2024 | PG-13 | starring Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Lana Parilla, Mark Strong | directed by Brad Peyton | 1h 58m | 1 out of 5 stars |
Netflix’s venture away from more niche film lovers programming (somber series like House of Cards or the unearthing of Orsen Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind) and into the same mainstream territory occupied by primetime broadcast TV and Michael Bay summer blockbusters has been… uh, fascinating (?). Their semi-annual original entry into the Hollywood blockbuster space has produced nothing but big, loud, brainless duds in which Grade A celebrities run around in clunky cliche-riddled, direct-to-video level movies. From Will Smith’s fairy movie Bright to The Rock’s painful Red Notice to Gal Gadot’s embarrassing Heart of Stone and Chris Evans’ The Gray Man. Earlier this year we had Kevin Hart playing it straight in the skyjacking movie Lift. Is anyone at Netflix keeping track of this junk? Jennifer Lopez has joined The Rock and Gadot as repeat offenders here, after last year’s The Mother, the star once again comes in with a baffling movie beneath her pay grade with the sci-fi mech actioner Atlas.
Now, in a movie about AI taking over the world, you might think the title refers to the AI system itself (The A.T.L.A.S. program!) or the name of a military mech technology. Nope, Jennifer Lopez plays the only-in-a-movie Atlas Shepard, an analyst who searches for fugitive robots in a future where AI became sentient and – apparently programmed by human-hating screenwriters and politicians deduced that mankind was the threat (yawn) – and launched a war on us. Its AI leader (Simu Liu) escaped to space and seeks to re-ignite that war. Once again Lopez plays a beyond capable person, brilliant in her field. The best of the best. But she’s cold to people and even colder to machines. Atlas’ AI distrust is commented on by her superiors, which is bizarre in a world where robots tried to destroy the world. In order to chase down the AI leader, Harlan, Atlas must pilot a mech powered by a robot consciousness and a neural link to humans (kind of like Pacific Rim) to a distant planet like a mis-matched partners cop movie learn how to work together to save the world.
There’s a point where Atlas crosses the line from junk action movie to becoming something notably worse and more interesting: a full-on piece of pro-AI propaganda. Whether it’s going to make life better or worse for us, the insistence that AI is coming despite no market demand for it is strange. Even weirder are movies like this, that are seemingly designed to cast anyone with any suspicion in AI as a backward rube that just needs to be taught a lesson and brought into the future. The neural-link plot point in the movie even casually depicts the AI as having conscious “thoughts” that is will share with the human driver. Like the exo-suit in Blue Beetle several action scenes in this movie find the mech making its own decisions in which it’s human “driver” is really only a bystander. As I said in that review, the less agency your human lead has in the decisions of the action, the less we will get invested in it. Director Brad Peyton has made a career out of steering The Rock through brainless CGI action movies (San Andreas, Rampage) and the action scenes and visual style here is just as ugly and unimaginative.
{Spoilers} The messages is beat in slow and deep in the film’s “emotional” climactic moments. In the end, Atlas learns the value of AI after it saves her life and then “sacrifices itself” by draining its power to replenish the oxygen in her suit. It happens slowly and “painfully”, Lopez is in tears and we too are supposed to be crying our eyes out for this poor robot. Earlier in the movie, we get a human character played by award-winning actor Sterling K. Brown pulling the old “Don’t wait for me” and blowing himself up to save the group without a blink of an eye.
It’s a garbage movie and a propaganda film on top of it. I can’t wait for the days when AI sci-fi films return to the cautionary tales of The Terminator and The Matrix and not whatever this sanctimonious, moralizing pablum is.
Damsel | 2024 | PG-13 | starring Millie Bobby Brown, Robin Wright, Ray Winstone, Angela Bassett | directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo | 1h 50m | 1 out of 5 stars |
More Netflix trash!
Damsel is a lot of obnoxious things all at once. It’s yet another manufactured star vehicle for Netflix star Millie Bobby Brown (kind of delightful in Enola Holmes but a scene-hogger in movies like Godzilla vs Kong). It’s a fantasy film commissioned in the wake of the dragon-revenge success of Game of Thrones. It’s also the latest in an increasingly long line of feminist spins on classic fairy tales that seek to interrogate a woman’s role as a plot device in these movies. Like last year’s Cinderalla with Camilla Cabello that short-circuited the plot of Cinderella, the damsel in Damsel is no damsel in distress that needs a prince to save her. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Interrogating the gender roles in fairy tales is actually something I find interesting and would like to see more of. The problem is, it is so rarely done in a particularly clever way and Damsel is the worst example of that. Case in point. Both Cinderalla and Damsel are unable to flip the gender roles of the prince/princess dynamic and leave the love story in tact. In Cinderella the men are feminized and humiliated for fun. In Damsel they are duplicitous villains. In these stories any romantic element has to be broken entirely and is replaced with nothing.
Exhibit A is this movie. A thinly plotted, claustrophobic and ugly looking thing that doesn’t have a specific fairy tale in mind that it’s ripping from. It just goes after the general concept of a woman as a damsel in distress. But first, it takes a pit stop at arranged marriages as the film opens with Bobby Brown’s Elodie being married off against her will to a prince from another land. But it’s a trick! The prince doesn’t want to marry these women, but due to an ancient curse that enslaves the city, sacrifices her to a dragon in a cave.
And this is where the nothing comes in. Most of the meat of Damsel consists of watching Bobby Brown slink around this dark, ugly, nondescript cave dodging around a single dragon. It’s like if The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was not the middle part of a story but the beginning and end of its own story. It’s lifeless, drab and unimaginative and it goes on forever. She is given nobody to talk to and we get very few narrative trap doors that take us away from the cave. It’s in the 2nd act when the movie’s nifty idea of a message runs head-long into the challenge of actually having to pay it off with something thrilling and substantive. Unable to, the movie just skids to a stop. It’s not enough to be simply against a trope, you need to be for something else. This movie is not.
Then the third act turns into a full-blown power-fantasy that recasts Elodie as their Daenerys Targaryen, created by people who watched Game of Thrones and only took away that the best way for women to get the upper hand in battle is with a dragon’s fire-breath. Thin and forgettable. Last year’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves did the gender reversal with Chris Kline and Michelle Rodriguez effortlessly without making a big deal about it. But to this day, the movie that still interrogated the role of women in fantasy is still 2007’s Frozen. It cleverly swapped out it’s damsel in distress story with a tale of sisterly love. It set the gold standard for this type of thing and far less talented people have been chasing it ever since.