Atlas Review: Jennifer Lopez stars in a sci-fi action thriller

In Atlas, Jennifer Lopez portrays a counterterrorism expert who lives for her profession – you know the sort. Atlas Shepherd is the type of woman who alienates her coworkers with her curt attitude and then wows them with her competence, who falls asleep on the couch in front of her chessboard at night, and who keeps her hair up in a businesslike twist so that it may come crashing down later. When a rare expedition into the field goes awry, she winds herself left in difficult territory in the care of Smith, a huge military type entrusted with guarding her, and with whom she immediately begins squabbling over how best to go home. In the romantic comedy version of this narrative, Smith might be portrayed by a John Cena or a Channing Tatum, all muscular and expert weaponry knowledge disguising a sensitive center. The Brad Peyton–directed Atlas is, however, a science fiction movie, and Smith is a robot. Most precisely, he’s a mecha suit, driven by a synthetic intelligence spoken by Gregory James Cohan, into whose pilot seat the AI-averse Atlas is forced moments before she crash lands on a strange planet.

Then then, if Her is aspirational to the point of corporations being ready to risk legal ramifications to conjure it, then there’s no reason this new movie can’t be seen at as a rom-com. Atlas has that weird ersatz aspect of many a Netflix original movie, where it seems like the extended version of a 30 Rock joke rather than anything anybody should really be able to watch, although its cross-genre parallels do appear purposeful. When attempting to enable Smith to get to know her better, for instance, she admits to appreciating the ocean, three sugars in her coffee, and “small, quiet gestures of affection.” Atlas is meant to be as bright as she is guarded, but she’s written just like one of those tightly wound ‘00s-era heroines who’s necessary to be put through pratfalls and trimmed down to size before she’s judged suitable for love. When she comes to inside Smith after a violent arrival, she hurriedly skips the set-up and fumbles her way into a French language choice before ending up with a default voice whose advice she swiftly dismisses.

Three decades ago, a robot called Harlan (a blue contact lensed Simu Liu), turned rogue and waged war on mankind before escaping with his companions to space. Atlas is obsessed with capturing him, for reasons that are later revealed to be extremely personal. But in order to access all her mech’s skills, she has to sync her mind to Smith, a meld they struggle to establish, and not because of performance concerns on his side. Freighted with pain dating back to her childhood, she’s too emotionally constipated to open up enough to clinch the deal.

Following Lopez’s acting career is an exercise in frustration. In Out of Sight and Hustlers, she’s incandescent with charm – a real star, bigger than life, twice as gorgeous, and endlessly captivating. But most of the parts she’s ended herself in waste those strengths, if they exhibit them at all. She’s fallen from being a rom-com queen to heading a procedural to fumbling with a turn toward action, but in films that have seemed more dinky and downmarket for what she’s proved capable of. Atlas — like her previous Netflix movie The Mother, like Shotgun Wedding and Marry Me — is a film she produced as well as performed in, showing that even when she’s more actively engaged in selecting out films for herself, she’s also not completely sure what she’s meant to be doing on screen. She wavers between playing her character with some degree of psychological realism, her lip quivering in despair as she tries in vain to contact her colleagues, and going full screwball in moments like the one in which she discovers she broke her leg, howling “I really need you to shut up right now!” at Smith. Lopez is unable to determine if Atlas is a serious entry in the action canon or a B-movie.

Atlas doesn’t really end up being either one, being both far from serious and yet missing any of the unsavory delights one would think to find in a B-movie. Atlas has the sleek, textureless shine of a sequence from a computer game we never get to play, a connection on which the film doubles down when Atlas scrolls through Smith’s weapon’s contents. Lopez, who spends half the movie as a face surrounded by technology, seems lost in a sea of computer images, something that’s even more true of her costars Liu and Sterling K. Brown, who portrays mission leader Colonel Elias Banks. When, sometime not so long from now, Netflix starts giving us individualized AI-generated sludge material based on each of our watching habits, it probably won’t look all that different from Atlas, which scarcely looks like it was produced by humans anyhow. But the aim of Atlas isn’t to make its performers appear huge — it’s to remind us that AI is our friend, even when it periodically attempts to eliminate us, and that we should get over ourselves and our tetchy concerns.