What could be more guaranteed to lift the spirits than a new sci-fi themed big-budget Netflix original, coming so closely on the heels of Rebel Moon – Part Two? (Sticking one’s hand in the toaster, growls a small voice in the back of my head.) Let’s have no truck with that sort of thinking, as we consider Atlas, the new film from Brad Peyton, who has previously delighted us (if that’s the right word) with films such as San Andreas and Rampage. Peyton is known for his collaborations with Genial Dwayne Johnson, but it seems ol’ Dwayne wasn’t available for the new one. As a consequence Peyton has been forced to find a different star for Atlas, but one as similar to the erstwhile Rock in every way as possible. Yes, it’s Jennifer Lopez.
(A genuinely serious thought: could it be this film was at one point intended as another Johnson vehicle? Atlas is, after all, essentially a boy’s name – yes, yes, I know we’re in 2024 and nothing means anything anymore – and the mythological Atlas, as any fule kno, was the dude whose job was to hold up the sky and stop it crushing the world. (Also he has an ocean and a lost continent named after him – don’t say you never learn anything hereabouts.) An actual movie about Atlas would surely have Dwayne’s name all over it.)
Anyway, we’re off to a generic mish-mash of a sci-fi future where smartphones have only relatively recently gone out of use, but intergalactic travel is not a big deal and people are living inside the Hollywood sign. The world is still recovering from a revolt by AI, led by the android butler (Simu Liu) from the house of a brilliant scientist. Things looked bleak until the world’s nations quickly came together and united to defeat this threat (there’s something genuinely depressing about the fact that this is the most implausible thing in an almost totally disposable movie). The butler himself ran off into space and – space being proverbially big – 28 years later the authorities are still looking for him. (And you get all this inside the first three minutes.)
The brilliant scientist at ground zero of the AI revolt (hmmm!) had a little daughter named Atlas who has grown up to be a spiky, withdrawn, brilliant analyst and interrogator for the anti-AI taskforce, with really good hair. (Even in this high-tech future, Atlas occasionally wears glasses, presumably because this tells the audience how intelligent she is.) This is J-Lo, obviously, and it would be hugely ungallant to suggest that in real life 28 years ago, rather than being a little girl, she was five years into her celebrity career and making movies with George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh (vastly better movies than this one, too). One of the things that doesn’t really get explored is the fact that society seems to have become a kind of slave state where apparently-sentient AIs are casually exploited – the first time we see J-Lo she is interrogating an enemy android, or at least his head (which they keep in a suitcase), and no-one has any issues with her torturing and then killing him once she’s got the data she needs.
Yup, old Atlas held up the heavens, but the world itself revolves around the new Atlas. Everything else in this movie is defined by its relationship to J-Lo and her excellent hair, in a weird kind of narrative solipsism. Childhood trauma (hmmm!) has left her distant and unable to connect with people, and with a strong aversion to linking her brain to an AI system the way everyone else is doing. (I can kind of sympathise with this, but then I don’t even have a smartphone.)
Anyway, J-Lo’s boss, former hardest working man in showbiz Mark Strong (phoning it in here), announces that she has managed to get the location from which her former butler is plotting the destruction of humanity – it’s a planet in the Andromeda galaxy (this is ridiculously far away, especially considering the actual location has no bearing on the plot), so they are packing off a ship full of soldiers to put a stop to all his scheming and plotting. J-Lo isn’t allowed to go and spends the rest of the movie watching the shopping channel.
No, of course she doesn’t. Having done something a bit like Minority Report, the film-makers flip through their book of 101 Sci-Fi Movies and settle on redoing a scene from Aliens – the one where Sigourney Weaver tries to brief the space marines on the danger they’ll be facing and they, foolish fellows, mock and belittle her. It doesn’t work quite as well here, obviously, because a) everyone here should already be aware of the seriousness of the AI threat and b) it’s been established that J-Lo’s character is a dedicated, brilliant and excellently-haired analyst and strategist. So why are they ignoring her? It’s a sort of residual narrative reflex that happens when people don’t think enough about the film they’re making.
Sure enough the space battleship no sooner arrives over Liu’s hide-out than it gets shot down by the evil robots, and J-Lo is forced to bail out in a suit of exoskeletal power armour. The second act consists of her yomping across the surface of the planet while arguing with the suit’s AI (voiced by Gregory James Cohan, whose previous roles include the title character in Veloci-Pastor (about a priest who discovers he can turn into a dinosaur and becomes a vigilante crime-fighter) and background voices in Red Dead Redemption 2) and occasionally fighting off evil androids. But then she discovers all this has been part of a devious plan by her old butler and Earth itself is at risk – but in order to save the planet she will have to combine her mind with that of the suit’s AI. Can she bring herself to do it? (Clue: yes.) And what long-buried secrets, explaining her general hostility to the world, will emerge? (Clue: loads of them.)
You have to thank Netflix for doing their bit for the cinematic experience by trying to drive people out of the house so they see proper films in actual cinemas, because there is not much to recommend Atlas as a viewing experience. An all-pervasive feeling of people going ‘aah, that’ll do’ emanates from virtually every element of this film. It’s not technically awful, in terms of its visuals, but it’s like watching a high-spec games console during many of the action sequences (and some of the stuff with the actors plays a bit like cut-scenes too). The script is… well, I hope I’ve given you a sense of what the script is like, whch is derivative, obvious, and poorly-thought-through. Here’s another example: it turns out the butler wants to save the Earth from being devastated by human civilisation (there’s another topical box ticked), but what plan has this AI genius come up with to save the environment? He’s going to use a missile which will ignite the atmosphere and reduce everything on the surface to ash and dust. Maybe run that one past Greenpeace or the WWF before going ahead with it.
Possibly the worst problem is that, despite how dumb and silly most of the film is, Jennifer Lopez doesn’t seem to have noticed any of this and is here to show that she is a Serious Actress. She spends the entire second act in the tiny control cabin of a clumpy mech arguing with it about… everything, but obviously hasn’t clocked that this is a lightweight genre film and is playing the part as if she’s doing Hedda Gabler, though with really good hair. I’ve got to say, it is really good hair – never mind those old rumours about her insuring certain parts of her anatomy, it’s her hair which is clearly the big asset here, looking fabulous throughout.
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‘Right then Jenny, give us – Fear! Pain! Loneliness! Incipient despair!’ ‘Okay, but my hair still has to look excellent.’ ‘Oh, if you insist.’
(I did think I was going to do an extended bit here commenting on how the idea of combat power armour, which probably dates back to Robert Heinlein and the original Starship Troopers novel, has now become sufficiently assimilated into the culture for it to appear in a film like this one without anyone feeling the need to dwell on it or explain it much. But there’s a time and a place for measured cultural commentary and I think I’ve spent enough time writing about Atlas as it is.)
So, yes, dreadful, derivative, CGI-dominated sci-fi knuckle-dragger with a lead performance by someone who doesn’t seem to understand the film she’s in, supporting performances which are either indifferent or just plain bad, and plot holes you could drive a tank through. It’s too trivial for sensible adults to watch (yeah, I know, but I’m not watching it again, that’s for damn sure) and occasionally too nasty for young kids. And some people are calling it pro-AI propaganda? This film is certainly artificial, but intelligent? Not in the slightest.
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