Memorial Day weekend has long been a vital, lucrative calendar date in Hollywood, a three-day stretch that’s birthed blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible, The Lost World and Top Gun: Maverick. As George Miller’s bombastic Mad Max prequel Furiosa urges those to the big screen, Netflix has something for the majority staying home – the sci-fi adventure Atlas, and it’s the kind of big, dumb, irony-free schlock that would have premiered theatrically on this very date two decades prior. And perhaps that’s the best way to view it, as knowing nostalgia bait, designed to appeal to those who prefer to look back rather than forward, an exercise in early ’00s immersion.
If only that’s how those involved with Atlas actually saw it, then maybe there’d be more fun to be had. But as with many of the streamer’s other mockbusters – its more naked attempts to compete with the biggest of boys – it’s all too synthetic and serious to possess anything close to self-awareness.
Which tracks for lead Jennifer Lopez, whose self-funded, self-praising folly This is Me … Now recently suffered a similar problem of self-perception (the accompanying documentary proved to be a far more revealing and entertaining watch). She’s an actor I still root for, with more star presence than most, even if her choices continue to test patience (Hustlers is not just her only genuinely great film in the last 20 years, but also her only vaguely good one). Lopez scored a major hit for Netflix with last year’s dire, dimly lit revenge thriller The Mother (it was the streamer’s most-watched original film of 2023) and she’s staying in the action lane for her next, this time with an added sci-fi bent, something new for the star, yet something that feels like a bit of an awkward mismatch.
As nervy, misanthropic data analyst Atlas Shepherd, Lopez feels like an unlikely pick, never quite convincing us as someone who spends her days mainlining coffee in a tech silo, back turned on the world she’s raised a middle finger to, hair and makeup always impeccable. Her reasoning is at least understandable, having been a child raised alongside a robot called Harlan (Simu Liu going full ham) who then became the world’s first “AI terrorist”, causing a deadly war between human and machine before escaping to another planet. Almost three decades later, a mission to capture him is launched (led by a rather bored Mark Strong and recent Oscar nominee Sterling K Brown giving a glorified cameo) with Atlas along for the ride. But when things go wrong, she’s forced to play action hero and team up with the very artificial intelligence she has grown to despise.
For much of the film, Lopez is then situated inside a robotic mech suit, learning to fight and befriending an entity called Smith, finding that actually, maybe AI isn’t that bad after all. So much then relies on Lopez’s face which (thanks to some subpar VFX work) is left to judder a little eerily around a green screen, and stuck with some hideously corny dialogue, the role brings out her worst, soapiest instincts.
The scenes of her bonding with Smith (those involved have repeatedly insisted it’s really a film about friendship) are particularly, embarrassingly awful, the script from Aron Eli Coleite and Leo Sardarian trying and repeatedly failing to inject humour into their eye-rolling banter with writing that feels more like a ChatGPT construction and not in the way that might work for the benefit of the story. Given the ever-present threat of AI destroying jobs and eroding creativity, a story of the importance of breaking down one’s tech-resistance and embracing machines as our new BFFs doesn’t feel as moving as the film would like us to think at this very moment.
Visually, we often understand where the reported budget of $100m has gone (it’s Netflix’s biggest female-fronted film to date), with some grand, if choppily edited, action sequences – but more often it proves far harder, with an unimaginative vision of the future that can look genuinely, jarringly ugly both on Earth and in space, much of the film resembling a tinny old video game. There’s just none of the awe we should get from a film such as this, director Brad Peyton (behind throwaway Dwayne Johnson vehicles Rampage and San Andreas) never able to edge his film away from being just another streaming simulation of a real blockbuster. For a film that wants us to stop worrying and love big tech, Atlas does an awfully good job of showing us why we should still be wary of it.
Atlas is out on Netflix on 24 May
