“The military was not so keen on the version of the doc that I wanted to make, so we decided to be satire.” “Atropia” follows an aspiring actress at a military role-playing facility who ...

Atropia, Hailey Gates' scattered debut feature, is based on a city invented by the American military to train cadets. That the United States erects role-playing facilities tasked with ...

The film centers on Atropia, a fake city built outside of Los Angeles, full of props and actors meant to prepare American soldiers for deployment in the Iraq War. The concept initially seems ...

Before soldiers departed for duty in the Iraq War, many made a stop in California’s Mojave Desert. At a simulated village called Medina Wasl at Fort Irwin, they carried out uncanny re-creations ...

“The military,” she said with a tight smile ... He challenged her to write the script for “Atropia” in only four weeks. “It was my most romantic writing experience because I was ...

While few Hollywood war movies have so directly confronted the flaws in the U.S.’ “Forever Wars,” the observations on racism and the military in “Atropia” are seldom explored beyond the ...

True as it is that such military simulations were created with the explicit hope of seducing Hollywood to film on them and/or model its war movies on Atropia’s vision of reality, Gates only ...

The most fascinating elements of Atropia expose another layer of the military-entertainment complex, the mutually beneficial relationship between the film industry and the U.S. Department of Defense.