If you haven’t had a chance to sit down and watch the latest Sci-Fi hit on Netflix titled “Atlas” then you are in for a good time. The movie is by no means perfect but is a great watch where you can just turn off the outside world for a couple of hours and enjoy some classic sci-fi with a fairly typical and obvious message about the dangers of A.I.
Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.
J-Lo is really solid as Atlas playing a character with a traumatic past and although she’s not known for her Sci-Fi movies, she should be, her previous outings in films like “The Cell” in 2000 has shown that she excels in the environment.
The A.I renegade is played by the talented Simu Liu who we have previously seen as the hero of Shang-Chi and as a Ken in Barbie. This is a different role for him, and he takes to it well.
The cast also includes the brilliant Sterling K Brown as Colonel Elias Banks and Gregory James Cohan as ‘Smith’ while there is a brief appearance from Mark Strong and it’s always good to see him in any film.
The Director Brad Peyton has said that the video game Titanfall was an inspiration for the film and giant robot mechs are certainly in line with that. Infact you could almost slap a “Titanfall: Atlas” on the title and it would make perfect sense. He had worked on a video game adaptation previously starring The Rock called “Rampage”.
Atlas is streaming now on Netflix and is a solid 7 out of 10. It’s really great to see some original content with new IP and given that its currently sitting in the number one spot in Australia on the service I’d expect there would be talk of a sequel in the near future.
