Atlas movie review: Utterly irredeemable Jennifer Lopez action film marks a new low for Netflix tent-poles

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Jennifer Lopez as Atlas Shepherd. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix ©2024.

Atlas is directed by Brad Peyton, who, after serving a sentence at the Dwayne Johnson penitentiary for stand-ins, appears to have washed up on the shores of streaming, seeking immediate asylum from the Hollywood studio system he once served. The result is an overproduced and underwritten mess that isn’t as technically accomplished as his previous movies — Peyton remains best known for San Andreas and Rampage — but more egregiously, is also completely lacking in their self-aware silliness. The plot involves Atlas, a genius who doesn’t play by the rules (unless she’s playing chess), being sent on a mission to a distant planet, essentially as a bounty hunter tasked with brining Harlan in alive. After her ship crash-lands and her entire platoon is either killed or captured, Atlas discovers that in order to defeat the evil AI, she must first learn to trust it.

She hops inside a mech suit straight out of Alien 2, does her best impression of Sigourney Weaver, and… remains immobile for large chunks of the supposedly action-packed narrative. Atlas is understandably static while she’s in the clunky suit, but Peyton and his screenwriters — Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite — make the odd choice to chain her to a table just as the movie is about to step into its final act. Which means that there is a solid chunk in which Lopez is lying still on a flat surface, spouting exposition about Atlas’ past, while being expected to deliver a convincingly dramatic performance. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of asking Virat Kohli to hit sixes with one arm tied behind his back.

But this isn’t the kind of movie you’re supposed to take seriously. It’s the kind of movie where people tend to say things like, “My turn,” after braving a barrage of bullets, and, “He’s targeting my fusion reactor,” while running for cover. Speaking of which, Lopez is pretty isolated for most of the movie, and placed in the difficult position of acting either by herself, or with the disembodied voice of an AI assistant that Atlas gradually forces herself to rely on. These are some of the most lifeless portions of the film, with the script performing cartwheels in its foolhardy attempts to create buddy-movie banter between the two characters.

Lopez probably never set foot outside the studio. Nor does she appear to have broken a sweat. The only crew members who perhaps required electrolytes and caffeine are the underpaid and overworked visual effects artists, nearly all of whom will be unjustly blamed for having had a hand in what is easily the ugliest-looking movie of the year so far. To call Atlas an eyesore would be accurate, but it would also unfortunately imply a misty-eyed longing for the days of The Gray Man and Red Notice.

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Jennifer Lopez as Atlas Shepherd. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024.

Most of it, without exaggeration, could have been pre-visualised on a computer before a single second of live-action footage was captured on camera. There’s something distinctly soulless about this kind of filmmaking. Artificial intelligence doesn’t merely serve as the villain of Atlas; given the proper prompt, a well-engineered system could have believably created it. Nobody seems to have spotted the irony.

Atlas
Director – Brad Peyton
Cast – Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Sterling K Brown, Mark Strong, Gregory James Cohan
Rating – 1/5