It’s bad enough whenever Jennifer Lopez is cast as the lead in a movie, but Jenny from the Block as a computer expert who hates AI? Come on, Netflix. 2024 was already one of the worst years for Netflix movies, thanks to forgettable releases like Damsel and Rebel Moon, and JLo’s newly released Atlas might actually end up being the worst of the entire year.
Starring a horribly miscast Lopez, Atlas is about a government analyst who travels to a distant world to defeat a robot. Netflix describes Lopez’s character as a “brilliant but misanthropic data analyst,” which, obviously, sounds like the role that she was just born to play.
From the movie’s official logline: “Atlas Shepherd, 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.”
Let me save you the trouble of watching this one: The movie looks cheaply made. The story is shallow. I found the writing to be pretty cringe, and the only reason it makes any sense that Lopez is in this movie at all is that she just wanted to get paid. Whatever the reason for its existence, the result is a movie with an abysmal 17% critics’ score and a very middling 54% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, plus a 5.7/10 on IMDb. Make of that what you will.
If it’s a great movie about AI that you want, I recommend avoiding Atlas like the plague and trying a Netflix movie like I Am Mother instead. In that one, a robot known as “Mother” (voiced by Rose Byrne) raises a human teenager after an extinction-level event has supposedly wiped out human life outside of the “mother” and daughter’s closed-off subterranean compound. Hilary Swank plays a human who eventually makes her way inside the compound, throwing the teenager’s whole understanding of her world into question.
You could also do a lot worse than Her, director Spike Jonze’s 2013 drama starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Available to stream on Max, it’s back in the news thanks to OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT using a voice that sounds suspiciously like Johansson’s — and incurring the actress’ wrath for it.
