Atropia opens like any other Iraq War film you’ve seen; nervous soldiers in a dusty town shot in desaturated colours, suspicious locals milling around an open-air market, and an insurgent ducking into an alleyway before a bomb goes off leaving the US troops in disarray and the locals screaming and maimed. And then…scene. A buzzer sounds and everyone resets to their first position, the whole thing revealed to be a live-action roleplaying set in California designed to train new soldiers for real counterinsurgency operations. It’s an inherently fascinating setting (based on very real US military training tactics) and a very fun scene, these early moments being Atropia at its best and most focused before it collapses into near incoherence.
The directorial debut of Hailey Gates (who you might have seen in front of the camera in recent weeks in The Drama), Atropia knows it’s a comedy, but cannot figure out what kind of comedy it is. Sometimes it’s a satire (and a broadly toothless one at that, setting the action in the Bush years of 2006 but only hitting the most surface-level notes of American imperial absurdity), sometimes it’s a more earnest romcom, sometimes it’s cartoonishly zany. These tones butt against each other in jarring ways, and while there are some funny gags here and there, it’s not funny enough to distract from the fact that this feels less like a cohesive film and more like a rapid-fire sketch show of underdeveloped ideas.
It’s a problem that extends to the cast, especially Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner in the lead roles. Shawkat plays Fayruz, an aspiring actress stuck in Atropia (the film gets its title from the name of the fake country the roleplay takes place in) thanks to her Iraqi heritage and language skills, wanting desperately to get the juicy terrorist roles in the hope that an actual Hollywood agent might see her. Again, like the war satire, the jokes here – delusional actor dreams in a demeaning role – are overfamiliar and surface level, and Shawkat seemingly can’t get a grip on Fayruz as a character; the writing and performance are both just weird most of the time.
Turner fares no better as Tanner, aka Abu Dice, an actual veteran whose experience in combat has landed him the role of insurgent leader within Atropia and finds himself, both in and out of character, falling for Fayruz. The pair share only a limited chemistry and the laughs between them dry up as the romance becomes more serious. It’s through Tanner that Gates gets to make her most cogent point about how all soldiering is a performance of sorts – the young troops training in Atropia are nervous kids, really – but the character writing simply isn’t consistent enough to really land these shots.
All told, Atropia is one of those films that probably would have just been better off as a documentary (at one point, Gates was even developing it as such). The concept of Atropia is hugely compelling and inherently darkly funny, and the absurdity of the situation (the army needing Hollywood dropouts to improv their way through a combat zone) would simply speak for itself if presented directly. In trying to make it sillier, Atropia actually just makes its subject matter less interesting.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 