Although many people are streaming it on Netflix, the new sci-fi adventure blockbuster Atlas is being torn apart by critics and audiences alike. Yet it sounded so promising on paper
Atlas is the name of the latest blockbuster starring Jennifer Lopez, which she shot for Netflix after The Mother. After its release on May 24, the sci-fi thriller quickly shot to number 1 in the German charts. No amount of bad reviews and audience ratings helped put people off watching it. Because the premise sounds pretty cool at first and Tom Hanks can tell you a thing or two about it
Place 1 on Netflix: Atlas earns ridicule despite cool premise
First of all, the premise of Atlas sounds pretty cool: Jennifer Lopez plays Atlas, a hater of artificial intelligence. However, when she crash lands on an alien planet while hunting an AI terrorist, she must team up with the AI of a large mecha in order to survive.
Many themes from tolerance to AI progress could have been combined with cool survival action here. Unfortunately, it turned into a completely uninspired CGI mishmash. In the first few days, Altas only received a 5.1 out of 10 on Moviepilot, a lousy 38 out of 100 points on the review aggregator Metacritic and a subterranean 17 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Paste Magazine sums up the ridicule Atlas is receiving well:
AI isn’t advanced enough to make a movie as crappy as Atlas, but until then, we can rely on Autocomplete.
Atlas leaves a lot of potential untapped and wastes the talent of Jennifer Lopez in particular, who makes a pretty cool action heroine in her stronger scenes. Atlas can’t keep up with its role model film in any respect
Also on Netflix: Atlas director was inspired by adventure masterpiece Cast Away
In an interview with GamesRadar, Atlas director Brad Peyton (San Andreas) revealed his big inspiration for the sci-fi blockbuster: the adventure masterpiece Cast Away. Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis is a grueling and touching survival story, brilliantly played by Tom Hanks. It is a modern-day Robinson Crusoe
(Tom Hanks and his friend Wilson, the volleyball, in Cast Away)
In Cast Away, Tom Hanks crashes an airplane on a desert island and has to survive there (almost) alone. Brad Peyton called Atlas a kind of “Cast Away in space”. In Cast Away, however, it is not an AI but a volleyball that the survivor talks to.
In fact, the friendship between Jennifer Lopez’s character Atlas and the mecha-AI Smith is the emotional core of the movie. Unfortunately, it is too overwhelmed by irrelevant action that it cannot develop strongly enough – in stark contrast to Tom Hanks and his volleyball companion Wilson.
