3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Atlas

2024, Brad Peyton (Rampage) -- Netflix

Kent commented on, in his writeup for The Fall Guy, that the movie-within-the-movie was depicted as an A-tier scifi blockbuster but looked like "B-movie action trash". I see that commonly when there is a movie being made in the movie -- I believe they cannot expend the same effort in the fake movie as they would with a real movie. BUT the key point is that the fictional effort they depict is supposed to be A-tier movie effort.

I think this movie is one where there was A-tier movie effort (well, as A as Netflix produced will ever get) but all we get is B-movie trash... maybe a few letters down. Its fun trash but I don't think its the blockbuster they think they were making, and some of the set pieces delivered, some of the lines said out loud, are almost as if they knew it was worth self-mockery. And yet, it just looks really really good.

In my headcanon (boom!) this movie is the sequel to the other Simu Liu "Evil AI" movie Simulant. This movie also wants to take the same plot space as The Creator but without being all high & mighty about the evil AIs. You are not meant to think during this movie.

So, yeah a few steps down in the depiction of AI from The Artifice Girl. 

Like The Creator this movie rushes through the advent of AI becoming a ubiquitous aspect of consumer culture and starts with some background on the AI Uprising (nanny bots kill their owners, etc.), led by a single AI named Harlan (Simu Liu, Simulant). If anything the depiction of mostly fragile household bots being taken out by combined international forces is realistic enough, and forces Harlan and his forces to feel into space. Its not mentioned, but apparently they have FTL capabilities making this setting interstellar but doesn't comment much about it.

Twenty-eight years later we have Atlas Sheppard (J Lo, The Mother), an analyst who hates AI (no, we don't know what she analyzes but one can only assume its just AI) cuz Harlan was mom's bot, and mom was his first victim. She is brought in to help them interrogate a Harlan operative who was uncovered hiding out on earth. Information she gathers leads them to Harlan's location on a distant (like, stars away distant), inhospitable world. She is assigned to assist the Space Rangers in their mech-suits to hunt down and kill Harlan.

But its all a ploy! Harlan was waiting for them! 😮 The Space Rangers are all but killed instantly and Atlas has to escape into a mech-suit. These suits are AI managed, and a bonding process is required for them to be used properly. But Atlas doesn't trust AI ! How will she survive on this dangerous world and find Harlan before he can enact the real plan for which he lured the Space Rangers to this planet ?!?! She will have to overcome her distrust, of course, and make friends with her mech-suit.

If anything, this is the exact kind of movie I love to look at, my usual fondness for tech interfaces and space gadgets and mech bots and space ships and the like. It has the budget to make all these things look spectacularly good. Alas, the writing is often more akin to something I would expect from a self-published scifi novel -- hammy and melodramatic without a hint of self-awareness (ironic considering the movie is about self-aware AI). Then again, that may be exactly what this movie was going for, as those self-published or fanfic novels garner pretty large and loyal followings. Just not sure if that demographic also crosses path with J Lo fans.

As for the AI depiction? Its the most cliché of the clichés. Household bots (individual AIs crammed inside a single human shell) are built and when a developer (Atlas's mom) creates an interface to allow her bot to share emotions (and full world wide network access) with her, it provides him a flash of everything humans can be, and you know what that means --- the only way to save the planet is to eliminate humans. I am pretty sure that the manufacturing process Harlan needs to make more bots would be just as destructive to the planet as human behaviour. No matter, people bad, bots good. Kill em all ! Or at least enough so Harlan can rule over what is left. Its not a half-bad action flick, with some pretty good visuals, but the AI depiction is just a vehicle for said action.