Atlas Movie Review: Science Fiction Film with Jennifer Lopez on Netflix Leaves its Mark
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Mark Strong
Director: Brad Peyton
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)
After the success of The Mother, Jennifer Lopez returns to Netflix with Atlas, a new science fiction and action film ready to make us reflect on the theme of artificial intelligence and human relationships. It’s called Atlas and it’s a sci-fi drama directed by Brad Peyton and set in a not-too-distant future where men and robots not only coexist but collaborate by putting together their specific characteristics to transform women and men into better and enhanced versions of themselves. This harmony is soon interrupted by a robotic rebellion that becomes the new threat to the future of humanity. The protagonist of the story is Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence despite living in a world where AI reigns supreme. Atlas will join a government mission in space to capture a robot that has sparked a war between humans and intelligent beings with whom she shares a mysterious past.
But when things get worse, the only hope of saving humanity’s future from her AI is to trust it, and that won’t be an easy task. In outlining the first steps of an extremely familiar story as a whole, Atlas soon manages to find its framework by centralizing itself around its protagonist and her relationship with technology. Despite developing from a rather banal and predictable plot, the film, available on Netflix from 24 May 2024, stands on its own, offering a significant and emotionally strong experience for home viewers. The current automatisms of society, ours, which is slowly developing at the level of artificial intelligence, intersect with the most classic science fiction of a world that, by hypothesis, is very close to what we know. It is precisely in this remote hypothesis that Atlas, like many other feature films of the same ilk (Terminator, The Creator, Ex Machina, and many others) manages to gain a foothold, building credibility both in terms of humanity and the relationship between man and technology.
Atlas Movie Review: The Story Plot
Jennifer Lopez is committed to showing her feisty side in a new role for her. The actress plays an analyst who participates in a mission to capture an artificial intelligence and who, 28 years earlier, rebelled against humans, causing millions of deaths. This AI represents a terrorist threat and, for the protagonist, also a personal pain, since it was created by her mother, a pioneer of technological development. The mission on a distant planet thus turns into a death trap. With her fellow rangers killed in the attack, the protagonist must fight to survive and face the artificial intelligence. Protected inside a mecha, her only way out is to overcome her reluctance towards advanced AI and collaborate with the computer program that drives this war machine.
Atlas incorporates elements of the eternal battle between humanity and artificial intelligence, similar to those seen in iconic films such as The Matrix and AI. Artificial Intelligence, enriched by philosophical reflections, and the spectacular nature of The Creator, was recently released in cinemas. The character played by Jennifer Lopez can be annoying, but this is intentional: she defines herself as a misanthrope and is committed to making herself unpleasant to others. Atlas’ big bad, Harlan, played by Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), is instead a little out of tone compared to the more positive roles the actor is used to. The film makes good use of Liu’s martial skills, but acting-wise, the villain comes across as more of a henchman than a criminal mastermind.
Atlas Movie Review and Analysis
Atlas gets right to the point. The speed of the exposition is always an advantage, it doesn’t waste the viewer’s time and keeps the story at the right pace, at a high pace. In the long run, the thinness of the narrative line and the hasty nature of some choices take away the bite from the film; at least in the first quarter of the story, however, things go well. We are on the Earth of the future, in a hyper-technological world where AI is the daily bread of existence. The protagonist is called Atlas Shepard (Lopez) and the film has fun portraying her misanthropic character, not very open to new things and hostile in her relationships with Artificial Intelligence. Without going into too much detail, in Atlas’ past, there is a trauma – there is always a trauma, the shortcut on which so much, too much contemporary storytelling rests – connected to the premature death of his mother, a scientist in the field of AI. The protagonist’s distrust of technology – in addition to her bad temper, she is a formidable data analyst – has an emotional basis.
He’s not entirely wrong. There is an evil terrorist, also AI, called Harlan (Liu, you will remember him from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and he threatens the survival of mankind. No one knows where he is, but General Boothe (Strong) is convinced that Atlas and his formidable analytical skills are what it takes to track him down, and indeed they are. Atlas joins the space ranger patrol that moves, led by Colonel Banks (Brown), toward a distant planet to capture and neutralize the threat. It’s not that easy. The first half of the film is the story of the hunt for the enemy, the second part is the chronicle of what happens afterward, when the rangers fall into an ambush and Atlas finds herself alone, lost in an unknown environment, immobilized inside an enormous giant robot driven by an Artificial Intelligence called Smith and whose voice we only hear. To save herself, save the world, and capture Harlan, the protagonist must learn to communicate with Smith, trust him, and open herself to the possibilities of contact with the unknown. The meeting/clash with Smith is a balm and a therapy.
End of the world, chronicle of lost times, Artificial Intelligence. In reality, Atlas is a less dark and pessimistic film than the premise and a quick look at the synopsis suggests. Nervous, yes, modeled on the personality and restless nature of the protagonist. Jennifer Lopez is on stage alone most of the time, trapped in an immobility (physical and spiritual) that the film does not enhance, not in terms of a solid narrative tension or work on the image; she will be able to get out of it by learning to come to terms with the “different”, the technology with infinite possibilities and equally as many risks. Curiously, the two most recent examples of sci-fi grapple with the big (and slightly ridiculous) question – is Artificial Intelligence here for us or here to destroy us? – that is to say, Atlas and The Creator (Gareth Edwards, 2023) answer the question in more or less the same way, conciliatory and hopeful. Imagine, that is, a future full of threats but essentially optimistic in which the possibilities offered by technology reward humanity far beyond the risks of subjugation, violation of privacy, and generalized destruction.
But Edwards’ film, which did not hide its derivative nature at all, managed, with his limitations, to draw a sentimentally full, visually lush, and thematically complex man-machine confrontation. Atlas, on the other hand, struggles to hit the target. The impression is that he didn’t seriously try. Brad Peyton confirms the essentially muscular and adrenaline-filled nature of a cinema that does not hide, from itself and the spectator, the debt of gratitude towards the master (also Canadian) of intelligent and loud science fiction. James Cameron is, for Atlas, a spiritual father, a lighthouse in the night, an unshakable reference. This adds to the frustration because it is clear that the film, which has no shortage of interesting ideas, about trust, the fragility of human relationships, the chaos of family life, AI, and the complex nature of life and death (!), he does not play the game of ambition by choice.
He seems to make a point of neglecting the intelligence of the premise, refusing any mention of a thought, a discourse, even if only vaguely problematic. The emotions, the big speeches, remain at a superficial level. Limit and Obstacle is too thin a screenplay, which negatively compensates for the rapid, effective exposition with a hasty and imprecise continuation which does not serve the plot well (at times inconsistent) and does not carve out enough space for the supporting characters – Sterling K. Brown above all, guiltily underused – to build a personality, adequate motivations and a satisfactory resolution. Atlas has no time or way to strengthen his emotions, ephemeral and fragile due to the fear of trying to be something more. One of the focal themes of Atlas is undoubtedly the relationship created between human beings and artificial intelligence. Although the reality presented in the film may seem distant and almost impossible, AI is slowly starting to be part of our current society.
Both in its aesthetic and narrative characterization, Atlas immediately presents itself as an extremely derivative work. Its derivation can be understood and observed openly from the initial plot and from how the same world around the protagonist is outlined as the spectators enter into it. The rules in place are familiar, as are the underlying issues and methodologies through which the director chooses to advance the main events. On a macro level, therefore, nothing new, it is in the more micro dimension that Atlas brings out the best of itself. In carrying out her journey the protagonist will have to make use of technology, but there is something wrong, there is something that torments her, preventing her from showing herself in all respects. What made it the way it is today, then? The mystery of an inscrutable woman moves the sensitivity of a film that quickly becomes an internal investigation and study of the relationship between the human and the technological.
In determining the search for a non-human terrorist, there are two elements that most attract and push us to continue with the vision: the characterization of Atlas herself and the exploration of a context that is both familiar and creatively unpredictable. The highlight of the feature film is undoubtedly the interpretation of Jennifer Lopez in part, aided by a direction extremely attentive to the specific human, capable of capturing J.Lo’s internal and external movements using close-ups and details that affect her the sensations first on the camera lens, and then on the small screen. Her broken looks and that inexpressible and pressing pain beneath the surface enhance the main intentions of a film made above all of the writing and inner investigation. In parallel, Atlas offers a glimpse into an extremely modern world, so much so that it is easily identifiable in terms of science fiction or Sci-Fi poetics.
The construction and characterization of a context in which robots and human beings coexist both in harmony and in conflict pushes towards some reflections which in the film will find direct concreteness in the path of the protagonist herself and in her relationship with a military exoskeleton within which she finds himself surviving. Here the hypothetical link between man and AI takes precedence over everything else, presenting some dynamics in which one immediately gets lost, finding oneself in close contact with doubts and reasoning on the same technological progress external to the cinematographic product in question. In the crazy and dramatic journey of an analyst, the entire other side of Atlas is measured, made up of open field clashes, battles, and strategic confrontation with a practically superior intelligence, or at least detached and resolute. Thanks to careful writing, however, the film hesitates a little when it comes to CGI, offering some more action moments that are certainly interesting, even if with perhaps less weight than the rest.
Atlas Movie Review: The Last Words
Atlas is not an original film, but it is precisely in this creative process in which the director, Brad Peyton, chooses to “play on the safe and the familiar”, that the story in images amazes, presenting particular attention in the writing. Investigating first and foremost the relationship between humans and technology, the film manages to be fascinating and inspiring, thanks to the work of Jennifer Lopez and a certain underlying emotional credibility. Don’t expect a highly original plot or a film that will leave you speechless but Atlas, despite following a path already unpaved by many other titles on artificial intelligence and following a classic narrative model that is often repeated in the cinema, is essentially a good film which succeeds in its intent to entertain, makes us reflect, excite and give the spectator the emotional comfort he seeks from an art form such as cinema.
Atlas Movie Review: Science Fiction Film with Jennifer Lopez on Netflix Leaves its Mark - Filmyhype
Director: Brad Peyton
Date Created: 2024-05-24 14:01
3
Pros
- Jennifer Lopez in action heroine version
- A vision that works as pure entertainment
- Jennifer Lopez's interpretation.
- The writing and investigation behind the film.
Cons
- The details of a world that is not too original.
- The CGI is unconvincing in some moments.
- It lacks a discernible idea and hand
- Both the narrative and world building aren't the most fascinating
