Jennifer Lopez’s Netflix sci-fi thriller Atlas is PANNED
- Lopez’s film has a disappointing 14 percent negative score on Rotten Tomatoes
- The film was blasted for having a paint-by-numbers screenplay
- Others criticized its poor production values and underwhelming action
Jennifer Lopez‘s latest film Atlas premiered on Netflix on Friday, but it hit the service amid a wave of withering negative reviews from film critics.
The science-fiction thriller earned a disappointing 14 percent rotten rating from the most prestigious critics surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes, indicating a solid wave pans.
Metacritic, which accounts for the strength of pans and praise, assigned the film a score of 38 out of 100, indicating ‘generally unfavorable’ reviews.
Lopez — who has been inundated by rumors of a split with her husband Ben Affleck in recent weeks — stars in Atlas Shepherd as a data analyst involved in tracking down a computer-based artificial intelligence that turned homicidal nearly 30 years earlier, leading a rebellion against humans that left three million people dead.
Atlas has a personal stake in the efforts to find and destroy the AI, which is named Harlan (and played by Simu Liu), as her mother was responsible for creating it decades earlier, before it murderer her along with millions more.
Lopez, 54, joins a group of soldier with mechanized suits trying to track down Harlan, including Sterling K. Brown as Colonel Elias Banks and Mark Strong as General Jake Boothe.
But several reviewers criticized the ‘formulaic’ story and Atlas’ lack of original elements, raising the question of whether an AI-penned screenplay might have been an improvement.
New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote that Atlas looks ‘cheap’ and ‘plasticky,’ and it ‘feels like pure pastiche’ at times.
‘Science fiction often earns its place in memory by envisioning something new and startling — but with Atlas, we’ve seen it all before,’ she wrote.
Benjamin Lee gave Atlas two out of five stars for The Guardian and compared the film to the kinds of ‘dumb, irony-free schlock’ blockbusters that used to be a regular fixture of Memorial Day Weekend two decades ago.
However, he thought the Netflix film suffered from the faults of many earlier films released by the streamer that have tried to ape those bygone big-budget hits.
‘As with many of the streamer’s other mockbusters — its more naked attempts to compete with the biggest of boys — it’s all too synthetic and serious to possess anything close to self-awareness,’ he wrote.
Variety‘s Todd Gilchrist called Atlas ‘underwhelming,’ and he compared it to the mediocre films Lopez has primarily made in the last couple decades, rather than the early success that made her a star, including Selena (1997) and Out Of Sight (1998).
He bemoaned Lopez turning to a ‘generic sci-fi adventure’ like Atlas after her Oscar-snubbed role in Hustlers, and he assigned much of the blame to the film’s screenplay by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite.
In The Wrap, William Bibbiani called the dialogue ‘generic’ and accused Atlas of suffering from an ’embarrassing plot’ with ‘mediocre action.’
He mocked the film for its seemingly cheap atmosphere, including an alien planet that looks ‘suspiciously… [like] Northern California’ and the AI villain’s lair, which ‘seems to have been modeled after an abandoned warehouse.’
Among the few positive reviews, Angie Han gave mild praise in The Hollywood Reporter, writing that ‘Lopez’s chemistry elevates otherwise unremarkable dialogue into passably amusing, occasionally touching banter.’
Brian Lowry gave the film modest praise for CNN, writing that Peyton ‘keeps the story moving with a check-your-brain-at-the-door level of efficiency, relying on the shorthand of how familiar almost every beat of it feels.’
