Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Atlas’ on Netflix, a generic A.I. sci-fi thriller starring a hysterical Jennifer Lopez (2024)

Jennifer Lopez headlines the Not All AI sci-fi extravaganza Atlas, her second action-packed feature under her current first-look deal with Netflix. The first was 2023’s The Mother, a po-faced generithriller that set the bar low for creativity, but, according to Netflix’s self-reporting, is among the streamer’s most-watched movies ever. J-Lo’s star shines as bright as ever, it seems, which translates to high expectations for Atlas, overseen by Rampage and San Andreas director Brad Peyton, and whose premise seems to be, what if we stuck J-Lo in a mech for two-thirds of a movie? And also, we should trust good AI and not trust bad AI, whether it’s a primary component of a movie or an algorithm feeding us things it thinks we’d like to watch. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

ATLAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A piece of advice: Before you watch this movie, dig a massive hole next to your couch so you have a place to put all the exposition that gets dumped in the first few minutes. How big should the hole be? Pretty big, I’d say. I looked up how to calculate the volume of a hole so I could potentially make a joke about it, and it ended up being the most fascinating thing I did all day, and yes, that is the same day in which I watched Atlas. (Yes, that’s the joke. It is not a hole-volume-specific joke. Maybe I should apologize for that, but one does not question the path one takes to get to a joke, be it good or bad. This one is admittedly marginal.) Anyway, I’ll help you out here by summing up the exposition as succinctly as possible: It’s the future. AI robots look like humans. One AI robot named Harlan (Simu Liu) got super-extra intelligent and began implementing genocide against humans. After he killed a billion humans, the humans started winning the war and Harlan got in a rocket ship and blasted off into space, and nobody knows where he went.

That was 28 years ago, and now Earth is all nervous that he’ll come back. Some AI terrorists are still embedded in the population, and we get an almost-exciting sequence in which one of Harlan’s finest butthole robot agents, Casca (Abraham Popoola), is hunted down. CUT TO: A crummy morning in Los Angeles. Well, it’s not that crummy, unless you’re Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), who has an absurd name befitting the lead character in a lousy sci-fi movie. There’s a bit where she just wants a damn cup of coffee, because she drinks a lot of coffee, and the coffee bit follows her throughout the movie like a string of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her shoe. Atlas is a counterterrorism analyst who goes to work and has to talk to Casca’s dismembered robot head in a suitcase, which gives us some real hard Ian Holm-in-Alien vibes. She outsmarts Casca and gets a lead on where Harlan is hiding, and then there’s about 374 coffee jokes, and they’re all dumb.

The thing you should know about Atlas is, she should probably lay off the coffee. She’s a bit high-strung, and that’s like saying a blue whale is a tad on the heavy side. I’m not judging her as a human being because we all have our peccadilloes and tics. No, I’m judging the way J-Lo’s untamed hair is consistently attempting to go AWOL, and how her performance is amplified to ridiculous levels of jittery hysteria. Why is she so frazzled? Well, she insists on tagging along on a military mission to kill Harlan (all together now: IS THIS ANOTHER BUG HUNT?) that requires playing nice with benevolent AI which she refuses to believe is benevolent, and do we blame her? Not at all, and that’s before we learn that her mother invented the AI thingy called a neural link that Harlan used to reprogram himself and initiate mass death, so she kinda wallows around in big piles of neurotic neural link guilt.

And so off she goes on the mission, led by a genericharacter, Col. Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown), who’s all arrogant about their ability to surprise-attack Harlan when BLAMMO, they get ambushed before we even get to the scene where all the military grunts do the just-tell-me-WHERE-THEY-ARE bravado thing. Mind you, she has no military training, so her hysteria gets even more hysterical when she finds herself on the surface of an alien planet inside a heavily armed war-mech that’s like ED-209 crossed with Ripley’s loader, and of course the mech is powered by an AI voice named Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan) who insists she put on the damn neural link and sync up their brains so they can survive, and maybe find Harlan and turn him into nuts and bolts. Will she succeed? NO SPOILERS MAN.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We should be grateful this movie gives us only minimal Chappie vibes. Otherwise, it feels like a bland amalgam of The Terminator, Aliens, The Creator, I, Robot, Oblivion and about a dozen other movies.

Performance Worth Watching: This is a YOU get a paycheck and YOU get a paycheck and YOU get a paycheck kind of movie, and just makes us want to see a sharp actor like Brown tackle another terrific American Fiction-type role after taking Netflix’s (hopefully big pile of) money.

Memorable Dialogue: “God, that was satisfying!” – J-Lo reviews a different movie in the dialogue for this movie

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Another movie Atlas reminds me of? Damsel, the Millie Bobby Brown vehicle that’s also a Netflix production that was probably expensive yet looks cheap, doesn’t have a single original idea in its head, and is an almost-solo movie for its star. It’s a formula for the streamer: Big name, boilerplate story, passable direction and scads of chintzy CGI, then jam it into everyone’s landing screen for a week and watch the streaming numbers pile up. Atlas plays like a parody version of a sci-fi movie from The Simpsons universe, which is a funny thought to entertain, but the thought doesn’t sustain itself for the film’s two-hour run time, thus leaving us bored and annoyed and hungry for something we haven’t seen before hundreds of times, or at least a teensy morsel of thematic subtext. But reader, be warned, you will starve to death before Atlas gives you any of that.

Peyton doesn’t seem to exert any control over Lopez’s performance, which is amped up to goofy levels, screaming its simplistic emotional blither-blather to the back row and defying plausibility even if you pretzel yourself trying to interpret it as comedy. Her out-of-control characterization is almost understandable, since Atlas spends a good chunk of the film inside the mech, looking very silly air-punching and air-running to control it, and listening to Smith, who exists to psychoanalyze her, perform various countdowns (to battery depletion, to oxygen depletion, to full AI-human synchronization, etc.), to explain the plot, or to explain away any holes in that plot. He’s very annoying and pushy, and sometimes a wiseass, and pretends to be funny when he says the word “sh*t,” because it’s funny when a robot voice learns the word “sh*t” for the first time and just casually starts dropping it into conversation, right? Uh huh.

I won’t name the screenwriters, because I think writers should have good-paying work, and if other productions need screenwriters and see their names on Atlas, they may look elsewhere. No cliche goes unindulged: The monologuing villain, the cheesy heartwrenching flashbacks, the hyper-edited action sequences that make you feel like your head is in a QVC salad spinner, the dead-ass action-movie one-liners, the protagonist’s Psych 101 character arc. It’s a beyond-hacky joke to say the movie plays as if it was written by AI, but there’s a legit reason for that, since the core message of the movie is to stop being such a neurotic doofus and just trust the benevolent AI. The benevolent AI that says the word “sh*t,” possibly because it’s self-aware enough to realize the primary substance of this movie.

Our Call: To be clear: It’s sh*t. The primary substance of this movie is sh*t. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.