My enjoyment of Brad Peyton’s Atlas reached its peak when the power went out two times within a span of five minutes. Of course, I don’t believe in things like signs or omens but I cannot help but to think that it was a divine signal advising me to cease watching the movie because it was making me dumber. With the number of problems I faced at the start of the movie while hoping my Wi-Fi would reconnect so I could continue watching the film, in the actual sense, it dragged on for way past what I was expecting and I was quick to roll over and sleep when the credits were rolling.
The next day, I was astonished to find that I did not recall a single still from the film and it was as though the picture was there to be enjoyed only in a haze. The only way to rationalize this illogical disaster of a movie, which has to be the most tedious picture Peyton has ever directed, is to imagine how the condescending action space science fiction plot was shoehorned into the production. This action space science fiction that Menahem Golan would’ve pushed forward to Cannes Film Festival as he did many projects which he would make up in his head but never filmed.
Peyton has consistently proved in the past that he is able to direct good action as seen in the films San Andreas and Rampage and this only means that he will do it. There is a specific scene in the very first moments that exhibits Peyton’s skills, where bullets and bombs are in action and it is played out with a first person perspective.
That sequence made me think perhaps this movie would not be that bad after all, but it gets thwarted almost at once, however, by poorly executed VFX that feels flat and lacks any real sense of scale, as we first meet our heroine, Jennifer Lopez, a reclusive scientist who has a horror of AI, as her mother was killed by Harlan, an AI developed as a sociopathic soldier, when she was a child.
Colonel Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown) is in the process of forming a squad to locate Harlan, and Atlas joins the operation as all the members of the team are equipped with AI suits, Smith, voiced by Gregory James Cohen, which Eastern does not want to work with or even come into close proximity of.
And precisely as one would expect, Harlan ambushes the team and Atlas has no option but to get onto a Smith to survive. The rest of the movie can be described as a pathetic clone of a teenage dying boy’s fantasy from After Earth, in which the main character is ‘Smith’ who guides Atlas to Harlan’s headquarters so that together they can blow it up.
Well, After Earth was bad in all accounts, but at least Shyamalan is open to putting avantgarde concepts on screen even if they don’t really pan out, which is in stark contrast to Peyton who wants to discuss AI without discussing AI. To clarify: Artificial Intelligence is the buzz word these days, and the fact that this technology has been introduced to the masses is quite dangerous not just for our jobs but the whole of humanity.
This is always appropriate to look into in a film as the impact grows and the advancements of AI adopt far more dystopian aspects. AI is present even in the opening scenes of the film, but impact of such technology is never completely explored, except for knowing how much hatred Atlas has for it while everyone else is in awe about it. Peyton does not take this conflict any further: Breach’s Atlas’ hatred for the technology, or the AI epidemic that the audience is in the first place.
It is a remarkable concept within itself and one gets curious as to why some would have faith in a technology that currently none understands (this includes some of AI’s most supportive advocates, such as Elon Musk and Joshua Bagnio who have called for a halt in new AI experimentation, and others in the form of Yann Lacuna who seems to have fully embraced it as well).
The only ‘real’ statement that we receive with the expansion of AI is that some machines are feminine by the way they listed their pronouns “she/her” and not “it”, and AI is literally omnipresent. Atlas considers AI to be an evil creation. Others believe AI is beneficial. She, in the end, will turn out to be anti AI except Smith as they are likely to learn how to (metaphorically and literally as well) interact inside a badly made space environment like Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, with poor visual effects and no proper shot composition whatsoever.
There is not a single frame of any significance in Atlas, the film would never get rid of its “bad film” claims and never in its history would there be a film that flimsy constructed characters with slips in acting and floating script are planned in a SNL impersonation and watch you feel like you’re in T he Hudsucker Proxy and that is probably the only appropriate way to write it.
It’s well and truly painful to pretend Liu’s clumsy, over the top acting as Harlan a villain whose goals can be summed up as “destroy the world and kill Atlas” is quite far off something which is psychologically engaging, which the greatest AI villains have always been worst case scenario, he does fight some people during the dragon ball z fight scene at the end of the movie but that doesn’t help him become a believable antagonist as Lopez does nothing either as he simply sits through a strange looking green screen with some action scenes made by the VFX team.
There is no drama anywhere and anything that regards an event, action or movement is completely absent of energy. We hardly know who these people are so that we can be able to connect with the protagonists which many would argue are the center of gravity in a good sci-fi film. If I have to waste TWO HOURS of my day where a single character appears for most of that time, normally I at least expect the main character to be well fleshed out, or if not then as relatable as one can get. I mean, sure, this isn’t a shock for us given Lopez’s astounding performance in Hustlers that has been followed by many disappointing movies including the international release of this movie.
Unfortunately, none of the performances are particularly captivating, the special effects are utterly unrealistic, the action adheres to the unfortunate trend in modern blockbusters of the computer-generated imagery (CGI) blob, and Peyton never goes into some of the ideas that may have made this science fiction work somewhat more exciting, which would be exploring the place of Artificial Intelligence in our lives today, as well how receptive we can be to its arrival, not in an alarming way but an unnerving way.
AI is not entirely evil using otter.ai to convert conversations into written form (for instance, now during this claustrophobic Emmy FYC season) is something I find very pleasant, but there is a downside to everything. This moral ambiguity appears to be one of the main themes in Atlas, but Peyton is not a man who possesses the determination to pursue him. Rather, he opts to bombard the viewer with incomprehensible graphics that are dull to the eye and make one want to drift off into slumber, only to wake up later and forget everything about them. I will simply feel the enjoyment of a particular moment that I had during the film. There were two times, rather two angels, who told me to stop watching the movie before it was too late and I completely switched off for two excruciatingly boring hours.
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