ATLAS
(director: Brad Peyton; screenwriters: Leo Sardarian, Aron Eli Coleite; cinematographer: John Schwartzman; editor: Bob Ducsay; music: Andrew Lockington; cast: Jennifer Lopez (Atlas Shepherd), Lana Perilla (Val Shepherd), Simu Liu (Harlan), Mark Strong (Gen. Jake Boothe), Abraham Popoola (Casca Vix), Briella Guiza (Young Atlas), Gregory James Cohan (voiced-Smith/Dhiib pilot), Sterling K. Brown (Col. Elias Bank) Leo Sardarian Aron Eli Coleites); Runtime: 118; MPAA Rating: PG-13; producers: Brad Peyton, Jeff Fierson, Joby Harold, Tory Tunnell, Jennifer Lopez, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Benny Medina, Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter; Netflix; 2024)
“Has little credibility and a familiar story that’s easy to forget.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A plodding, cliched, generic, and derivative sci-fi thriller directed by the Canadian Brad Peyton (San Andreas) and painfully written by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, as if a video game. It’s a slickly made film that’s set in the future as a dystopian thriller. It has little credibility and a familiar story that’s easy to forget. The story deals with artificial intelligence trying to wipe out the human race by infiltrating their minds.
The mother of Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), Val (Lana Perilla), is a scientist known for her work as a robotic developer. She created Harlan (Simu Liu), an A.I., as her personal servant. But he kills her and leads an android attack on humans that kills millions, and then takes off into outer space.
Some 28 years later the hostile but brilliant Atlas has become a civilian counter-terrorism data analyst when General Jake Boothe (Mark Strong), on the request of the International Coalition of Nations, tells her that they captured on Earth, Harlan’s A.I. soldier agent, Casca Vix (Abraham Popoola).
Atlas’s examination of Casca reveals that Harlan is hiding on a distant planet in the Andromeda Galaxy.
This prompts Atlas to go on a spacecraft with Special Force rangers, trained A.I. killers, headed by the pilot Col. Banks (Sterling K. Brown), where she aims to take Harlan alive so she can study him in the lab (the rangers aim to kill him).
Atlas is faced with an emotional breakdown when left on her own on Harlan’s alien planet in a mech space suit. Fortunately, she’s saved from her plight when she finally gets over her hatred of artificial intelligence by making contact with the A.I. Smith, the Dhiib pilot (voiced by Gregory James Cohan), and gets his help.
The film rolls out some curious high-tech devices, however its formulaic plot is contrived and leaves us with a half-hearted facile message about co-existence as a possibility, but that message never squares with the narrative as our heroine won’t evolve through technology.
This is clearly a style over substance film, where Lopez is up to the physicality of the part but flubs on the dramatic part by making her character’s one-note performance too robotic to identify with.
REVIEWED ON 7/17/2024 GRADE: C+