Movie Review: Atlas

Netflix has a history of throwing large amounts of money at a variety of projects in the hopes of creating a blockbuster film that can rival the best of what Hollywood puts into theaters every Summer and so far has been almost completely incapable of doing so (The Old Guard being the one exception I can think of). With a budget of around $100 million, the Jennifer Lopez sci-fi vehicle Atlas is their latest try, and while it isn’t bad, it’s hardly great either.

Lopez stars as Atlas Shepherd, an expert on artificial intelligence in a future America. She harbors a deep distrust of AI, despite living in a world in which it is effectively everywhere, which has made her somewhat of a pariah in the tech community. Despite this, when a long-missing robot (Abraham Popoola) that was involved in a string of very destructive terrorist attacks resurfaces, General Jake Boothe (Mark Strong) of the International Coalition of Nations (I guess United Nations felt too short?) calls her in to interrogate it. Not afraid to use very aggressive tactics to extract information, she learns that the leader of the attacks, another AI by the name of Harlan (Simu Liu), has been hiding on a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy and plotting his return.

The ICN quickly gets Colonel Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown) to put together a mission to capture Harlan and Atlas insists that she be taken along for the ride, arguing that she has spent her life studying him. Boothe and Banks ultimately agree to let her go, and she is introduced to the new mechs that the ICN military will be using, each of which is run via the pilots syncing their minds with their suit’s AI. Unwilling to trust the tech, she refuses to sync herself, even after they arrive at their destination and their ship is promptly attacked by Harlan, forcing her to escape in a mech suit (voiced by Gregory James Cohan). Seemingly alone on the surface of a strange planet where Harlan and his forces are certainly hunting her, she has to try and work with her suit if she has any hope of survival.

The visions of a future Los Angeles and the alien world Atlas is stranded on are strikingly imaginative and well-realized, if occasionally a little derivative. As usual Lopez is magnetic in the lead role and is easy to root for, while Cohan is able to invest the mech suit Atlas inhabits with a surprising amount of charm and pathos. Unfortunately, the usually reliable Liu is miscast as the blandly villainous Harlan, whose argument that he has to destroy most of humanity to save the species has been used often enough in sci-fi that it has long since become a well-worn trope of the genre.

Director Brad Peyton has a good handle on shooting action and is able to execute several thrilling sequences, but the whole affair is dragged down by the relatively rote and predictable script. The movie has nothing to say about its very timely subject matter and doesn’t go anywhere that most audiences won’t see coming a mile away, though at least they won’t be bored as it gets there. This mechanically entertaining bit of sci-fi spectacle will likely elicit the emotional responses it wants out of viewers, but I doubt many will remember much about it afterward. ★★★