Atlas Smith And J-Lo

Atlas director Brad Peyton on his intergalactic AI actioner

- JAC SHEPHERD

BRAD PEYTON IS NO STRANGER to pushing the boundaries of reality. Consider his three films with Dwayne Johnson: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, San Andreas and Rampage – each one a bombastic slice of pulpy cinema. Now Peyton returns with Atlas, the story of a data analyst (Jennifer Lopez) stranded on a dangerous planet after pursuing Harlan (Simu Liu), a villainous artificial intelligence terrorist.

“My taste is always to do as much as I can,” the filmmaker tells Red Alert. “I want to push everything as much as possible.”

We’re discussing how he designed the colourful planet that Lopez’s eponymous character Atlas Shepherd cannot escape, and how he wanted to avoid creating another Tatooine. “When I first came to Netflix and pitched this idea, they were like, ‘Well, what’s the overall terrain of the planet?’ I was like, it’s everything. We’re going to do everything.”

The planet became a colourful, characterful landscape featuring forest, snow and desert climates, each serving up different traps for Atlas to conquer while driving her newly acquired mech suit. The film ends up acting as an intergalactic riff on Tom Hanks’s Cast Away, except that rather than having a volleyball to keep her company, Atlas’s high-tech suit comes fitted with an AI named Smith. Atlas, however, has a deep distrust of AI, especially as her mission – and the reason she’s many moons away from Earth – is to hunt down a different AI hellbent on destroying mankind.