Afghan girls’ robotics biopic ‘Rule Breakers’ is red, white and blue-washing

Produced by Angel Studios—the Evangelical outfit behind Biblical series The Chosen and QAnon-adjacent action hit Sound of Freedom—Rule Breakers is, to its credit, not nearly as offensive as it could have been. However, it’s not much of anything beyond a point. It presents gendered discrimination as something shockingly easy to overcome. It’s also pointed in its attempts to be apolitical, despite the charged territory it treads. In the process, it paints a superficial portrait of its characters, including and especially the real Afghan tech maverick Roya Mahboob (Nikohl Boosheri), and a number of fictionalized composites standing in for the teen girls she shepherded to international robotics glory.

Set in Herat, in northwestern Afghanistan, the movie’s paper-thin reality might be hard to accept for even the most forgiving audiences. That it’s entirely in spoken English isn’t really the problem—such concessions can fall under acceptable artistic license—but that it feels so nakedly like a movie both by and for Americans is where the issues arise. With Morocco standing in for Herat, its minimal set dressing is made all the more flimsy by the fact that every bit of expository dialogue and performance lacks authenticity and cultural specificity.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of the performers. The four young girls Roya recruits— Haadiya (Sara Malal Rowe), Taara (Nina Hosseinzadeh), Esin (Amber Afzali) and Arezo (Mariam Saraj)—are bright spots in an otherwise dull production, as are their respective actresses. However, the world around them, and the manner in which they’re directed to interact (with each other, and with everyone else) plays like a North American facsimile of a vague “Middle Eastern-ness.” There is, on one hand, the shy demureness and modesty foisted upon them, while on the other lies a sense of carefree liberation, though these are two modes that seem to exist in two different realities, and practically different bodies, rather than contradictions within the same person.

In a larger sense, this sense of freedom is born of desires that point westward (the girls want to travel and study in the United States and United Kingdom), which is an understandable motive, given the oppression they face at home. However, the film takes this cultural dynamic for granted, seldom presenting the Taliban as anything but a nebulous idea hovering in the background. On the other side of this coin is its attempts to avoid political entanglements with regards to American presence in the region, thus becoming deeply political itself. In one scene, in which Roya is introduced to Samir Sinha (a delightful Ali Faza), the Indian American tech mogul who eventually funds her endeavor, she jokingly lists the numerous colonial forces Afghanistan has had to deal with over the centuries—from Alexander the Great, to the British, to the Soviet Union—a list from which Uncle Sam is conspicuously absent. In another moment, an Afghan character’s eyes light up when she meets a former U.S. soldier who was once stationed in Afghanistan, despite the likely hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the United States’ invasion.

Rule Breakers is, in effect, a film that takes an occupation dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom” at its word, as it follows young girls challenging educational norms in ways that would’ve been unthinkable in years prior. It all but frames the United States as both a catalyst for this change, as well as an eventual promised land (one where a Latino mechanic named Jesus provides the girls some divine, last-minute help during a competition, in case you were wondering when the studio’s religious leanings might come into play).

Worse yet, perhaps, is how this movie about individualism, educational pursuit and free expression ends up smushing its young competitors’ personalities together into an indecipherable blob. Apart from Esin, who’s afforded a handful of exciting and interesting beats (first surrounding her crush on a European competitor, and then around her brief stage fright an hour or so later), none of the girls really stands out. This is especially problematic for what is essentially a sports movie, in which they each have a distinct role to play in the robotics team, at least in theory. However, what they actually do (or how they do it) doesn’t seem as important as the fact that they simply partake, turning them into symbols rather than individuals.

If nothing else, this approach assists in the film’s head-scratchingly chaotic unfurling. Its denial of individual drama allows it to hop and skip quickly from one scenario to the next, where each objection and hurdle is quickly overcome without too much trouble (all it takes is a pinch of moxie). The one major emotional obstacle they face is drawn from a real-world tragedy that, though it affected them directly, did so incidentally. Apart from this one instance, Rule Breakers features little to no rigorous drama across its two hour runtime. It’s a mere simulacrum of struggle, America-washed into oblivion thanks to its noncommittal approach to the people and cultures it seeks to portray—all of whom barely exist outside the context of their relationship to the United States. In the end, things come easy when you have the United States on the brain.