I love mech suits.
I enjoyed Matrix Revolutions because of the mech suits. I don’t really watch anime, but I like the fact its full of mech suits. I love Pacific Rim. But this was one meh movie.
J-Lo’ Atlas is a brilliant scientist. I know this because both Netflix told me in the description, and the movie uses all the cliches to reinforce that. Her apartment is strewn with science papers, she plays (and wins) chess so much she has a favourite chess piece from her childhood, listens to classical music all the time, and everyone says she’s brilliant. She is so smart. SMRT.
She’s out to get AI baddie Harlan. He’s a robot with mommy issues who goes full Skynet to try and kill most of us to stop all of from dying? Who has a connection to Atlas’s childhood. Why and how he’s evil is not explored. Just that he is. He’s played by a criminally underused Simon Liu. He’s usually so good as an actor but the script fails him. He also has a retractable sword that comes from the space between his fingers which makes me really uncomfortable watching it. Like my hands flexed involuntarily as it came out. His plan sucks and actually makes it easier to be thwarted.
The movie just doesn’t care to explain anything. The baddie planet is in the Andromeda Galaxy? Why? There are so many other, closer planets that you could have said, why specific another galaxy? Inter-galaxy FTL? An organisation called the International Coalition of Nations. International and Nations in the same Acronym?
Speaking of the Andromeda Galaxy, the alien world gets very little screen time. This is no Pandora, but it’s got electric Cyclones, weird energy plants and it seems, no indigenous life forms of any kind. We skip past these things unless it’s a way into am Atlas flashback. We’ve come to an alien world on another galaxy, and we might as well have been on the moon for all that matters.
After a bit of an X-Force moment with some forgettable space marines, Atlas teams up with AI mech suit Smith to find Harlan and stop his evil plan. But Smith sounds like Tommy Wiseau in a Star Trek episode like we haven’t had Data do the emotionless robot voice better.
Hi Mark
It’s a movie that thinks we should just get on with liking it. Every action sequence is unsatisfying, its emotional moments are unearned, its tension is manufactured and it’s ending cliché. Even acting heavyweights Mark Strong and Sterling K. Brown can’t save it from itself.
Ultimately, Atlas fails to say anything about its main theme, AI.
More than that. It’s boring. It’s just not as boring as Rebel Moon.
For a more complex story about AI and it’s place in the world, watch The Creator.
For a better mech suit movie, Watch Pacific Rim, hell Avatar did it better.