Atlas

dir: Brad Peyton

2024

Like, did you ever want to watch a whole movie where Jennifer Lopez argues continuously with her GPS / Alexa / Siri for two hours?

Because if you have a subscription to Neflix, all this and more can be bafflingly yours.

This curious lite sci-fi flick has a hero, being JLo, representing humanity, and a villain, Harlan (Simu Liu), representing AI. Don’t worry yourself, the flick goes to absolutely no trouble to define or explain what AI means in this context: all it means is when computers or robots want to kill us.

Like almost every instance of cinematic AI, in this film’s world, an AI that was otherwise docile has a moment and loses its shit, and infects all the other AIs, and they start killing humanity. So it’s Skynet, but instead of the Austrian beefcake of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger representing the AI, it’s the young handsome features of Simu Liu, but with blue eyes, so we know he’s evil.

He has decided that in order to save humanity he has to kill most of them, but leave a tiny fraction alive, to keep as pets, maybe? Anyway, in the middle of some crucial battle he flies off into outer space, eventually to return, we presume.

Twenty eight years later, a woman called Atlas, being JLo, who clearly is carrying the whole world on her shoulders, gets a chance to find out where he is so she can presumably kill him, kill him dead, and save humanity.

She is very distrustful of AI technology, but, wouldn’t you know it, the plot compels her to put aside her misgivings about AIs in order to bond with an AI in order to bring Harlan down. So the vast majority of this movie is watching JLo arguing with someone who isn’t there physically. Because us humans are quite dumb, and nowhere near as smart as AIs, to represent this disembodied AI, we are shown a glowing orb of some description, blue and yellow, sort of, so we know that she isn’t completely crazy and just talking to herself.

What doesn’t help, in terms of not seeming ‘crazy’, is that fucking hairstyle.

Honestly, what the fuck is going on with that hairstyle? Do you know how off-putting or disconcerting a hairstyle has to be for me to even notice it or comment on it? I’m a guy, a cis het guy who barely knows the difference between bangs and a fringe, or what a blowout is versus a silk press, so for me to think “why is her hair doing all that and changing from shot to shot?” it has to be something truly diabolical.

I was not put on this planet to make comments about people’s appearances etc in the movies they’re in, or whatever societal standards their appearance meets or doesn’t meet. I’m not here to make creepy comments about women’s looks either, so I am not coming from that place, I hope. It’s just whatever crazy perm and brush forward they have going on here, which I think is either meant to make her look unstable, or, perhaps was just whatever look JLo decided she wanted to have, distracted in a flick where there aren’t any other distractions, including whatever action might be happening.

Can you imagine the argument between any director and JLo about how her hair should look in a movie? She probably wouldn’t even do it in person: Her assistant’s assistant would probably say to the director “one more word out of you about JLo’s hair and you’re off this fucking movie."

A mech is like a robot that a human can sit in. JLo / Atlas spends most of the movie in a mech. The mech has the AI program that she decides, when it insists, to call Smith (Gregory James Cohan). Throughout the movie the AI Smith keeps goading her, grooming her, in order for her to ‘fully’ let the AI program integrate with her brain / consciousness. 100%. It needs to be complete in order for full functionality. So they argue and argue for two hours, until it happens, crucially before…something important or bad is about to happen. It’s meant to be, thematically, about Atlas forgiving herself for something that happened 28 years ago, coincidentally, so that she can move forward with her life.

Also, if she doesn’t let the hated AI technology into her mind, humanity is doomed. It seems like a bit of a contradictory message, but I’m okay with contradiction, and ambiguity.

This is a film impossible to take seriously from a scientific perspective. It’s not so-called ‘hard’ science fiction, as in, it’s not trying to be credible or based in complexity, like let’s say The Three Body Problem. And it surprisingly enough has nothing to say about the ‘threat’ of AI, one which enough people here in the real world, and not just Scarlet Johansson, having been ringing the warning bell over and over about for a while. In this flick there is ‘bad’ AI in the form of Harlan, which achieved self-awareness and decided to exterminate humanity, and ‘good’ AI in the form of Smith that also accesses people’s minds but doesn’t snap and decide to eradicate humanity.

What’s the difference between them? Who fucking knows? The film doesn’t. JLo doesn’t. Smith doesn’t. Smith is super caring and confident and careful, and an entirely ‘rounded’ type of personality capable of humour and sarcasm and all that stuff. But it’s still just a program, though a complex, ‘learning’ program at that, that shapes itself based on Atlas’s needs and personality.

But then if that’s possible, who even cares about Harlan? Let Harlan be. After all, the plot kicks off when our supposed human heroes find out where Harlan has been for 28 years. He’s been on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy.

Huh? Wuh? The fuck? Let me put this in some other kind of context for you: in sixty years of Star Trek, in all its iterations and all its version, with all the technology, magical and otherwise, they’ve dreamt up, they’ve never left the Milky Way galaxy, no matter how far flung the adventure or how far into the future they venture. In this flick, about a pesky AI wanting to end humans, they can fly to other galaxies whenever they feel like it. That seems like they’re burying the headline a bit. If Earth developed faster than light travel 28 years ago in this flick’s universe, who even cares if there’s a naughty AI – humanity could spread across the universe. Even his stupid plan to blow up the world wouldn’t mean anything, because people not only would be spread across the solar system, they’d be everywhere, colonising, bullying the locals, committing genocides, leaving Maccas wrappers and greasy cardboard everywhere.

Such an advance would fundamentally change reality for humans, let alone for our AI allies and enemies. Also, Harlan can presumably go anywhere in the universe, and all he does is camp out on a planet a galaxy away, and construct some stuff for some purpose and a bunch of other AIs in order to come back and finish the job? That’s an AI without much of an imagination.

He’s free to go anywhere, build anything, create a perfect society where AIs make the best memes and prank videos, create AI puppies that never die and bag up their own poop, invent new flavours that blow the mind and narrow the hips. Make perfect cocktails, engineer the perfect wings with which to fly, or build mountain-high statues of Megan Thee Stallion. Absolutely anything. Instead…

It’s almost like these supergenius synthetic life forms are actually, dare I say it, as dumb as the screenwriters that have brought them to life. This is not an entirely bad movie, but it’s charm lies not in what happens, which is SyFy channel-level plot, action etc. It’s a buddy movie where you have to be able to put up with JLo bickering with someone who’s not even there, when the real source of her anger is her haircut.

It’s all resolved neatly in the end, in a way that hopefully precludes sequels. I will say, because while it was fairly dumb, it was dumb within standard action movie parameters, it was still more coherent and more enjoyable to watch than the last two terrible Zack Snyder sci-fi movies made for Netflix.

That’s the new benchmark, the new standard against which all other crap will be compared.

It was also (marginally) better than that terrible action thriller she made last year, being The Mother, or as I prefer to think of it, since JLo keeps reminding us that she’s from both Jenny from the block and from the Bronx, Da Mudda. That was really, really stupid.

This is only stupid, yet at least she gets to spend most of her time with her favourite actor, being, not the great Mark Strong, who has a role as a general who is the only person who likes her, nor the great Sterling K Brown, wasted in a sham of a role as some colonel leading a team of rangers who die before we find out their stupid names.

No, she acts 90% of the time with her favourite actor, being JLo.

This is not a strong JLo performance, and we all know how great she’s been in some movies, including Out of Sight, and more recently Hustlers. But this? This is just collecting a paycheck, and there is nothing wrong with that when you’re hard up for cash.

5 Atlas shrugged and the whole damn movie fell off of her shoulders out of 10

--
“When we first met, you asked me if I like pie or cake. I don't care, I like both. And it's not that I hate AI, Smith. The truth is... I don't actually like anybody. People always disappoint. But not you. I like you.” – ugh, just, ugh - Atlas