Jennifer Lopez is an extremely charismatic woman. Love her or hate her, her enviable achievements and career success have to be acknowledged. I don’t know much about her singing career, but she has over 30 leads in her filmography. Those in romantic comedies sometimes blend into one other, but there are also a couple of valuable contributions to the film industry, and not just to the romantic genre. Her second collaboration with Netflix in the film Atlas (2024), just like The Mother (2023) before it, will not remain in the memory for long.
Lopez is the eponymous heroine Atlas and takes on a very stereotypical role of a misunderstood genius whose life is lived in service of hunting down a criminal from her past. On the day we meet her, she wakes up on a messy couch, drinks quadruple americanos and continues a game of chess from the night before. Although the evil robot/AI has announced that he will return with a plan for destruction after 28 years, when she sees hints of this on the news, Atlas is surprised.
A special unit that wants to be the UN of the future takes her to the headquarters where Atlas demands that all data be transmitted analogically and thus becomes the object of ridicule for the young soldiers digitally connected to their robot assistants. They will descend on the inhospitable planet where the evil Harlan is and stop him from destroying the world. It’s just that… Harlan is extremely smart, so he attacks them before they can attack him. This means that Atlas – the office analyst ends up in one of the robots to save her life and falls to the planet where she has to stop Harlan.
One would say: so far so good. And indeed, Lopez has enough charisma and talent to make Atlas likable. She stubbornly refuses to be neurally linked to her robot and does well in a situation where she has to become a hero. It’s just that… She spends most of her time walking to Harlan’s headquarters, which she must destroy, and the obstacles and fights she overcomes on the way are predictable as if they were combined together by artificial intelligence of a previous generation.
The battle scenes and the planet itself look like they were taken from some gloomy, simple video game, and the concern for the main character never turns into excitement. Villains are a threat that does not particularly worry us, and there is one scene of nature on the planet that looks cute for a moment and is quickly forgotten.
The point of the movie is actually for Atlas to form a bond with her robot who is a second generation artificial intelligence and will not become evil like Harlan. Even Harlan himself turns out not to be so evil. He wants to save humanity from themselves, but he’s made a bit of a miscalculation. The story feels particularly flat because the film does not give enough time or space to its actors to convey any emotional weight. Probably in fear that if the viewer is given a moment of peace, all the inconsistencies of the story will come to light. Even the introduced elements such as the insistence on Atlas’s quadruple coffee and analogically printed information about the mission are not included in the resolution. Like everything else in the film, they are there, just to be there.
Like many Netflix productions, this film will end up forgotten. If it was worse maybe it would have fared better. At least then it would induce some feeling. Overall, this isn’t a bad movie, nor is it particularly boring. But it doesn’t have sufficiently developed characters or a sufficiently developed story to stand out in any way. It has JLo, which may encourage many to watch it, but it won’t stimulate interest in what is more of a sketch than a substantial story.
RANKED:
