An Atlas Who Can't Carry

J.Lo's AI-friendly flick flattens its own world.

- Alison Willmore

ATLAS DIRECTED BY BRAD PEYTON. NETFLIX. PG-13.

IN ATLAS, Jennifer Lopez plays a counterterrorism analyst who lives for her work-you know the type. Atlas Shepherd is the kind of woman who alienates her colleagues with her terse attitude and then wows them with her competence, who falls asleep on the sofa in front of her chessboard at night, and who wears her hair up in a businesslike twist so that it can come tumbling down later. When a rare trip into the field goes wrong, she ends up stranded in hostile terrain in the care of Smith, a military sort tasked with protecting her, with whom she immediately starts bickering about how best to get home. In the romantic-comedy version of this story, Smith would be played by a John Cena or a Channing Tatum, all muscles and advanced weapons knowledge hiding a sensitive core. The Brad Peyton-directed Atlas is, however, a science-fiction movie, and Smith is a robot. More specifically, he's a hulking metal mech suit stocked with artillery, powered by a synthetic consciousness voiced by Gregory James Cohan, into whose pilot seat the AI-averse Atlas is shoved right before she crash-lands on an alien planet.