Jennifer Lopez tries her hand in the action/sci-fi sphere with Brad Peyton’s bombastic Atlas. The hot button topic right now of artificial intelligence altogether taking over has been done before, and better (see: I, Robot), but this is a nifty, breezy Netflix watch that should appease longtime viewers of the multitalented actress/musician. It probably helps that from top to bottom, the film has been conceived to appeal to the widest audience possible. Situations never get too bleak for the younger subset, and the storyline remains palatable for a family movie night. Though it misses points for originality, Atlas is a surprisingly entertaining Terminator-lite, with J-Lo fighting her way through a bunch of humanistic android terrorists.
A weirdly distorted opening credits sequence documents a rise in crime, emphasizing that all forms of artificial intelligence have bypassed their security protocols. This has led to over a million human casualties. Harlan (Simu Lui, Barbie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), the world’s first “A.I. terrorist,” leads the destruction. Developed at the Shepherd Robotics lab and raised alongside brilliant researcher Val Shepherd’s ten-year-old daughter, Harlan took full responsibility for overriding their programming. Eventually, the ICN, or International Coalition of Nations, would strike back against the bots, driving Harlan to swiftly flee Earth in a spaceship and vowing to come back to “finish” what he started. All of this information overload is dumped on the viewer in the first ten minutes or so of Atlas. The setup moves by far too quickly to latch onto much of anything without going back to rewatch once or twice, which I was forced to do in order to grasp the introduction.
Lest we try to absorb the initial status quo, the script from Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite flashes forward a weirdly specific twenty-eight years. Dazzling special effects already show themselves early on, with the Hollywood sign looking blinged out and the city itself appearing wildly different. Terrorism expert Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), now a grown woman, has come to fully despise artificial intelligence even though she is forced to use it in her everyday existence. The ICN appears to be closer than ever to nailing down Harlan’s location in outer space, owing much to Atlas’s interrogation techniques with a dastardly bot she has captured. Colonel Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown, This Is Us, American Fiction) comes on to assist in the project of tracking down Harlan. Assembling his troops, donned in mech suits fueled by neural links to their respective humans, Elias heads out to a distant planet in the Andromeda Galaxy with Atlas in tow.
After a series of mishaps, Atlas is forced inside one of the mech suits for survival, but adamantly refuses any form of neural link. Atlas must use her wits—and the help of sarcastic A.I. program Smith—in order to take down Harlan and his liberated crew. Action-packed hijinks follow, charged by Atlas and her growing bond with the surprisingly sweet program. Nothing that occurs within Atlas delves into fresh territory, nor are the visuals captivating enough for big-screen Marvel fanatics. However, the film frolics from engaging set piece to intimate moments of character building with ease. Jennifer Lopez has nothing to prove at this point (her Oscar buzz for 2019’s Hustlers still lingers), yet she never phones in her performance on any level. We root for Atlas to overcome her obstacles and emerge out the other side relatively unscathed. Simu Lui leaves a mark as Harlan, channeling the distant and unnerving performance of Robert Patrick in T2: Judgement Day.
A late-in-the-game twist adds an extra layer of intrigue to Atlas’s preceding arc, and the actual finale practically transforms into a video game boss fight. While some elements definitely could have been executed more concisely, the amount of heart exuding from Smith sells any shortcomings. Overflowing with exciting action sequences peppered with eye-popping CGI, Atlas manages to overcome the monotonous overflow of star-studded Netflix flicks courtesy of an impressive performance by Jennifer Lopez and a zany premise. At the very least, it may slightly alter the manner we engage with A.I. on a day to day basis.
Sync with the neural link and prepare to receive Atlas, streaming exclusively to Netflix on Friday, May 24th.
