In the boundaryless imagination of science fiction, artificial intelligence is a story as old as the lightbulb. From Blade Runner to Battlestar Galactica, the genre has warned us time and time again about the perils of humans playing God; even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, now more than 200 years old, was, in part, an exploration of what has become the increasingly relevant AI issue. Atlas, a new film topping Netflix’s most-watched charts, is the latest sci-fi work to position AI in its crosshairs. Once there, however, it refuses to squeeze the trigger.
The premise is simple enough. At the beginning of the film, planet Earth is rocked by an “AI terrorist” known as Harlan, played with flat plasticity by Marvel star Simu Liu. Millions of humans are killed; Harlan flees the planet with his robotic acolytes. A few decades later, analyst Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez) embarks on a mission to hunt down this robotic Osama bin Laptop, who is hiding out on a distant planet. After the initial military operation goes awry, she must rely on the help of the AI system inside her mech suit – referred to by the humanising (and, one must imagine, Matrix-derived) nickname of “Smith”. At every obstacle, it is Smith that comes to Shepherd’s aid; by the film’s end, she is a total convert, a fully-fledged apostle of the church of AI. What starts out as a kind of heavy-handed piece of fear-mongering ends up as a heavy-handed work of propaganda, a tale of overcoming prejudice in which the prejudice was, in fact, completely justified all along. Has any recent film so spectacularly failed at reading the room?
