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.

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.

A soldier takes part in a war game at Medina Wasl, the simulated Iraqi village at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, on Aug. 22, 2007. Ruaridh Stewart/ZUMA Press via Reuters

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........

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