by Alfredo Galindo.
No surprise 2024 has been a bumpy ride for Jennifer Lopez, to say the least. Last February she was expected to repeat the success she had on Valentine’s Day, 2001, when her romantic comedy “The Wedding Planner” and her second album “JLo” reached number one in the box office and Billboard respectively. However, “This is Me … Now”, her music film and her latest album of the same title, only proved (her husband Ben Affleck included as part of the cast of the film) to revisits “Gigli”, as the failure of the first one streaming on Prime Video and the second one in sales. These terrible numbers only affected her summer concert tour to the point of being forced to cancel some of its last dates.
Just in time for Memorial Day Weekend, JLo is back with a vengeance … or at least it seemed, with a new film starring and producing for Netflix titled “Atlas”, where she plays precisely in a not too distant future an AI analyst called Atlas Shepherd who is assigned with a crew of rangers lead by Colonel Elias Banks (Academy Award nominee Sterling K. Brown) to capture a terrorist AI unit called Harlan (Simu Lu) who’s hiding in a planet preparing for an annihilation attack on Earth to end human kind. No need to tell you who saves the day.
Directed by Brad Peyton (“San Andreas”; “Rampage”), “Atlas” is a film composed by homages to some of the best films in the science fiction genre either strong and emphatic female leads fighting either AI (just like Linda Hamilton in the first two Terminators) or aliens (just like Sigourney Weaver in her first Academy Award nominated role) but Peyton isn’t by far a great storyteller such as James Cameron. Adding to that, Jennifer Lopez, a Sandra Bullock wannabe accomplished scientist to face gravity, tries hard since the beginning to appear the more “raw” and “real” before her arc of change. Unfortunately all we get are corny lines and situations in “Atlas” which is fully clouded until its end. We just hope, as it includes with an “open” ending there’s no “Revenge of the Fallen” in the horizon. No way.