This review was made possible by an advance screener of Atlas. Atlas releases on Netflix on May 24, 2024.
Jennifer Lopez is back for another film with Netflix, this time collaborating with the director known for San Andreas, Rampage, and Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Brad Peyton. Lopez might love the workload and have a good relationship with Netflix, having dropped three projects on there back-to-back since 2022, but I think it’s about time that she thinks carefully about what project she attaches herself to, as her resume isn’t looking too good right now with this latest addition.
Atlas follows Atlas Shepard (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, as she joins a mission to capture a renegade robot named Harlan (Simu Liu), with whom she shares a mysterious past. When plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.
‘Atlas’ Is The Same AI Film You’ve Seen Before
When going into this film, I didn’t expect anything revolutionary, as I knew what Brad Peyton and Jennifer Lopez usually bring to the table, yet somehow I’m more disappointed than expected. It has gotten to the point where I am tired of films that focus themselves on AI, specifically evil AI. It really opens up a question that should be open for discussion: When will we stop making films on AI taking over when they hold nothing useful to add to the overall topic?
From watching a film that handles the AI taking over a scenario like Mars Express, to a film like this, where in the first five minutes, you can predict exactly how the film will end, it’s embarrassing. The film went through rewrites, with Aron Eli Coleite taking over with the screenplay. It’s sad to say, but I’ve never been a true fan of his work besides Locke & Key. We’ll never know why it needed rewriting, but it’s hard to believe that it was somehow worse than it is now.
There’s a character that Atlas comes across called Smith (Gregory James Cohan), and as you can probably guess, he is the good AI of this story that is part of the Arc Suit’s system that Atlas finds herself with. The one redeeming factor of this film is that Smith can actually be quite funny at times. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the dynamic between the two characters, as Atlas just became very annoying and hard to like, but Smith came in with witty one-liners occasionally.
At some point during the film, a conversation happens between Atlas and Smith where they talk about Smith having a soul, as he believes everything has a soul. Atlas says, “But you can’t find it in your code,” wherein Smith replies, “Not any more than you can find it in yours.” This made me lean forward, but I instantly leaned back when I realised that the film wasn’t going to make actual use of this conversation.
The basis of that conversation was enough for me to want a film about AI taking over and having it revolve around faith, belief, and spirituality. It would’ve added a lot more to the world-building, which is just nonexistent, and would’ve provided more depth to the characters instead of them all feeling one-dimensional, aside from Smith for this one exact moment.
The Visuals and Performances Can’t Save It
The best way to describe this film without providing any spoilers is by comparing it to Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s literally the plot of that film, but it’s worse, boring, and has uninteresting characters. Atlas becomes trapped on another planet where no human has ever been before. She becomes trapped there after a crash and is met with Harlan’s forces.
The visuals for the planet can actually be quite decent when just focusing on the landscape, but as soon as we bring numerous people and a big mech into the scene, everything starts to look visually unpleasant and becomes reminiscent of an early 2010’s video game, and even then, that’s not the best comparison because Titanfall was released in 2014, and even that can look better than the CGI in Atlas during certain moments. I probably thought a lot more about Titanfall than Atlas itself while I was watching, wishing they had just removed AI from this film and added more Arc Suits.
It doesn’t end there; in the first 30 minutes of Atlas, you’re met with just outright terrible performances. It’s not expected for award-winning performances, but at the very least, we want some effort put into it. The line deliveries are beyond laughable, and it’s hard to take this film seriously when the effort isn’t being put into it.
Once again, Gregory James Cohan does a good job at voicing Smith, between the tonal shifts in his voice, and how quickly he can switch from a sarcastic tone to a serious one while still sounding like the generic AI that you hear in almost every film that involves AI. The sound design isn’t anything impressive in this film, but there is one moment where a character is charging into battle and it’s synced to the score of the film. In that one moment, I was once again impressed by what the film had to offer.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Atlas is a product you might get if you asked a ten-year-old to give you a film where AI has to take over the world, which would be more impressive if it came from the mind of a ten-year-old, but it didn’t. It’s a subpar film that doesn’t bring anything new to the discussion, and while it has many moments to make the film unique with the interesting topic of faith, belief, and spirituality, it doesn’t make any real use of it and only ever tries to hint at what could’ve been.
Jennifer Lopez and co. don’t provide a performance worthy of watching, even with Gregory James Cohan trying to save the film with performance and Smith’s ideologies. The landscapes are beautiful but interrupted by sloppy visuals that are used for the action sequences and to help blend the actors and CGI mech with the rest of the world. I do now yearn for a Titanfall live-action adaptation and can see the vision thanks to what Atlas showed me with Arc Suits. I can appreciate that much.
Atlas releases on Netflix on May 24, 2024. Check out the trailer below.
The Review
Atlas
If you've watched countless films surrounding evil AI or even watched ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’, don't bother with Jennifer Lopez's ‘Atlas’, as it brings nothing new to the table that you haven't already seen before.
