Before one gets into the review, imagine this: Jennifer Lopez, sitting inside a partially made cockpit of a semi-giant robot, emoting, most of the time like an amateur actor, to nothing but air on a green-screen set. Can you imagine in your mind’s eyes how ridiculous the actress would look?

In most of Atlas, Lopez is stuck inside the aforementioned mech — a mechanised robot suit with an artificial intelligence operating system. Now, for most, any actress with acting skills, or directors with directorial skills capable of milking out worthwhile performances, the solo-character story would be a gift from the gods, since it allows the opportunity to really explore one’s adeptness of the craft (as much as the screenplay allows, that is). Not for Lopez, though.

Lopez has never been a great actress, but her work has been borderline okay. Here, with Brad Peyton (Rampage, San Andreas, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) at the helm — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s go-to guy for unappealing big-budget films — Lopez slips from adequate to amateur.

Lopez is the film’s title character Atlas, a woman whose mother pioneered artificial intelligence before it gained enough sentience to start a war with Earth. The main inciter of the war is Harlan Shepherd (Simu Liu), Atlas’s robot-brother of-sorts, who is now hiding in GR-39, a planet far-off in the Andromeda galaxy, where Lopez’s character, a non-combatant, leads Earth’s soldiers to legitimise a hokey plot point.

Atlas’s plot seems to be generated by an AI chatbot on one of its off-days

After a botched landing on the planet, where most of her team is shot out of the sky, Atlas reluctantly bonds with the semi-sentient programme (voiced by Gregory James Cohan), treks alien terrain and then takes out Harlan.

Atlas’s plot seems to be generated by an AI chatbot on one of its off-days … however, given that it is written by people, I guess one should blame humanity for this blunder. The screenplay, by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, is a predictable, unimaginative collection of scenes that includes a lot of groan-inducing humour about arcane things such as “paper” and “cell phones.” “Remember them?!?,” Atlas’s mother tells a holographic virtual gathering of bit-part actors who nod, smile and chuckle at this non-starter of a joke.

Since it would be a crime to not add gender diversity in the film, in a semi-serious moment, when Atlas first meets another mech called Zoe, the machine reprimands Atlas by giving “her” own pronouns (the mech likes to be called “She/Her”).

On a deeper level, the film is about inclusivity and humanity… even if that humanity comes from accepting the fact that AI can be good.

There is no denying the perfect timing of the story… as there is also no denying its perfect blundering of everything.

With an opening montage that harks of Starship Troopers (the comparison is not a compliment), average visual effects (they look fake nine out of ten times), and below-average performances — even from genuinely good actors such as Mark Strong, who plays a military general — the film, about the rise, revolt and acceptance of artificial intelligence, is a mess that may appeal only to teenagers (or adults) whose intellectual growth is stunted by video games.

Atlas streams on Netflix and, according to the ratings, the film is suitable for ages 13+ … or people mentally stuck in that age

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 2nd, 2024