Netflix Top 1 Movie With 19% Tomatometer Is Actually Biggest Sci-Fi Disaster of a Decade

On May 24, Netflix released the new sci-fi movie Atlas starring Jennifer Lopez — it immediately broke into the top 1 movies on the platform, where it still remains, and also received far from the best (or rather catastrophically bad) ratings on Rotten Tomatoes — 19% from critics and 49% from viewers.

And even though the RT score is often out of sync with reality — there are a large number of truly worthy films with low ratings — in this case, Rotten Tomatoes score is accurately conveying the impressions left after watching the new blockbuster.

What Is Atlas About?

In the near future, humanity is using holographic interfaces, neural communication, and hypersonic engines. Scientist Val Shepherd creates an advanced android, Harlan, who accidentally gains self-awareness.

He subjugates other robots and enters into a fierce confrontation with humans, resulting in millions of casualties, after which Harlan flies to another galaxy and promises to return to cleanse Earth of humans.

28 years later, Val Shepherd's daughter, Atlas, works as an analyst in the fight against AI terrorism. Suddenly, the military manages to capture Harlan's right hand — the android Casca. Through manipulation, Atlas discovers the exact location of humanity's greatest enemy and sets off on an expedition.

Atlas Is a Formulaic Mix of All Possible Sci-Fi Clichés with a Faceless Bad Guy

Let's say right away that the Atlas script looks like it was generated by an AI: the result was numerous clichés of science fiction films about the confrontation between man and artificial intelligence. The viewer has seen all this many times before, and in much more inventive forms.

The main villain is given catastrophically little time: Simu Liu as Harlan has barely more scenes than Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, but his villain does not feel as dangerous and powerful.

The talents of Mark Strong and Oscar nominee Sterling K. Brown are just wasted — the filmmakers are obviously not interested in character development. Secondary characters only appear so that the main character can demonstrate her dislike for intelligent machines.

Atlas seems to have taken all the possible clichés of the sci-fi genre and mixed them in a blender to end up with another boring and inexpressive story. Its main drawback is that the movie does not show us anything new about the relationship between humans and AI, but at the same time it looks like it was written and filmed by a neural network.

Watch These Two Sci-Fi Gems Instead of Atlas

If you still saw Atlas and now your eyes hurt, then it is better to pay attention to the recent French animated masterpiece Mars Express, which dives deep into the interaction of humans and intelligent robots, or Scavengers Reign — another animated project with 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which drops on Netflix on May 31 after being canceled by Max.