Jennifer Lopez has never had the best movie career, which is a shame considering how good she can be in films like Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. Considering she is perhaps best known for being the star of a bunch of bland romantic comedies, 2019’s Hustlers was a major comeback for her stardom, and yet she has continuously not been able to find movies that are worthy of her acting capabilities. Having found a home in the streaming services from This Is Me… Now: A Love Story with Amazon, and her latest feature at Netflix, in which she pilots a mecha.
As Lopez plays the titular protagonist, Atlas is set in the distant future, where humanity is at war with artificial intelligence. With a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, analyst Atlas Shepherd searches for fugitive AI terrorist Harlan (Simu Liu), who 28 years ago led an AI rebellion that left 3 million dead before fleeing into outer space. Accompanied in the military mission to find and capture Harlan, Atlas finds herself on a planet where she is forced to enter a mech herself and develops an uneasy alliance in the onboard AI, who introduces itself as Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan).
Best known for directing the Dwayne Johnson star vehicles Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, San Andreas and Rampage, Brad Peyton is not one for making original movies and whether enjoyable or not, they try to emulate better movies that you would rather be watching. In the case of Atlas, written by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, it evokes not only the Hollywood actioners that have explored the dangers of artificial intelligence, but also the many mecha anime including Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Considering that the aforementioned Evangelion was a psychological deconstruction of the mecha genre, which meshed soap opera storytelling with giant mechanized suits battling each other, a big portion of Atlas is all about therapy. Despite the supporting players like Sterling K. Brown and Mark Strong, you are predominately in the company of Lopez and her off-screen co-star, which drives the central relationship between a reluctant human and the assistant AI. No doubt Lopez delivers a strong dramatic performance that somewhat elevates the well-worn material, whilst Cohan’s vocals deliver enough wit as Smith, and yet the dialogue is over-explanatory and tries too hard to engage in the psychological torment of its protagonist.
With much of Atlas essentially being Lopez in a mech suit, where you can see a lot of detail has been achieved through its design, you can also see the movie’s limitations as it must balance that with the mech spectacle, which is more reminiscent of video games like Titanfall. The effects may not reach Avatar’s level of quality, and while the action is decent if a bit dizzying like Michael Bay’s Transformers, had the movie been shorter than its two-hour running time, Atlas would have been a passable B-movie watch – if it hadn’t had the pretense that it thinks it had something to say.
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