Atlas Review – Jennifer Lopez learns to love artificial intelligence in Netflix’s goofy mockumentary

MMemorial Day weekend has long been a vital and lucrative calendar date in Hollywood, a three-day stretch that spawned blockbusters like Mission: Impossible, The Lost World and Top Gun: Maverick. While George Miller’s bombastic Mad Max prequel Furiosa spurs them onto the big screen, Netflix has something for most to stay at home — the sci-fi adventure Atlas, and it’s kind of a big, dumb, ironic— cheap schlock that would have premiered in theaters on this very date two decades ago. And perhaps that’s the best way to look at it, as knowing nostalgia bait designed to appeal to those who’d rather look back than forward, an exercise in early ’00s immersion.

If only that’s how those dealing with Atlas actually saw it, then maybe there would be more fun. But as with much of the broadcaster’s other wares – its most bare-bones attempts to compete with the big boys – it’s too synthetic and earnest to possess anything close to consciousness.

Which are the top songs for Jennifer Lopez, whose self-funded, self-aggrandizing folly This is Me – Now has recently suffered from a similar self-perception problem (the accompanying documentary turned out to be a much more revealing and entertaining watch ). She’s an actress I still root for, with more star presence than most, even if her choices continue to test patience ( Hustlers is not only her only truly great film in the last 20 years, but even her only slightly good one) . Lopez scored a huge hit for Netflix with last year’s gritty, dark revenge thriller The Mother (it was the streamer’s most-watched original film of 2023), and she’ll stay in action lane for her next. . , this time with an added sci-fi bent, something new for the star, but something that feels like an awkward mismatch.

As the jittery, misanthropic data analyst Atlas Shepherd, Lopez feels like an unlikely choice, never convincing us as someone who spends her days sipping coffee in a tech silo, back in the world she’s raised her finger on. waistline, hair and make-up always flawless. Her reasoning is at least understandable, as she was a child raised alongside a robot named Harlan (Simu Liu going full ham), who went on to become the world’s first AI terrorist, causing a deadly war between man and machine before escaping to another planet. Almost three decades later, a mission to capture him sets out (led by a rather bored Mark Strong and recent Oscar nominee Sterling K Brown giving a commendable performance) with Atlas in tow. But when things go wrong, she’s forced to play action hero and team up with the artificial intelligence she despised.

For most of the film, Lopez is then placed inside a robotic mech suit, learning to fight and befriend an entity named Smith, discovering that actually, maybe HE isn’t so bad after all. last. Then, relying so heavily on Lopez’s face, which (thanks to some low-key VFX work) is left to flicker slightly eerily around a green screen and laced with some horrendously weird dialogue, the role brings out the instincts of its worst and ugliest.

The scenes of her relationship with Smith (those involved have repeatedly insisted that it is really a movie about friendship) are particularly, utterly awful, the script by Aron Eli Coleite and Leo Sardarian repeatedly trying and failing to inject humor into their cringe-worthy jokes in writing that feels more like a ChatGPT build than in the way it can work. for the sake of the story. Given the ever-present threat of AI destroying jobs and eroding creativity, a story about the importance of breaking down resistance to technology and embracing machines as our new BFFs don’t feel as mobile as the movie would like. think at this very moment.

Visually, we often get a sense of where the reported $100 million budget went (it’s Netflix’s biggest female-led film to date), with some grand, if clumsily edited, action sequences – but more often this proves much more difficult, with an unimaginative vision of the future that can look really, really ugly both on Earth and in space, much of the film feels like a little old video game. There’s no fear we should take from a film like this, director Brad Peyton (behind Dwayne Johnson’s throwaway vehicles Rampage and San Andreas) can never quite get his film out of being just another block-broadcast simulation. really. For a movie that wants us to not worry about and love big tech, Atlas does a remarkably good job of showing us why we should still be wary of it.