It’s 2006. A veiled woman ambles through a dusty street, exchanging glances with men in keffiyehs as sinister music plays in the background. In rolls a Humvee, and out pours a team of soldiers, rushing to assess the situation. Tensions rise, one soldier points a gun at the woman, and an explosion ripples through the block. Shock, fear, shaky cameras.

The soldiers scramble, chased by insurgents shouting “Allahu akbar” and “Death to America.”  The woman wails to the sky, only to be interrupted by a director’s megaphone. The donkey bomb didn’t detonate, so they’ll have to run it back from the top.

This is Atropia, a new film that’s part rom-com and part war on terror satire, an interesting take on the disconnect between Americans and the not-so-long-ago wars fought in their name. The title refers to a fake, oil-rich dictatorship constructed within a real U.S. military training facility in the California desert, where the story unfolds.

Inside the facility, actors play civilians and insurgents in an immersive simulation to prepare soldiers for deployment. Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) is an Iraqi American actor searching for her big break. As she stumbles into a romance with a recent veteran cast as an insurgent, Fayruz begins to grapple with the moral complexities of, as her coworker puts it, “helping a group of teenagers” to invade their homeland “in a gentler way.”

When Atropia debuted at Sundance in January 2025, it won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. drama. But the critical response was tepid, saying the plot was scattershot, the satire too surface-level, and revisiting the Iraq War felt futile in a world upended by U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

But after a brief theatrical run in December, Atropia’s digital release arrived at an unexpectedly timely moment: Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran. Against the backdrop of Washington’s latest military venture in the Middle East, the film’s portrayal of manufactured consent and the abstraction of foreign suffering is smart, incisive, and all too familiar.

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Fort Irwin’s National Training Center opened in 1981, after a series of conflicts revealed that the United States could not rely solely on superior manpower or firepower to win. Later, it also became clear how unprepared the U.S. military was for combat in urban environments, where soldiers struggled to distinguish enemy fighters from civilians. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolded, the Pentagon invested heavily in training facilities meant to mirror the conditions of modern warfare.

In the film, enormous effort goes into the details of the simulation. The fake city is modeled on satellite imagery of Baghdad, down to the width of the streets. Videos inform trainees that the facility adds the “highest level of realism to simulate the fog of war.” Machines pump into the air the scents of chai, sewage, and burning flesh; producers dial up and down the sounds of barking dogs, crying babies, bleating goats, calls to prayer, and gunfire.

However, certain markers of authenticity are prioritized over others. Though some of the actors are recent immigrants or refugees from the Middle East, most are Mexicans whose skin color allows them to pass. Amputees can make three times as much as Fayruz for acting as victims of explosions—but those who lost limbs in combat cannot be hired out of fear of “retraumatizing” them.

Guided by her Hollywood ambitions, Fayruz buys into this pursuit of realism and finds ways to justify her participation. But this confidence begins to waver. In a memorable scene, Fayruz finds herself hiding in a room filled with animatronic mannequins to make a phone call to her brother. “Everyone else is making money off this war,” she tells him. “Next year they can invade somewhere else, and they won’t be casting roles that I’m perfect for.”

As Fayruz says this, she examines one of the dummies—his broken teeth, jagged fingernails, skin meticulously caked with dirt—and seems to grasp just how much detail was dedicated to portraying Iraqis as backward, uncivilized, and fanatical. Putting a fine point on it, the mannequins begin glitching, repeating the phrase “Allahu akbar” in a sad, strange refrain.

This all reads like a straightforward send-up of Orientalism. Whether she’s playing a chemist, a suicide bomber, or a grieving civilian, Fayruz is shown to be no less a prop than the mannequins, performing a stereotype in service of U.S. war efforts. Her love interest, Abu Dice (Callum Turner), is similarly constrained by the roles afforded to him. As an Iraq War veteran, he is caught between worlds: unable to return to civilian life, desperate to redeploy, and yet unsure about the morality of being in Iraq.

What makes the film thrilling are the ways Fayruz and the other actors subvert stereotypes to their advantage. Sometimes she breaks character when it benefits her; other times, she plays along when soldiers assume she doesn’t understand English or even finds a deviant pleasure in playing an insurgent, firing her gun into the sky with an exuberant yawp. Abu Dice also unsettles expectations. He seems to know Iraq better than Fayruz does, showing a surprising intimacy with the country—a closeness that she envies.

In these moments of reversal, when characters are allowed to defy the viewers’ and their country’s expectations of them, their performance becomes a tool of agency rather than subjugation.

Despite their honest efforts, the soldiers never quite understand the performances being put on for them. At a staged wedding, for instance, they believe they’re being attacked when they’re actually witnessing celebratory gunfire. In moments like this, the film becomes an amusing cat-and-mouse game of misinterpretation, where stereotypes and realities constantly slip out of alignment.

You can never truly understand another person, Atropia seems to say, especially if you’re looking at them through the scope of a gun. Even if you could, there is no amount of cultural knowledge, immersion, or sensitivity that could render an invasion as gentle, moral, or benign.

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If Atropia had come out in 2006, which is admittedly hard to imagine, it would have likely been read as a critique of ongoing wars and an exploration of the profound displacement—figurative and literal—experienced by Iraqis, Afghans, and others in the post-9/11 world.

If it had arrived in 2023, when it was filmed, the movie might have been a timely critique of the corporate-friendly liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration, in which surface-level rhetoric about diversity and human rights sat in increasingly uncomfortable tension with unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

But when the film premiered last year, the mood had already shifted. The rhetoric of liberalism had begun to lose its moral authority. For a swathe of young leftists in the U.S. electorate, these narratives of anti-colonialism and self-determination were part of the dominant intellectual framework—to say nothing of their international resonance. To some reviewers, Atropia felt like a redundant argument that audiences had already settled.

Watching the film amid Trump’s war in Iran, however, the parallels are difficult to ignore. As Daniel Neep notes in Foreign Policy, some narrative hooks of today’s war resemble those of the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a “loose interpretation of imminent threat, the specter of weapons of mass destruction, musings of regime change with no plan for the day after, the build-up of ground troops, and the very real risk of regional destabilization.” (Other elements, Neep writes, echo the 1991 Gulf War.)

The topics explored in Atropia no longer feel retrospective, which gives the film a glaring dramatic irony. At one point, the soldiers are shown a message from George W. Bush: “The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military. Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly—” before the training video abruptly cuts off.

Unlike the soldiers onscreen, the audience already knows how that story ended. Iraqis did not broadly experience the United States as a liberating force but as an occupying one. The promises of honor and decency collapsed under the weight of torture scandals, civilian killings, indefinite detention, and a war sold on false pretenses.

Likewise, in Iran and much of the Middle East today, the U.S. military is not perceived as a neutral guarantor of order but as an instrument of plunder and impunity. “People in the region have lost nearly all confidence in a U.S.-led regional order” and view the United States as morally compromised and less trustworthy than China or Russia, according to polling by Arab Barometer.

Iranians have not been liberated from their oppressive regime—they are rallying around the flag and developing, through lived experience, the very hostility toward the United States that the Islamic Republic has sought to cultivate for decades.

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There is one insight in the film that feels especially prescient, a thread connecting the first so-called forever wars to the present day.

Last year, the writer Mitch Therieau argued that the White House’s surreal social media output—for instance, a deportation video set to a remix of Semisomic’s 1998 hit “Closing Time”—was about more than naked cruelty. These videos, he wrote, project a “more abstract power the Trump administration thinks it has: the ability to cancel and reverse meaning.”

Atropia suggests the simulations in the desert were never just about combat readiness—they were exercises in manufacturing meaning. The actors’ performances were meant to condition otherness into soldiers’ minds to dull the psychological distress of waging war against people who look, sound, and smell like them. They provided a narrative framework that made violence feel coherent, necessary, and palatable.

What is unfolding now feels like a distortion of that process, but perhaps a natural progression. Today, the Trump administration is deeply invested in the process of meaning-making—or, more specifically, the deliberate perversion of meaning—to serve its narratives about war. Watching official White House accounts troll, shitpost, and disseminate AI-generated memes, it seems that the administration is less concerned with constructing a coherent story about the Middle East than with desensitizing Americans to the moral consequence of wars waged on their behalf.

The United States may not have absorbed the moral lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it certainly remembers how to use the machinery of narrativizing them. Atropia is a movie about a country endlessly rehearsing war in the hopes of convincing itself and everyone watching that this time, it will be cleaner, smarter, and more humane than the last.