Jennifer Lopez’s Netflix sci-fi thriller Atlas is PANNED – as critics wonder if ‘artificial intelligence is really all that bad’ due to ‘formulaic’ script

Jennifer Lopez’s latest film Atlas premiered on Netflix on Friday, but hit the market amid a wave of scathing negative reviews from film critics.

The science fiction thriller received a disappointing 14 percent rating from the most prestigious critics surveyed Rotten tomatoesindicating solid wave panning.

Metacriticalexplaining the power of pans and praise, awarded the film a score of 38 out of 100, indicating “generally unfavorable” reviews.

Lopez — who has been inundated with rumors of a rift 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 murderous and led an uprising nearly thirty years earlier against people who killed three million people.

Atlas has a personal hand in the efforts to find and destroy the AI, named Harlan (and played by Simu Liu), as her mother was responsible for its creation decades earlier, before it murdered her along with millions of others.

The sci-fi thriller received a disappointing 14 percent rating from the most prestigious critics surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes, suggesting a strong wave is underway; pictured in Mexico on Tuesday

Lopez, 54, joins a group of soldiers wearing mechanized suits who try to track down Harlan, including Sterling K. Brown as Colonel Elias Banks and Mark Strong as General Jake Boothe.

But several reviewers criticized Atlas’s “formulaic” story and lack of original elements, raising questions about whether an AI-written screenplay might have been an improvement.

New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote that Atlas looks “cheap” and “tacky,” and that it sometimes “feels like pure pastiche.”

“Science fiction often earns its place in memory by proposing something new and surprising, but with Atlas we’ve seen it all before,” she wrote.

Benjamin Lee gave Atlas two out of five stars The guard and compared the film to the kind of “dumb, irony-free schlock” blockbusters that were a staple of Memorial Day Weekend twenty years ago.

However, he felt that the Netflix film suffered from the mistakes of many previous films released by the streamer that attempted to emulate its bygone big hits.

“Like many of the streamer’s mockbusters – the more naked attempts to compete with the biggest boys – it’s all too synthetic and serious to possess anything approaching self-awareness,” he wrote.

VarietyTodd Gilchrist called Atlas “disappointing,” and he compared it to the mediocre films Lopez has made mainly over the decades, rather than the early success that made her a star, including Selena (1997) and Out Of Sight ( 1998). ).

He lamented that Lopez turned to a “generic sci-fi adventure” like Atlas after her Oscar-rejected role in Hustlers, and he placed much of the blame on the film’s screenplay by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite .

New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote that Atlas looks “cheap” and “tacky”, and at times it “feels like pure pastiche”; still from Atlas

Several critics noted that Atlas suffers from a formulaic screenplay. William Bibbiani complained in The Wrap that it fails to develop anything new, despite allusions to classic science fiction and action films; still from Atlas

Of the few positive reviews, Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter offered mild praise, writing that “Lopez’s chemistry elevates the otherwise unremarkable dialogue into moderately amusing, occasionally moving banter”; seen in LA in March 2023

In The coverWilliam Bibbiani called the dialogue “generic” and accused Atlas of suffering from a “shameful plot” with “mediocre action.”

He mocked the film for its seemingly cheesy atmosphere, including an alien planet that looked “suspiciously… [like] Northern California” and the AI ​​villain’s lair, which “appears to be modeled after an abandoned warehouse.”

Of the few positive reviews, Angie Han gave mild praise The Hollywood Reporterwriting that “Lopez’s chemistry elevates the otherwise unremarkable dialogue into moderately amusing, sometimes moving banter.”

Brian Lowry gave the film modest praise for it CNNwriting that Peyton “keeps the story moving with a check-your-brain-at-the-door efficiency, relying on the shorthand of how familiar almost every beat of it feels.”