Once again, news of another sci-fi movie touching down on the landing pad of Netflix bring conflicting emotions. While not every action or sci-fi entry they shove in our direction are mindlessly glossy exercises in blowing budgets on films that are emptier than a burnt out refrigerator, more often than not that’s proved to be the case.
Also adding to my streaming anxiety is that Jennifer Lopez’s last dalliance with Netflix was The Mother; an action thriller I know I’ve reviewed, but have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever – and when you consider that other examples of Netflix’s female-led actioners contain the similarly forgettable Heart Of Stone and Interceptor, my expectations for Atlas plunged into an expected nose dive.
Can J-Lo and director Brad Peyton – a man who has helmed not one, not two, but three Dwayne Johnson movies – manage to defy expectations and produce a Netflix sci-fi/action film with a female lead that can actually remain in the memory longer than the length of the end credits? Considering that the end credits for Atlas last a whopping eleven minutes; chances aren’t looking good…
It’s the future, and even though A.I. has evolved to the point that it wants to kill us, we still live in a time where coffee machines still break down at regular intervals. After Harlan, the world’s first Artificial Intelligence terrorist, retreated into space to plot against us fleshy humans anew, three decades have passed, and Atlas Sheppard, the daughter of the woman who created Harlan, has been preparing for his return.
Now a top analyst, Atlas has enough personal trauma, a butt-load of guilt and a whole mess of Quad Americanos in her system to make her something of a liability to her military colleagues, but her main Achilles heel is her complete and utter distrust of all things A.I.. While it’s understandable considering her past with Harlan, the fact remains that it doesn’t sit particularly well with her that humans are still trying to push the boundaries between creating a seamless interface between those soft, human brains and A.l.. But when intel gathered by Atlas reveals that her nemesis is lurking on a inhospitable rock in the Andromeda galaxy, a mission launched to well and truly kick his ass is revealed to be a trap.
Before you know it, Atlas is all alone on the surface of an oxygen-free planet, strapped into a state of the art mech suit and facing a robot army with only an A.I. named Smith for company. Can she find it within the mess of her predictably traumatic backstory to bond fully with Smith to become a fearless fighting team, or will her robophobia bring disaster to the entire human race?
So once again, Netflix rolls out another sci-fi stinker that, believe it or not, is probably a more frustrating watch than Zack Snyder’s eye-rollingly overblown Rebel Moon. You see, even though that overwhelmingly hollow space opera was fairly derivative, at least Snyder was blatant trying to make it his own; in comparison, Peyton seems to be actively copying scenes he loves from other movies and transferring them to his movie wholesale.
Take an early moment that sees cops tracking down a robo-warrior working undercover that feels suspiciously like that opening scene from the first Matrix with Trinity fighting off her own brush with the law. Peyton light the scene with eerie green hues, seemingly desperate to invoke the Wachowski classic, but the issue is that no other scene in the movie is even remotely lit the same way – which means he’s deliberately just copying for the sake of copying even if it doesn’t fit with the rest of the film. However, I suppose this would be more of an issue if the rest of the entire film wasn’t just a hit parade of the best bits from other sci-fi movies bundled together to make one jumbled, deja vu inducing Frankenfilm.
But when the film isn’t going hell for leather to invoke moments from the likes of Transformers, Pacific Rim, Edge Of Tomorrow, Aliens, Terminator, Avatar, I, Robot and virtually anything else with a mech suit in it, it suffers badly when trying to establish it’s own identity. For a start, some of the establishing dialogue is so clunky, you probably could report Atlas to the police for assault with a deadly exposition and there is so many lines simply thrown in to painfully spell things out, I was genuinely wondering if Netflix was actively trying to make a movie specifically for people who don’t like actually watching films. I mean, crafting a film that doesn’t require you to look up from your phone once is, in of itself, an impressive skill – but it’s not one I particularly want to take off.
In the casting department, it proves to be more of the same as Jennifer Lopez is woefully miscast as a caffeine addicted analyst who is obsessed with bringing down her mother’s creation. Now, I don’t mean that she can’t handle the action – she is from the block, after all – but despite her being in phenomenal shape, the movie not only keeps her cooped up inside Smith’s cockpit for the majority of the time, but her character takes to utterly freaking out at the drop of a hat whether the moment calls for it or not and it soon starts to grate. I’m not sure if this level of sweat pumping histrionics are how J-Lo thinks caffeine addicts actually communicate, or she just couldn’t judge any given scene correctly due to the copious amounts of green screen she had to negotiate, but take it from me; her performance here makes her one in Anaconda seem as cool and collected as James Bond.
Elsewhere, the minimal cast do what they can. Mark Strong cashes in his check with a minimum of fuss while Sterling K. Brown does the same while nabbing the best lines; but Simu Liu’s biomechanical baddie is a standard case of robo-villainy and you can see he – like the rest of us – is yearning for another Shang Chi movie even from behind some funky, I’ve-been-set-to-evil contact lenses.
Still, the CGI is pretty, the action contains some cool moves and as disembodied voices go, Smith isn’t a bad character as giant, lumbering, heavily armed, robo-suits go; but while Atlas spends way too much time demanding that its panic stricken lead just shuts up and surrender her brain patterns to her buddy bot, it make you suspicious whether or not A.I. itself actually wrote this script in an attempt to bend is to its will. Still, I’d much rather prefer the Terminator attempt of world dominance rather than being gradually worn down by horrifically predictable movies, and in its attempts to convince us to Bond with A.I., Atlas instead gave me that synching feeling.
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