Channing Tatum Shocks Sundance With Secret Cameo in Anti-War Satire ‘Atropia’

PARK CITY, Utah—It’s never a bad thing when Channing Tatum shows up.

Audiences in Park City spent nearly the entire running time of Saturday’s Sundance Film Festival premiere of the anti-war satire Atropia gasping and then melting into stunned laughter. The biggest reaction, however, was reserved for the A-lister’s unannounced appearance. Tatum’s secret cameo in writer-director Hailey Gates’ movie was the hottest talk of the frigid mountains following that well-received first showing.

Atropia begins with Alia Shawkat’s Fayruz navigating life on an Iraqi street when a U.S. military convoy arrives. Tension escalates between them and the locals, and an explosion leaves Fayruz wailing over the body of a friend, who is now missing a leg. Her shriek, however, lasts a little too long, dissipating to awkward silence until the sound of walkie talkie beeps and a director says it’s time to “go again”—one of the bomb special effects didn’t detonate.

It turns out Fayruz is an actress at a California military base that simulates an Iraqi warzone, where soldiers can train for deployment abroad in a mock village complete with simulations acted out by working performers. These camps were—and are—real. Actors play everyone from the town’s mayor to a suicide bomber and a woman selling old DVDs on the street. Fog machines are used to replicate explosions, deafening noise effects are blared, and even scents are pumped out to smell like, depending on the situation, chai tea or burning flesh.

The face-value outrageousness of these places’ mere existence is a hotbed for satire in Atropia (Atropia is the name of the fake Iraqi town in this camp), contributing to a series of sitcom-esque hijinks as the actors and military trainees navigate the surreality. Fayruz, for her part, takes her job very seriously, developing detailed backstories for the characters she’s assigned to play and coaching her fellow performers to bring more emotional grit to their performances.

When she learns that a famous actor is going to be visiting the camp to prepare for his role in a new war movie, Fayruz sees it as an opportunity to impress him with her acting chops and finally get cast in a real film.

As you might have guessed by this point, Tatum plays that famous actor. He gamely sends up the trope of the ditzy Hollywood Himbo so jazzed by the bells-and-whistles going off around him in the simulation that he has no idea that he’s coming off as an embarrassing meathead. When Fayruz dials up the histrionics to show off for him, he, confused, turns into an acting-off, the two of them trading wartorn battle cries as they try to outdo each other.

Atropia, while consistently funny, diverges on what may be one (or three) storylines too many. Fayruz strikes up a romance with a hunky military veteran, played by Calum Turner participating in the training. Tim Heidecker and Chloe Sevigny play Department of Defense workers more preoccupied with the dollar-and-cents financials of the simulations than actually preparing soldiers for war. And the whole effort is meant to make a point about the justification—or lack thereof—for sending these young troops to Iraq at all.

The film and its satire is messy, but often effective. Beyond the delight of the Tatum Surprise, there was another detail that won’t soon leave anyone who was at that Sundance premiere.

There are dilapidated, creepy animatronics of Iraqi villagers that are shown in the movie at one point, fritzing and as fake looking as a Chuck E. Cheese reject robot. During a Q&A after the screening, Gates revealed that she discovered while on a tour of one of these bases that these animatronics, to her disbelief, were real and legitimately used for years. Moreover, she got her hands on the actual ones that were used at the base to put in the movie. Perhaps the only thing that could upstage a Channing Tatum cameo.