Atropia: The Army’s biggest inside joke has its own movie
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A new movie trailer just dropped for soldiers fortunate enough to survive a month of “war” in the Mojave Desert against one of the Army’s most enduring foes.
“Atropia,” a military satire named after the fictional, corrupt nation favored by U.S. forces during a simulated, but major war at the National Training Center in California, follows a troupe of role-players helping prepare soldiers for combat in Iraq. Or to spend several hours looking for a company commander’s pistol only for it to turn up inside a wretched porta-potty.
It stars Alia Shawkat as an eager actress who finds herself in the middle of the great Atropian War as a contractor tasked with providing troops with realistic combat situations as they rotate through the arid training ground known as “the box.”
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“Welcome to Atropia, a 24/7 warfare simulation,” a husky voiceover announces over clips of jets zooming across the sky, Strykers (apparently functional, which is how you know it’s fiction) kicking up dust and a fake exploding donkey. “It is a town populated with civilian role players and movie special effects designed to give our brave men and women the tools to fight and win,” the narrator intones.
First developed in 2012, the Army created the real-life Atropia with a vast, detailed background and its never-ending turmoil has become an enduring cultural touchpoint for soldiers and veterans of a certain age. Patches, mugs, memes and mock “Atropia veteran” t-shirts are now staples of a tongue-in-cheek inside joke that is, apparently, a full feature film.
While the nearly two-minute trailer promises fast-paced action and social commentary on the Iraq War, it suffers from a severe lack of the resident pretenemy known as the Blackhorse Regiment beating the ass out of brigades who enter the arena. Here, a colonel’s next top block evaluation could hinge on the performance of multiple loose factions of junior enlisted soldiers spread across the simulated battlefield.
Written and directed by Hailey Gates, “Atropia” took home the top prize at the Sundance Film Festival’s dramatic features in January. It is scheduled for a theatrical release in the U.S. on Dec. 12. It currently clocks a whopping 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is coincidentally your unit’s vehicle readiness rate.
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Missing from the brief trailer are tired noncommissioned officers playing heated games of spades, or perhaps a private who signed for thousands of dollars’ worth of broken sensors that he will certainly be on the hook for when one falls off on the first day of training.
But hardened Atropia veterans might hold out on their judgment. Even if it’s bad, the film’s 103-minute run time would pale in comparison to a 30-day (often more) all-expenses-paid trip to Barstow, California’s nearest attraction.
It is unclear if Atropia will delve into the complicated intricacies of the “neutral, Western-leaning oligarchy” replete with a fictional government “that is autocratic with a democratic facade,” according to hundreds of pages of official analysis some inventive military nerds made for the Army.
Will the Donovians make an appearance? What about Gorgas, Lamaria or any of the other whimsically-named countries that are totally not based on actual nations located in Eurasia? Who knows, but one thing remains certain: you’re not getting out of the rotation because the war for Atropia never ends.
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