Rule Breakers

Rated PG • Theaters

The story made headlines around the world in 2017: A team of teenage girls from Afghanistan was participating in an international robotics competition. Despite backlash in their country, the girls and coach Roya Mahboob had studied computer coding, acquired mechanical components, and were traveling abroad. The new Angel Studios film Rule Breakers dramatizes their courageous accomplishments but has surprisingly little intensity.

The film explains that under the Taliban young Roya and other Afghan girls were denied access to computers. In the early 2000s, an adult Roya (Nikohl Boosheri) is motivated to organize computer classes for girls. She selects four girls (in real life there were six) strong in math and physics for a robotics team.

Disapproving patriarchs and suspicious American Embassy officials in Kabul tell them no. But with the Taliban’s power (temporarily) diminished, the team’s persistence pays off. They travel to America and elsewhere pitting their robots against other national teams’ machines.

Rule Breakers fudges on the types of robots the Afghan Dreamers, as they were called, built, as well as on how they fared in competitions. That’s routine dramatic license. But the film also suffers from dramatic lightness.

Rule Breakers busies itself with screwdrivers turning, girls excitedly clapping, and tournament emcees speechifying to attendees (and filmgoers) with lines such as “You have come … to build a better future together through our common language of science and technology.” Scenes of family and religious clashes, love interests, and Western decadence aren’t given enough dramatic depth or exploration. Perhaps Roya and her sister Elaha, the film’s executive producers, prescribed a narrative as modest as their hijab-draped heroines. Either way, it’s a dry two hours. A more compelling option with half the runtime might be the 2023 documentary Afghan Dreamers.