If you decide to stay in and watch a movie in the near future, the people at Netflix will be delighted if you make it Brad Peyton's Atlas, which has little to do with cartography and a lot to do with Jennifer Lopez being stuck in the cockpit of a big combat walker and arguing with the AI a lot. Peyton has made a lot of movies with Dwayne Johnson in the past so this arguably counts as a bit of a change of pace for him; it's seldom a bad idea to try something new, but also important to be able to recognise when you've made a mistake.

The setting is a future which is mostly made up of bits from other sci-fi movies, all rendered in the style of a high-spec games console. The world is recovering from a rebellion by all the AIs and robots, led by the android butler (Simu Liu) from Lopez's house when she was a little girl. When the nations of Earth swiftly united to fight them off (yes, this is a fairly far-fetched movie), he ran off into space, and they've been looking for him ever since, with Lopez as the chief analyst.

Lopez finds a clue (by torturing one of Liu's android subordinates, whom she then murders, but this is apparently not a big deal) so they all go off to the Andromeda galaxy where his hideout is. Despite Lopez's attempts to warn them, the overconfident military get ambushed and virtually wiped out, leaving Lopez stuck inside one of their power armour suits and trying to stop the evil plan to. . . well, actually the android butler wants to save the environment from being ravaged by the human race, which sounds not unreasonable. However, he plans to save the environment by igniting the atmosphere and destroying the entire surface of the planet, which if nothing else should tell you everything you need to know about the quality of the scripting here.

An overwhelming aroma of 'you know what, that'll do' emanates from virtually every aspect of this film, which is possibly even more derivative than it sounds – it's clearly had some money spent on it, but every frame looks artificial. This might be intentional given this is, after all, supposedly a movie about the hot-button topic of AI, but I really doubt it. By far the most impressive visual element is Jennifer Lopez's hair, which looks really excellent throughout. Even this, however, comes with the problem that it's attached to the rest of J-Lo, who seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the film she's appearing in. It's an essentially unserious film with a half-baked script about robots fighting each other, so of course she treats it as if she's appearing in Hedda Gabler, never knowingly underwrought. There's some fun to be had by laughing at Atlas, but we really should be able to find a more positive way of spending our time.

For example, we might decide to go to an actual cinema showing George Miller's Furiosa, a prequel to 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road, which is largely about Anya Taylor-Joy sitting in a big truck looking very intense. The setting is post-apocalyptic Australia, which honestly looks a fair bit like pre-apocalyptic Australia in places, where the youthful Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is growing up in an oasis of peace and abundance. Until some raiders stumble upon the place – the good news is that they don't get a chance to share the secret, but the bad news is that she ends up basically as a slave in the entourage of unhinged warlord Dr Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).

What follows – the bulk of the movie – is a combination of coming-of-age story, revenge thriller, and grandiose epic, with Miller clearly revelling in the opportunity to establish and play with the world of the story. Given that he has done as much as anyone to create the SF subgenre where cars and their drivers engage in semi-gladiatorial combat, it shouldn't really be a surprise that nobody does it better than him.

It's not quite the relentless assault on the senses that Fury Road was, though the movie is still filled with intense and grotesque moments and images – a fair bit of black comedy too. A lot of this comes from Chris Hemsworth, who relishes the chance to unleash his inner Aussie; this is as good a performance as he's ever given, and one wonders the extent to which this is down to the fake nose he is wearing throughout. Anya Taylor-Joy is a big presence when she eventually turns up, but this is really only in the second half of the movie, and even then she apparently only gets less than thirty lines of dialogue. Giving equally taciturn support is Tom Burke as Taylor-Joy's mentor.

As usual, this is basically a western in a different skin, punctuated with visceral action sequences, and with slightly more of an overtly mythic feel to it than was the case with some previous instalments. It even touches on the profound in places, but not so much that there's any danger of the mainstream audience getting skittish: things blow up and engines rev with a comforting regularity. This is a really solid movie with some touches of genius in its art direction, script, and performances; Miller may be 79 but this series feels as vital and rumbustious as ever.

(With a horrible predictability, it seems that 28 million Netflix subscribers have watched at least the first couple of minutes of Atlas – let us maintain a generous view of human nature and hope that they didn't all watch to the end – while Furiosa is the latest well-reviewed film this year to be in danger of tanking at the box office. Though, to be fair, 2024's biggest hit to date has been the very decent Dune 2, with other pretty good films like Argylle, the new Planet of the Apes, and The Beekeeper also in the lower reaches of the top ten. Even so, it's hardly likely to fill one with joy.)

Awix

03.06.24 Front Page

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