Atlas Movie Review Rating:
Star Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown, Mark Strong and Simu Liu.
Director: Brad Peyton
What’s Good: Some of the action is fun in a cheesy way, and the movie doesn’t know when to hold on to its unhinged energy.
What’s Bad: The acting is awful across the board, and great actors like Sterling K. Brown and Mark Strong are wasted.
Loo Break: You could take a break at any point, and you wouldn’t be missing much, as the film’s twist is just too predictable and there are no action or character moments worth waiting for.
Watch or Not?: This film is an overall pass. There are better offerings out there, especially with Furiosa and Dune still playing in theaters.
Language: English (with subtitles).
Available On: Netflix
Runtime: 118 Minutes.
User Rating:
Hollywood is going through changes, and it seems like the arrival of AI as a tool to make some of the most mundane and tedious tasks a thing of the past is being, and with good reason, actually be used just to replace every single writer, and beyond that even the actors that we see acting in our entertainment. Atlas, is a new sci-fi film dealing with the dangers of AI and starring Jennifer Lopez, but for a movie that talks about what it means to have a soul, it has none.
Atlas Movie Review: Script Analysis
During the previous Hollywood strike, one of the most contentious points was the use of AI to write scripts. Writers wanted to make sure that their positions wouldn’t be put at risk as it would mean the loss of many writing jobs in the industry, and Hollywood basically just wanted to use AI to make the writing process faster and cheaper, with more content for less investment. However, when movies like Atlas come out, it is very hard to see the difference between something made by AI and something that is not.
AI writing is supposedly terrible, at least for now. Still, if Atlas was written by a human, in this case, credited screenwriters Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite, then they have good reason to fear they could be replaced by AI when their script is just so wrong. The script is just devoid of any sort of nuance, compelling characterization and even funny jokes, even if it attempts to give you one every five minutes. Writing is very hard, creating a fictional universe that feels real and worth exploring is not an easy task, and sadly Atlas fails to do so.
Nothing is more important in a fantasy or science fiction film than using the story to set up the world the characters live in. Still, Atlas offers almost zero attempts at world-building, and it feels devoid of any attempt to create something memorable. With efforts like this, it should be worth watching something made by AI and see if there is any difference. If writers want to ensure they are never replaced, they must step up their game, as AI could easily write stuff like this.
Because the plot twist is just so predictable, the story doesn’t get the chance to create any tension around its climax, and when it happens, it just happens. There is also an attempt at making a good relationship between a human and an AI that feels very much inspired by Titanfall 2’ storyline. Still, where the game manages to create a compelling AI, that character feels like a voice interface and nothing more. If an eight-year-old video game can do better than you when writing about this stuff, you have a problem.
Atlas Movie Review: Star Performance
Atlas is a very strange case because it is filled with A-listers and yet, their performances feel lacking quite a bit. We have seen many of these actors deliver some amazing performances; just having Mark Strong and Sterling K. Brown around should be enough to make sure you will have good performances in your movie, but it seems to have a director that understands acting is also quite important and Atlas fails at that, making both actors feel lost in this unoriginal sci-fi universe.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Lopez tries her best to be the movie’s anchor, but it is just not possible. The material surrounding her character is quite weak, which hurts her performance. She has never been an amazing actress, but she is better than this, for sure. However, it is Simu Liu who comes off as the worst offender of bad acting in the film, his villain, Harlan, is anything but intimidating, and it is hard to take him seriously even when the world is burning outside.
Atlas Movie Review: Direction, Music
Brad Peyton is not one of the most exciting filmmakers in Hollywood, but he has managed to direct some fun popcorn movies in his career; San Andreas and Rampage were fun Dwayne Johnson vehicles, so we understand he can come up with fun stuff, but this movie is not fun at all even when it tries so hard to be, the visual effects are decent for a movie that is clearly very low on the budget scale, and so we might have to give him a pass on that regard when thing don’t look that good, but everywhere else it seems like Peyton couldn’t really achieve any sort of quality control for whatever reason, maybe the schedule was too tight and there wasn’t enough money to actually make something good is post-production, but this is certainly one stumble in his career, let’s hope he can recover from this.
Composer Andrew Lockington might be the one who comes off the best during the film, as his score is potent and feels you with a sense of grandeur, but because the performances and the visuals are not the best, they hold the score down with them, and it never manages to reach its true potential.
Atlas Movie Review: The Last Word
Atlas feels exactly what you see in your mind when you think of “A Netflix Movie”, it looks cheap and the ideas are just too undercooked to take them seriously. The film also feels like it arrived quite late into the AI discourse and has nothing new to say about it, which is a shame because in the way that the technology is progressing, there could be some fantastic commentary regarding its current state, but you need good world-building for that to happen, just like Her did with the subject 10 years ago.
Atlas Trailer
Atlas released on May 24, 2024.