away from reality it tries to play against. Other threads bind in similar knots, or would if “atropia” gave them enough material to do so. Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny have some fun because the glorious supervisors responsible for the role play, Jane Levy is a burst when Box News Reporter is looking for a big scoop, and there is a consistently pleasant character that acts as a human iPod, which is something that is something More films could use.
It is as it can, exactly none of what happens in the box is a fraction as interesting as the box itself, and the sobering images that Gates cut in the action – much of the taken from Iraq documentaries like “Gunner Palace” – is for Clamsily introduced to have the sobering effect, it is so important to exercise this material. If “war is God’s way of teaching the geography of Americans”, as Ambrose Bierce quotes read at the beginning of the film, then the films may have become the Americans’ way of teaching the world what they have learned. “We’re all just set clothes,” says one of the characters in “Atropia”. But in this movie, the set has more to say than any of the people trying to act out of it.
Rating: c
“Atropia” premiered at 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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