Well, I guess someone sold the Titanfall rights to Netflix, based on the official trailer for Jennifer Lopez’s newest movie for the streamer. I kid, I kid, but seriously — it’s hard to watch the trailer for Atlas, once you get past the cringe-worthy dialogue and all, and not feel like this is somebody’s idea for either an homage of or just an outright bad ripoff of the Titanfall video game. For crying out loud, Lopez even plays a character called Atlas, just like that mech in the game franchise.
Atlas, which is set for a May 24 release on the streaming giant, stars the multi-hyphenate as a government analyst who basically travels to a distant world to defeat a robot. Netflix describes Lopez’s character as a “brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence,” which, obviously, sounds like the role that she was born to play.
I know I probably sound overly negative here; it’s just that the trailer doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, assuming you’re a hardcore sci-fi fan (and if you are, by the way, Apple TV+ is really where you should looking for this kind of entertainment). And with Lopez being tapped as the leading lady for Atlas … I don’t want to go so far as to say this one is dead on arrival, especially considering her big Netflix movie last year (Mother, in which Lopez played an assassin protecting her daughter) did some bonkers numbers for the streamer viewership-wise.
From the new 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.”
Sorry Netflix, but no. I’m deeply suspicious of anyone and anything that presents AI as a net positive for humanity, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in fact, made a version of that same point in a speech today. Speaking at the Time100 Summit, Schmidt remarked: “Right now people have been trained since birth to believe what they hear and what they see, and it is a significant change for every human being to learn the majority of what they see may or may not be (true).”
That’s, of course, thanks to everything from synthetic voice creators to AI image and audio generators — and, for that matter, Netflix itself, which recently got caught altering photos in a new documentary.
