REVIEW: ‘ATLAS’ Really Wants To Be An Anime

Netflix Original Atlas puts Jennifer Lopez in a mech, and that alone is a pretty good time. However, it never seems to get past its gimmick, even with its star-studded cast. Directed by Brad Peyton, Atlas is written by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite.

The film stars Lopez as the brilliant analyst Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez). She knows AI and technology inside and out, thanks to her mother, but despite her intelligence with technology, she despises it. While the world around her embraces every advancement in tech, she doesn’t fear it, but she hates it. When a renegade android, Harlan (Simu Liu), known as the world’s first AI terrorist resurfaces, Atlas joins a mission to capture him.

Forced to embrace technology and confront the trauma of her past, which links her directly with Harlan, nothing goes as planned. When all the plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to check her anger at the door and take a step forward in trusting Smith (Gregory James Cohan)—her mech AI.

When it comes to production design, Atlas bears all of the hallmarks of a Netflix budget. With a lot of computer-generated effects, thoughtful cinematography keeps the world feeling grounded. The action set pieces are grand in scale, and Lopez does her best as the titular character while piloting her mech. One of my issues with Lopez’s last Netflix action outing, The Mother (2024), was that she remained unscathed despite all of the hand-to-hand combat, and here, she gets dirty.

Lopez’s title character gets injured, tortured, thrown around, and the film is better for it. While her hair may be over-teased in her introductory scenes, Atlas takes on danger like a real action star and looks the part. She fits into the wonderful action sets that push everything bigger. But the film’s well-executed action and visuals are where the praise stops.

For the most part, the film’s narrative is one-note. Instead of letting the story carry it over the finish line, Atlas relies on the viewer’s affinity for anime. At times, it feels like you’re watching a live adaptation of anime, but not in a good way. With everything right on the surface, buying into the larger world is hard.

The lack of larger world-building is what stops the film from going further. That’s the frustrating thing. It’s clear that there is more to explore, and the lore of this far-future sci-fi story can give more. Instead, what you see is what you get. And that’s no more true than with Liu’s Harlan.

Simply, Simu Liu is just not a good villain. Speaking in a forced and nearly monotone voice, everything feels like he is trying too hard, while his costuming and hair just aren’t trying hard enough. He’s a waif-thin villain who means nothing on his own and fades away from Atlas’s struggle with accepting AI in her life. Harlan is a vapid villain who doesn’t do much and lacks any presence compared to Lopez’s Atlas and even Sterling K. Brown‘s Colonel Elias Banks.

Atlas is pretty to look at, and Jennifer Lopez continues her run as a very competent action star, but with a clunky narrative, you can tell that it wants to be an anime very, very badly. Beyond that, there are also large sci-fi hits that you can trace back to some of anime’s most iconic sci-fi.

With AI as the villain, Atlas also retreads a path that even American films keep going over. It stifles what could have been something unique, and instead, it’s left as a shadow of other media that just handled the concepts better. Strong in concept, it’s the execution where a lot is to be desired.

Atlasis streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.