Over the long weekend, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos got a bit of a roasting for telling the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that Barbie and Oppenheimer, whose combined global box office was $2.4 billion, “would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” It’s easy to chuckle at Sarandos’ comments, as it was when Zack Snyder told Joe Rogan that his movie Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child of Fire pulled in more viewers than Greta Gerwig’s theatrical smash. But as Sarandos’ interview was being mocked around the internet, movie theaters were experiencing their worst Memorial Day weekend in decades, led, just barely, by an underwhelming start for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Little more than a week after the prequel to the beloved Mad Max: Fury Road debuted to awestruck reviews at Cannes, the film edged out Garfield to win the weekend with a four-day haul of $32 million at the domestic box office, which was a far less robust showing than industry experts had predicted, and well short of its predecessor’s $45 million opening. Meanwhile, according to Netflix’s figures, more than 28 million viewers worldwide celebrated the holiday by firing up Atlas, in which Jennifer Lopez is a scientist who defends Earth from annihilation by a terrorist artificial intelligence played by Simu Liu. Vive le cinéma!
Common sense, and possibly even Ted Sarandos, will tell you that people don’t watch Netflix’s content the way they watch a movie like Barbie in a theater—or even the way they’ll watch Barbie when it turns up on Netflix. Although Sarandos, in his Times interview, tries to change the subject to the difference between theatrical and home viewing—his 28-year-old son, he volunteers, has “watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone”—that’s not really the distinction in play. (People have, after all, been watching movies on their televisions for nearly as long as they’ve been watching television, period.) It’s not just the size of their audiences that made Barbie and Oppenheimer cultural touchstones, but the way going out to see them felt like being part of something, whether you were donning pink or mapping out the drive to the nearest IMAX screen. Netflix generates that participatory feeling with TV shows on a regular basis, from the unstoppable juggernaut of Bridgerton to the overnight success of Baby Reindeer. But looking over the list of their most-viewed movies of all time is like flipping through your high school yearbook, pausing over the photos of people you can almost remember, but not quite. God, this is gonna bug me, what the hell was his name … oh, right: Red Notice.
Atlas isn’t a bad movie, exactly. The director, Brad Peyton, is a competent hand who knows how to shoot coherent action—a hack, if you will—and Lopez commits to the bit as an overcaffeinated techie whose personal history is deeply entwined with the rogue A.I., Harlan. It doesn’t feel as oppressively puffed-up as an ersatz blockbuster like The Gray Man, and it’s even got a few ideas on its mind, mostly about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between humanity and its sentient tools. In the movie, Lopez’s Atlas Shepherd fights Harlan’s army of murderous A.I.s by joining forces with a friendly A.I. named Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan), which controls the mechanical battle suit that keeps her alive on the alien planet where Harlan has taken refuge. (Imagine Aliens if Sigourney Weaver spent most of the movie inside her power loader.) Having watched her mother, the inventor who created Harlan, die at his hands, Atlas is firmly opposed to letting A.I. adopt any but the most servile of roles. It’s OK for her voice assistant to make her coffee in the morning, but not for Smith to hook himself—in this world, A.I.s have preferred pronouns—directly into her brain, even though the “neural link” is the best way to pool their collective abilities. A genial and even-keeled type, Smith takes Atlas’ refusal to treat him as more than a glorified remote control in stride, but he eventually pushes back. I feel, I make decisions, I learn, he argues. How does that not make me alive? What’s the difference between DNA and a line of code, or the electricity that powers a computer and the impulses coursing through our neurons?
The question of what, if anything, distinguishes human consciousness from a meticulous simulation of it is at the core of Atlas, both in terms of its story and the experience of watching, or half-watching, it. Give the movie the amount of attention it’s designed to engage—let’s say 70 percent—and it plays just fine. But there’s something absent at its core, a spark of inspiration, a sense of purpose, even if that purpose is just to make something cool. It’s not uncommon for big-budget projects to lose sight of their own reason for being, but some of them will try to convince you otherwise, the way The Fall Guy built its publicity campaign around the crusade to add an Academy Award for stunts. But Atlas is counting on you not missing it, or that you might actually prefer your entertainment weightless and forgettable. J. Lo may be fighting for the very existence of the human race, but there’s nothing at stake between you and the screen.
I’m not saying that Atlas was created by artificial intelligence for the purpose of training viewers to accept the products of A.I. as a substitute for the fruits of human creativity. But if that were the goal, this is the kind of movie you, or it, would make, a slurry of recognizable faces and familiar tropes—a computer learns to swear!—that goes down easy and leaves no aftertaste. A.I. can’t make the inspired leaps a human mind can—it can paint like Picasso, but it can’t invent cubism—but it can nudge us toward a future where those leaps no longer seem quite so important, or even desirable. Just as the endless stream of Spotify has helped reshape our relationship to music, slowly changing it from something we actively listen to into something that’s simply always there, Netflix’s ideal seems to be to provide us with a piece of content that flows seamlessly into the next one, engaging our minds enough to keep us from switching apps but not so much we’ll be tempted to step away and think about what we’ve just seen.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Atlas arrived on Netflix the day before an interview in which its co-CEO touts artificial intelligence as an unavoidable part of our future, one where the only choice is between harnessing the power of A.I. or getting swept aside by it. But the algorithm couldn’t have planned it any better.