Why do movies keep getting made with the message that AI is misunderstood and that the ultimate goal is for humans and AI to get along? That was the argument in last year’s The Creator, which took the counterintuitive line that AI robots are good, and Americans of the future are the villains for demonizing AI tech. (Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, a year ago, at least made AI the unambiguous villain—and is said to have influenced President Biden’s AI policy.)
Now there’s Atlas, the latest in a Netflix subgenre that’s one of my least favorite today, even beyond the AI part. It combines a big star, what appears to be a high budget, elaborate action set pieces, and a visual style that makes it look like crud. Atlas is of a piece with Red Notice, The Gray Man, Heart of Stone, and other movies of recent years that you probably haven’t thought of since.
Jennifer Lopez previously starred in The Mother, a Netflix spy thriller that arrived around this time last year and was an instantly forgettable part of the above-mentioned coterie of movies (she produced both films as well). To her credit, following that weirdo Amazon Prime documentary/album commercial This is Me, Now, Atlas isn’t her most ill-conceived streaming project this year.
Atlas—named not for any mythological reason but rather because it’s Lopez’s character’s first name—is an AI story set in the far future and is concerned with ideas better previously articulated in the work of Asimov, not to mention the Terminator movies. The director is Brad Peyton, who has spent the last decade-plus as an in-house director for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (he did San Andreas, Journey 2, and Rampage).
Lopez plays Atlas, an analyst who harbors a lifelong distrust of artificial intelligence for silly reasons that will become apparent as the film continues (it’s a story of human/robot sibling rivalry that I liked a lot more when Spielberg, adapting Philip K. Dick, did it in AI: Artificial Intelligence).
A rogue “AI terrorist,” played in humanized form by Simu Liu, has gotten loose, and it's up to Atlas to stop it in a mission involving a walking robot that’s also AI-powered (with the voice of Gregory James Cohan).
The Creator, at least, looked cool. Ever effect shot of a robot flying through space looks exactly like every other, and characters keep disappearing into the darkness. I never thought I’d miss the visual coherence of the third acts of MCU movies. Atlas also wastes talented performers like Mark Strong and Sterling K. Brown. The sound isn’t great; at one point, a character says, “He gave me purpose,” but it sounds like he’s saying, “He gave me poppers.”
Meanwhile, the film’s idea of a joke is when a robot says, “My pronouns are she and her, not it.” In the unlikely event anyone watches this movie in the future, they’ll know exactly when it was made. But even worse is what the movie has to say. Atlas’ lesson is that Lopez’s character needs to get over her fears or prejudices about AI and come to terms with how there’s good and evil in AI, just like with humanity. Why?
I’m not a Marxist, but if I were, I might get the impression that Hollywood was employing a top-down effort to soften us up for the sort of AI-generated scripts and, eventually, acting performances that are already in the works and the crushing of the acting and trade unions that will accompany that.