Picture this: You just got home from school, and are prepared to flop onto the couch, relaxing after a long day of testing. You flip through your subscriptions until something on Netflix catches your eye. “ ‘Atlas?’ Looks like they finally made a ‘Titanfall 2’ movie, I guess.” “Titanfall 2” is one of the most pivotal movement shooters in modern gaming, combining the normal features of FPS games with an intricate parkour system supplemented by the ability to call down (from orbit) Titans, your own mechs, to combat other players and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In other words, “Titanfall 2” is an amazing game about piloting mechs & doing cool parkour. From the trailer, that’s exactly what Atlas appears to be (minus the parkour)—the ultimate Titanfall 2 movie.
You’ll need to keep searching, though, because this isn’t it.
Atlas is a sci-fi action movie set in the far future, where a technologically advanced humanity is struggling to deal with the consequences of AI development. A household AI named Harlan (played by Simu Lu) went rogue, triggering all other AI to begin attacking humanity. After most of these attacks die down, Harlan flees out of the solar system, to an alien planet, where the majority of the film takes place. Lead analyst Atlas Shepard (played by Jennifer Lopez) ends up on the planet inside of a sentient mech suit when a mission goes awry, and needs to get over her distrust of AI to survive and defeat Harlan.
All this plot looks watertight from far away, but quickly falls into shambles when any part is observed too closely. The production itself leans heavily into CGI when on the alien planet, with very little filming on sets until the climax. In addition, the initial group of introduced characters falls quickly, with Atlas and her mech being the only characters for the majority of the screen time. This causes all the other characters to stagnate with very little development, while the antagonist Harlan’s character development is rushed right before the climax.
The plot, as I mentioned before, isn’t exactly the best. Slightly similar to the plot of “Titanfall 2” ’s campaign, Atlas is forced to make a bond with her mech, Smith, in order to survive, first an emotional bond and then a mental one. However, due to the situation Atlas and Smith found themselves in, there are almost no other characters to interact with (outside of antagonists not interested in conversation), resulting in a lot of the character development being internal, with Atlas revealing more about her childhood. Unfortunately, the only major change she makes in herself is trusting Smith, and AI by extension.
In addition, despite the nice production in set design and detailed CGI, the majority of the movie is just the inside of Atlas’s mech suit, leading to most of the non-action scenes being very repetitive. Overall, despite good intentions and investments in acting, aesthetics and CGI, I would say that it’s the lack of a real plot that sent Atlas falling to its doom (with a 5.6/10 on IMDB and a 18% on Rotton Tomatoes). It’s almost like the writers trusted too much in AI for the script.