
In a rather dystopian future, an A.I. soldier has come to the conclusion that the only way to treat war is to kill all human beings.
I sat at home and watched Atlas(2024), the one directed by Brad Peyton, and for the second time in five minutes, the lights went out. I don’t really believe in god or these sorts of things, but surely this must be some sort of a sign from above that I should stop watching before I get any more stupider. There were quite a number of annoying moments right during the beginning of the film where I was waiting to see if my WiFi would cooperate before I resumed the movie, I finished watching it late and went straight to bed as soon as the credits were over.
The next day I opened my eyes remembering not a single scene out of Atlas. It’s as if the movie never existed, but I could have only dreamt about it. Of course that has to be the only such reason to comment about Peyton’s most boring film to date There is just no other reason or way to explain such action slop, science fiction not even worthy of Golan pitching at Cannes and musings that can only come straight out of what insipid ‘creative’ imaging things the idiot director envisioned from never wanting to ever actually shoot the piece of trash.
It is sad, because Peyton did prove in the past that he was capable of directing some decent action in San Andreas and Rampage, and there is a scene in its initial moments that shows he can still do it, with first-person views of guns mounted on cameras as well as shots from the POV of a fist fight.
The movie starts on a pleasant note but soon devolves into utter chaos due to the substandard VFX. Jennifer Lopez stars as the reclusive scientist, Mysteriously Ding. As a child, she was precisely that because a robot named Harlan, played by Simu Liu, killed her mother. As if that wasn’t realistic enough, Ding still fears that AI may be too prominent in the world.
Lieutenant Colonel Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown) is en route to capturing him after rendezvousing with Harlan’s team, of which Atlas is a part. But there’s a twist. All of them are wearing ‘Smith’ AI-powered space suits and Atlas, surprisingly, doesn’t want to wear one or be anywhere near it.
As the plot unfolds, everybody gets ambushed, which results in Atlas being the one left to wear the Smith. The entire movie consists of Atlas being directed by Smith until she reaches Harlan’s base and destroys it in a rather inspired After Earth way.
Well, let’s be honest, After Earth was not some masterpiece but at least Shyamalan puts in more interesting concepts on the screen even if half of them fail than someone like Peyton who wants to have a dialogue about AI but doesn’t really. Allow me to elaborate more: Artificial intelligence is the hot topic nowadays and considering how rapidly technology is advancing, the threat is not only within the substitute it provides for human labour but to mankind itself.
This is worth investigating on within a film as the technologies continue advancing day by day and taking very sinister approaches. The opening minutes of the film show a world where AI is present everywhere but the impact of such a technology ventures into no man’s land other than the fact that Atlas is a hundred percent against it but everyone else loves it. Peyton does not make much effort in developing the plot by resolving the conflicts, Atlas’ negative viewpoint of the advancement or what made the rest of the population so eager to use AI.
The idea is puzzling, and anyway, one wonders in which professional field one feels confident enough to accept a technology hardly anyone understands (even for a few AI\’s staunch advocates that exist like Elon Musk and yoshua bengio, who have clamored for halt the creation of new AI experiments, for some reasons, unlike others like Yann LeCun who have wholeheartedly adopted AI, it is like, though no single footprint of it, have been left in the development of ideas that can practically help in progressing the utilization of AI in real-time).
From the massive advances in AI all we really hear is that cosmetics measures has been achieved in almost all AI programs (‘for example, we came to address AI by specifically stating that she/her pronouns instead of it as a third person’) and that AI is everywhere. AI is bad – think Atlas. AI is good – think Indeed. The end-game sees this in her mind. Atlas will view AI as evil, with the exception of Smith, who was incorrectly programmed to embrace the theme of onscreen romance and it made sense in a cheap Spykids 3D Game Over-like virtual world with horrible cinematography and no regard for shot composition with many characters virtually clashing onscreen every second.
There’s absolutely nothing of interest in the film Atlas and not for a moment in the film does the viewer have a chance of escaping the stigma of it as a fake movie, and as thin and poorly acted characters that made us pity the guys that landed what seems to be auditioning for a long SNL skit. That is the only way to describe the disorientation you will get while watching this movie.
The only redeeming quality about Liu’s incompetent and seemingly full-of-fire performance is that it allows Harlan to be motivated by the insipid goal of “destroying the world and killing Atlas” not something much more psychologically active like the AI villains have always been. Admittedly, he does dish out some damage during the climactic Dragon Ball Z-styled combat sequence, but that alone does not qualify him as a proper antagonist, and Lopez on his part seems to just go through the motions against a green screen with a bunch of action scenes generated by the visual effects team.
There is no feeling of rhythm or energy in anything that is happening. We hardly find out who these people are for us to learn about them and form meaningful relationships with the characters who are the focal point of most science fiction stories. If I am going to take up TWO HOURS of my life, and most of it focusing on one character, I at least expect the lead character to be interesting or developed in some way. But Lopez is a long way from her outstanding performance in Chakda ‘Xpress, and we all know this will be another unremarkable entry in the Netflix machine just as her previous role in The Mother was.
At least that film had some interesting storytelling techniques that gave a dreamlike quality to it as opposed to Atlas which does not have any defining qualities.
No one can claim to find any of the performances of interest, the special effects look laughably unrealistic, the action continues the CGI blob plague that inescapably afflicts almost all blockbusters these days, and Peyton never explores any of the themes that could make this story futuristic, even as it tackles important issues of our day such as the role of Artificial Intelligence in society and how one can view its advent in contemporary society not with fear, but with caution.
Not that bad, of course. I personally enjoy the features in otter.ai to convert interviews (especially during this crazy Emmy FYC season etc.) but then again, it’s not all that good either. This area of moral ambiguity is what appears to be vaccinated in Atlas, but even Peyton cannot scholar, so he takes one for the team. Instead of subjecting the audience to banal imagery barely phenomenal to him, the audiences should be routinely bored by grasping cross-sections of ineptitude for a while and then being bombarded with illustrations that ruin the film. The recording I will bear in mind as the most fortunate, two of the Divine saw fit to guide me away from the dire straits of the film after I had gotten in and lost my sense of time for two overwhelmingly tedious hours.
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