Atlas (2024) Movie Review: Jennifer Lopez wails her way through AI and mommy issues in rudimentary made-for-streaming trash 

There are two sides to Jeniffer Lopez and the actors’ recent revival on streaming. I’m sure she signed one of those 5 movie deals with both Prime Video and Netflix after offering a one-off great performance in the 2018 film ‘Hustlers.’ I mean, it hasn’t been more than a couple of months since we last saw her presenting us with an elaborate stunt of her love story in the artsy emptiness of ‘This is me..Now.’ And now, we have her again, switching gears to act smart in Netflix’s latest depository of trash in ‘Atlas’ – a film so drab and uneventful that it does the great disservice of even making seasoned actors like Mark Strong and Sterling K. Brown look bad.  

JLo plays Atlas Shepard, a really smart analyst who has been studying the ways of a rouge AI terrorist named Harlan (Simu Liu) after he caused a genocide on earth some 28 years ago and has since been in hiding. Please notice that director Brad Peyton wants you to remember that she is smart, and the only way he thinks that would get through to us is by showing us that she plays chess when she wakes up and has won against a computer numerous times. When one of Harlan’s soldiers is found in a sleeper cell on Earth, Agent Shepard is summoned to take a trip along with Colonel Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown) and his suited-up neural-linked AI counterparts to a planet far, far away. Their mission? Bring back Harlan alive, in spite of Shepard’s insistence that he is a threat that they can’t understand. 

In the name of character development, Peyton offers Agent Shepard some sort of semblance of a personality. She is famously a recluse who hates human and AI interaction; she loves her coffee and overdoses on Americano any chance she gets and hates Harlan with a heartbeat. There are some things in her past that make her distrustful of each and everyone, and thus, she, according to the movie itself, is not someone who should be sent on such a mission. However, when their mission goes southways, she is forced to neural link with an AI program named Smith (Gregory James Cohan) and fight her way through severe threats to her life and the lives of millions back home.

Now, this is essentially a film that would join the bandwagon of movies about Artificial intelligence that don’t understand an iota of what it stands for. It is neither interested in the good nor the bad that the advent of AI can do to us, and frankly, it doesn’t even care to do so. Essentially, this is a movie that wants to use AI as a narrative tool to tell a story about JLo being a badass. However, it even fails to do that because all she does is sit inside a designed video game console and act in front of a green screen. After last year’s ‘The Mother.’ Netflix has bankrolled yet another exasperating, incompetent, and badly acted sci-fi film. It is one of the worst things Lopez has done thus far, and this is coming from someone who has seen her in ‘Gigli.’

From horrendous character design to caricaturish writing, the film’s entire personality can be summed up as a ‘Jlo cries in CGI’ meme, and even that would be smarter than whatever this is. 

Read More: Everything Coming to Netflix in June 2024

Atlas (2024) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia
Atlas (2024) Movie Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Gregory James Cohan, Mark Strong
Atlas (2024) Movie Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure | Runtime: 1h 58 Mins

Where to watch Atlas