Rule Breakers (2025)
Directed by: Bill Guttentag
Premise: Based on true events. Set in Afghanistan during the American occupation, teacher Roya Mahboob (Nikohl Boosheri) assembles a team of teenage girls to compete in an international robotics contest. They must overcome the challenges of being an underdog and cultural resistance in their home country.
What Works: Rule Breakers succeeds as a feel-good drama. This is fundamentally a sports story but in this case science and engineering take the place of athletics. The coach assembles a team of underdogs and they enter into a competition in which they are outmatched by more experienced and better funded teams. Rule Breakers fulfills the requirements of the sports film and ought to satisfy viewers who like that kind of story. The core performances are very good, namely Nikohl Boosheri as the team’s founder Roya Mahboob. She is tough and determined but we also get a sense of the pressure that Mahboob is under. In addition to the difficulty of learning and mastering robotics, the story also finds drama in the administration of the team. There isn’t much funding available and the competitions require international travel, creating political obstacles. The team members are played by Amber Afzali, Nina Hosseinzadeh, Sara Malal Rowe, and Mariam Saraj and all of them do a good job. Each of the teammates is distinct and the actors and the filmmakers make these young women into real people. We get a sense of their culture, especially their religious beliefs, and their inner conflicts as the women encounter the outside world and its possibilities and temptations. That inner conflict, along with the challenges of the competition, offer moments that demonstrate maturation and growth among the young characters. Rule Breakers is primarily set during the American occupation of Afghanistan and there is a sense of the risk that these women have put themselves in as the Taliban occupies the edges of the story. It’s not an aggressively political film but Rule Breakers takes a stand for women and leaves us with a sense of what has been lost since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and control of the country reverted to the Taliban.
What Doesn’t: The filmmaking of Rule Breakers is inconsistent. Some outdoor scenes look like they were filmed on a set and the wide establishing shots use very fake looking digital images to create the locations. The robotics contest sequences include archival footage of the events with appearances by real life competitors and celebrities. This real-life content is intended to heighten the reality of the scene but it does the opposite. The archival footage doesn’t match the dramatic footage and it disrupts the illusion. The drama of Rule Breakers doesn’t quite establish the stakes. We know that winning the contests could dramatically improve the course of these girls’ lives but the film doesn’t provide a clear sense of what happens if they fail.
Bottom Line: Rule Breakers is a satisfying, feel-good story. It suffers from some defects in its filmmaking but there is a lot to admire about it. This is a hopeful film about the possibilities of education and cooperation.
Episode: #1040 (March 23, 2025)