Atlas

Atlas, the new Netflix original starring Jennifer Lopez, is a mixed bag. With a strong cast and solid technical achievements, the bones are there to have something special. Yet, uninspired direction and a script that has uneven characterization, tone and theme, prevents this one from being more than a disappointment. With elements cribbed from much better films, such as Aliens, Blade Runner, The Matrix, and more, the film fails to come anywhere close to those works. Indeed, such a by the numbers work could have benefited from the funky weirdness of the Wachowski siblings, the grim determination of Ridley Scott or the assured action-master hand of James Cameron.

Courtesy Netflix

Lopez plays Atlas Shepherd, an analyst with a profound distrust of artificial intelligence, who is tasked with bringing a fugitive AI leader to justice. The leader, Harlan (Simu Liu), has been in hiding for almost thirty years and Atlas discovers he has been on another planet. Along with some “Rangers” she is sent to retrieve Harlan. Joining her is Colonel Banks, played by Sterling K. Brown, who has perfected a neural link between AI and humans that Atlas’s mother, Val, had been working on prior to her death. This is a fact which angers and frightens the highly skeptical Shepherd.

When the mission goes awry, Banks is taken by Harlan and Atlas is left to fend for herself in an ARC suit, a weaponized mecha, guided by an AI named Smith. This is where the majority of the film takes place and what it centers on. A woman, with thousands of arguments against AI, learning to depend on an AI in order to survive a hostile environment crawling with AI bent on destroying both of them. So far, so average, right? You would be wrong. For every good moment, there are three or four bad ones. That neural link? Of course Atlas is going to have to use it and of course she is going to bond with the AI. That is a given. This alone is not one of the crimes the film commits.

No, what hurts this film is how, despite the best intentions of everyone involved, there is nothing really special here. There are no surprises. There are no insights. There is pleasure to be had, in the corny, popcorn movie sense of the term. There is nothing wrong with that but the film is clearly aiming for something a little higher, a bit more noble. Lost in a chaotic work of noise and fast editing is another film, about survival, trust and what it means to be alive. Two writers were credited for this one, but experience tells this reviewer the real count is probably closer to five or six.

Courtesy Netflix

When the film moves away from Atlas and Smith, it falters. Unfortunately, it takes nearly forty minutes to get there. Once it happens, you go through a series of “meet cute” scenarios that, were Smith not an AI, you would think might lead to romance. Wisely, the film never tries to go there, with this story. The one saving grace in this work is that they allow that relationship to be the center of the film and be a genuine friendship about growth and trust. A much better film would have dropped the action sequences toward the end and focused on such character work.

Instead, we get an interminable battle between the humans and AI, with predictable outcomes all around. The action scenes are boring, and poorly lit. The director seems to believe that lots of sparks or flames equals something worth seeing. The script seems to think that sometimes it is best to focus on characters but mostly, it is just as well or better to go for paper thin motivations for those characters. A 1960’s soap opera would have a better grasp of plotting and character than this script sometimes does, and that is the biggest flaw. You will get whiplash trying to decide what the hell this is all about. Is it a work about the dangers of AI, or the dangers of not trusting others? Is it a warning against selfishness and how altruism is not always altruistic?

Courtesy Netflix

In the end, you probably will not care. You might not make it past the half hour mark. If you do, there’s half of a decent movie sandwiched between a dull opening and a naff conclusion. A shame, too, because Lopez gives this her all and, in a better film, Atlas could have become an iconic female role in science fiction. Instead, this is just another by-the-numbers blockbuster.

Atlas is now streaming on Netflix