Director – Brad Peyton, Screenplay – Aron Eli Coleite & Leo Sardarian, Producers – Greg Berlanti, Jeff Fierson, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Joby Harold, Jennifer Lopez, Benny Medina, Brad Peyton, Sarah Schechter & Tory Tunnell, Photography – John Schwartzman, Music – Andrew Lockington, Visual Effects Supervisor – Lindy De Quattro, Visual Effects – Cantina Creative (Supervisor – Aaron Eaton), MPC (Supervisor – Luc-Ewen Martin Fenouillet), Scanline VFX (Supervisors – Bryan Hirota & Derek T. Spears) & Territory Studio (Supervisor – Marti Romances), Visual Effects & Animation – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Victor Schutz IV, Animation Supervisor – Mathew Cowie), Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Makeup Effects – Autonomous F/X, Inc. (Designer – Jason Collins), Production Design – Barry Chusid. Production Company – ASAP Entertainment/Safehouse Pictures/Nuyorican Productions/Berlanti-Schechter.
Cast
Jennifer Lopez (Atlas Shepherd), Simi Liu (Harlan Shepherd), Sterling K. Brown (Colonel Elias Banks), Gregory James Cohan (Voice of Smith), Abraham Popoola (Casca Decius/Dix), Mark Strong (General Jake Boothe), Lana Parrilla (Val Shepherd), Briella Guiza (Young Atlas Shepherd)
Plot
The machines have rebelled against humanity. The android Harlan, developed by Val Shepherd of Shepherd Robotics, was first to gain independence whereupon it sent commands to all other androids to defy their programming. A war between the machines and humanity, united under the banner of The International Coalition of Nations, ensued. Harlan was forced to flee off world. 28 years later, Casca Dix, one of Harlan’s lieutenants, is captured by ICN. Val Shepherd’s now adult daughter Atlas, who works as a counterterrorism analyst, is brought in to interrogate Casca’s severed head. From it, she succeeds in finding the whereabouts of Harlan on the planet GR-39 in the Andromeda Galaxy. Atlas insists on joining the ICN expedition to GR-39 to hunt Harlan. The expedition departs but finds the machines waiting as they arrive. Their ship is shot down in orbit. Atlas is one of the only survivors in one of the ARC Nine mecha suits. She sets out to find and eliminate Harlan but doing so means having to use the neural link to integrate her mind with the ARC’s A.I. Smith, something she refuses to do due to her past.
Brad Peyton is a director whose name that I have regularly written about on this site. Peyton started out in family-friendly films, making his feature-length directorial debut with Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010), followed by the inane Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012). Peyton then moved onto the disaster movie spectacular San Andreas (2015), the videogame adaptation Rampage (2018) and the Blumhouse horror film Incarnate (2016), while he has also produced the vampire comedy Suck (2009) and the post-apocalyptic tv series Daybreak (2019). Co-writer Aron Eli Coleite is a longtime tv writer, having created Daybreak along with Locke & Key (2022) and The Spiderwick Chronicles (2024).
I must confess I didn’t have much in the way of high hopes for Atlas before sitting down to watch. The premise sounded fairly outlandish – J. Lo in a film about the machine revolution. Without wanting to look too closely at the details (I always prefer to go into a film blind knowing nothing about it), it left me with two head-scratching possibilities – the idea of a film about J. Lo kicking killer robot butt or else even the idea of J. Lo herself playing an Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque terminator bot.
Jennifer Lopez’s acting career became a joke after the bomb of Gigli (2003). She has made sporadic work since, but usually works that have been ridiculed like The Boy Next Door (2005), while a look through her credits has shown she has kept returning to the standard fallback of the romcom with the likes of Shall We Dance? (2004), The Back-Up Plan (2010), Second Act (2018), Marry Me (2022) and Shotgun Wedding (2022). She has also appeared in her share of dramatic works too with the likes of An Unfinished Life (2005), Bordertown (2007), Hustlers (2019), The Mother (2023), Unstoppable (2024) and as the lead in the cop show Shades of Blue (2016-8), none of which seemed to have set the world alight.
Jennifer Lopez as Atlas Shepherd in the ARC Smith
Nothing about Jennifer Lopez’s acting career, nor Brad Peyton’s previous output, led me to have high expectations of Atlas as being anything other than a standard killer android film – I was thinking we would get something down around the level of Eve of Destruction (1991). So the great surprise ended up being how much Atlas completely defied any expectations that one has of it and is actually quite a good film.
I began to connect with Atlas from the scene about ten minutes in where Jennifer Lopez goes in to interrogate Abraham Popoola who exists only as a severed android head. In between torturing him with a magnetised chess piece and banter that is used to trick him into revealing the whereabouts of Harlan, it is a scene that is written as smart SF. Throughout what we end up with is a script that works as really strong SF, dealing variously with Artificial Intelligence
themes, the problems of neural jacks and the transhumanism debate, while also working extremely well as a character arc where we have Jennifer Lopez as a sceptic who is forced to warm to the idea of integrating with a machine if she is to defeat the Big Bad of the show. The relationship between J. Lo and the ARC A.I. Smith is written with some snappy dialogue.
The arrival on planet GR-39 comes with some exhilarating effects action as Jennifer Lopez is trying to adjust to the ARC at the same time as the rest of the ARCs and the ship are massacred in an ambush and she is left falling from orbit amid raining debris and others mecha fighting. The ARC itself is an awe-inspiringly cool Mecha – where the design team have really gone to work and come up with a standout design.
Some of the best of these effects scenes come during the climactic scenes. The scene where Jennifer Lopez manages to break out of captivity in the ARC, which emerges with four arms each containing a weapon and moves through the complex eliminating the androids en masse, is quite a triumphal one. This is followed by a fantastic showdown with Simi Liu in the midst of a burning plain filled with lava pools as he proceeds to slice apart the ARC with a glowing lightsabre sword.
