Atlas (Netflix, 2024)
Atlas carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, just as Jennifer Lopez does in this sci fi epic from Brad Peyton (San Andreas, Rampage).
But as she is called Atlas Shepherd there is a chance she might just shepherd humanity towards a better future.
Cut to the chase: the movie takes place some thirty years from now, after an ultimately failed rebellion of AI robots caused three million people to die.
Their leader Harlan (Simu Liu) has fled to a far away planet in the Andromeda system, from where he hatches his ultimate plan: to end humanity and finally bring about peace on earth.
To defeat him, Atlas has to establish a neural link with her own all-knowing AI pod-bot, who is called Smith (voiced well by Gregory James Cohan), so that they basically become one person.
There is a reason Atlas doesn’t want to do this (she has trust issues), and there is another why she eventually gives in (she wants to live!).
The movie poses the question whether we are ready to allow AI to help us grow as a species, but it also stresses the dangers of such developments.
Atlas is not a great movie, however. It uses a lot of cliches from other sci fi movies (Blade Runner, Terminator, Demolition Man, Pacific Rim, etc.), even though it was apparently written by real humans Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, who perhaps, like Atlas, should have donned a ‘mech suit’ and synced with their better AI-halves.
Jennifer Lopez (whose previous Netflix-feature The Mother was pretty good, actually) often plays Atlas in an overdramatic fashion, which doesn’t exactly help matters, as it ruins most of her scenes with Smith, which could have been pretty good, thanks to their witty banter (credits to the writers here).
The spectacle scenes may have worked better on the big screen, even if it is clear that they are pretty run of the mill to begin with and yes, director Brad Peyton did do a lot better with both his disaster movie San Andreas (2015) and his video game adaptation Rampage (2018).
Twenty years ago a movie like Atlas would have undoubtedly been a theatrical feature, but things change. This weekend it will probably do big numbers on Netflix, before dropping off (a cliff).
I give it two stars!