The film industry has long been a vital weapon in America’s propagandistic arsenal. Projects that have received explicit script approval from the Department Of Defense include Birth Of A Nation, Top Gun, and even this year’s Pixar flop Elio. Hollywood and the DoD collaborated most conspicuously during WWII (when watching propaganda films was baked into the act of cinemagoing), but there was another period when this union was seen as downright necessary in response to an unprecedented attack on U.S. soil. Following the 9/11 attacks, Hollywood heavyweights—including then-MPAA president Jack Valenti—immediately took meetings with senior government officials. This resulted in a general commitment to collaborate, with both parties recognizing that manufacturing movies about heroic war efforts would boost patriotism not only among Americans, but also worldwide consumers of our media, which had become more readily accessible to a global audience.
On paper, Hailey Gates possesses the necessary perspective to craft an incisive satire on this phenomenon. She is a seventh-generation Angeleno (her grandmother is celebrated filmmaker Joan Tewkesbury); she hosted the hit Viceland show States Of Undress about the intersection of fashion, women’s issues, and culture in countries considered political hot-spots; and, like most millennials, she came of age during the aftermath of 9/11 and the purposely vague “Global War On Terrorism” it prompted. Yet Atropia, her feature debut as a writer-director, is more of a scattershot riff on Hollywood’s complicity in the American imperial project than it is a salient investigation into the repercussions of this specific era of propaganda. While Gates wrote the film with Iraqi-American actress Alia Shawkat in mind for the starring role, its commentary on American Islamophobia stays on the surface.
Set in 2006, Atropia is based on a real-life training facility located just outside of Los Angeles, operated by the U.S. military and meant to mimic active combat zones. Recruits are sent in order to prepare themselves for the threats they will likely encounter on foreign soil, which here mostly involves suicide bombers (a donkey dummy among them), looters derogatorily dubbed “Ali Babas,” and uncooperative anti-Ameircan civilians. Not only are the cadets trained to spot these threats, but taught cultural norms—important phrases in Arabic and Kurdish, halal food restrictions, appropriate conduct between men and women—in order to curry favor with local officials and potential allies.
Bringing this mock village to life is an extensive troupe of performers tapped from L.A.’s vast pool of aspiring actors. Living on the compound for weeks on end, these roleplayers vary in shades of “authenticity” (some speak Arabic, but many are Mexicans deemed brown enough to play Iraqi), with many hinting that taking this gig is merely for green card purposes.
The only one who takes their role seriously is Fayruz (Shawkat), a young woman whose sights are set on Hollywood stardom. Despite her fervent belief that this gig may lead to her big break, the truth is that it’s dead-end and dehumanizing: she seldom showers (water is mostly conserved for washing dishes), barters contraband cigarettes to swap with fellow castmates for juicer roles, and, above all, must adhere to stereotypical American assumptions of her cultural roots. Even though Fayruz and a handful of other players (including Shawkat’s real father, Tony, playing a man who embodies the mayor of Atropia) have Iraqi heritage, the real “experts” on the scene are high-ranking military officials freshly back from tours in the region. They ironically play a band of armed terrorists who are hellbent on killing as many Americans as they can. A very sexy soldier (Callum Turner) takes the part of Abu Dice, the faction’s merciless leader. As Fayruz and Abu Dice navigate their roles in Atropia, a plot twist unfolds: a romantic tryst between the two
In the film’s press notes, Gates discloses that Atropia was originally conceived as a documentary project, about “how this dystopian community theater was blurring lines between training and performance.” Citing a lack of cooperation on behalf of the Department Of Defense, Gates decided to pivot to satire in order to tell a story about these training centers. If Gates’ original concept sounds vaguely familiar, look no further than Sierra Pettingill’s 2022 doc Riotsville, U.S.A., about similar facilities first created under Nixon’s presidency that train armed forces to combat the threat of civil unrest on American soil. It’s possible that Gates could have found her percolating project made moot after Pettingill’s doc bowed at Sundance, but apparently one of Atropia‘s weakest narrative decisions was at the behest of Shawkat: Although the pair’s short film Shako Mako served as the inspiration for Atropia, Shawkat would only agree to star in the feature if a romance was baked into the plot.
Shawkat and Turner have chemistry (an infrared-shot bathing scene is a highlight), but the film’s satire suffers for it. Atropia all but pivots away from critiquing the military-entertainment complex in order to serve their love story, which channels nothing but tepid false equivalences about the trauma suffered by Iraqi civilians and invading soldiers. These perspectives are generic, with Abu Dice suffering from PTSD flashbacks and Fayruz lamenting a homeland that has been irrevocably altered by the conflict. Yet they remain locked in a bitter cycle of delusion: Abu Dice desperately wants to get back to the battlefield, while Fayruz comments that she can’t return to Iraq for fear of not being around “when Hollywood calls.” The only ones who possess clarity about the dynamics at play are a recruit dubbed Private iPod (assigned the humiliating task of singing on command whenever prompted) and industry liaisons (played with evil apathy by Chloë Sevigny and Tim Hiedecker). “These boys will never be ready,” Heidecker says glibly as he eats sushi airlifted from Vegas.
The threads that Gates tugs are intriguing, but don’t actually lead anything revelatory about this conspiratorial hydra. We know the American project is one rooted in exploitation, and this is just as true of the underprivileged youths who are funneled into the military as it is the civilians who merely serve as tragic background actors in our war stories. We also know that the film industry is nefarious in its own right, with horrible treatment of below-the-line talent and hungry wannabes. Atropia does little to actually satirize these bitter truths or subvert its genre’s clichés. There is still a war hero with a heart of gold, Iraqis who side with the American military “for the greater good,” a misguided mishmash of vaguely Middle Eastern set dressing. The film ends by noting that now these same facilities are meant to mirror Russian villages, but Gates does little to set up an argument as to why this role-playing project is still valued by the powers that be when “these boys will never be ready.” Without a tangible connection to the material—most notably to Iraq and its people—Gates’ viewpoint feels unguided, doomed to be influenced by the same pervasive prejudices that Atropia ostensibly attempts to combat.
Director: Hailey Gates
Writer: Hailey Gates
Starring: Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, Zahra Alzubaidi, Tony Shawkat, Jane Levy, Tim Heidecker, Lola Kirke, Chloë Sevigny
Release Date: December 12, 2025
