From “Her web connects them all” to “The future is in her hands,” 2024 is the year of girlboss movie taglines. The latter comes from Jennifer Lopez’s new sci-fi action flick Atlas, which looks like a spinoff of her visual album, except all the music was replaced with robots and AI.
Netflix dropped a full trailer for Atlas, in which Lopez plays the eponymous protagonist—yes, her name is Atlas. Does she shrug? TBD. Anyway, Atlas and her begrudging friendship with the onboard AI in a mech-suit is the only thing standing between us and a humanity-ending plot concocted by Simu Liu.
To be fair, Atlas also stars Sterling K. Brown, and that gives it an immediate leg-up in the J.Lo canon. Otherwise, the trailers for Atlas are giving low-budgy Pacific Rim, and if it weren’t for Lopez’s proven charisma as an actor—and, again, Sterling K. Brown—I don’t know that I would’ve watched the first teaser:
Atlas was directed by Brad Peyton, whose credits include the Dwayne Johnson action flicks Rampage (the one with a giant gorilla) and San Andreas (the one with a giant earthquake). The film stars Lopez as a woman named, and I kid you not, Atlas Shepherd. Oh, is Atlas Shepherd a silly name? Would it help to know that she is also a “brilliant but misanthropic data analyst” and humanity’s only hope of surviving a deadly AI takeover? No?
Here’s the official synopsis:
Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.
Atlas also stars Gregory James Cohan, Abraham Popoola, Lana Parrilla, and Mark Strong, and hits Netflix on May 24.
(featured image: Netflix)
