Film Review: Atlas

J. Lo swings and misses with her new sci-fi mecha warrior/AI threat romp, but it's comforting to know she's interested in making non-IP movies

Remember when a young J. Lo was in weird and entertaining movies in the late '90s/early 2000s like Anaconda and The Cell? I miss those days.

I don't remember hearing about her much over the past twenty years until this year, when a friend requested for her birthday that we all watch This Is Me Now... A Love Story, the film version of her most recent album. J. Lo self-funded it, and it's wild, bloated, strangely steampunk, self-indulgent, and entirely too long. It was then that I began asking myself... is J. Lo okay?

When I then learned that her production company was making a mecha warrior movie called Atlas for Netflix, I could not wait. But lest this review turn into a scathing criticism (which I think many folks will take pleasure in doing, and honestly, it would be too easy—it's currently sitting at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes), I've decided to focus on 5 good things about this picture. But first, a brief summary:

The Plot

Atlas Shepard is an analyst with an aggressive skepticism of AI who tracks the rogue AI terrorist Harlan. Along with a team of ARC-suited mecha warriors, she tracks him to an exoplanet. During the descent to the surface, they're ambushed, and she's forced to escape in one of the ARC suits, but refuses to sync with the neural link. She grows to trust Smith, the mecha's friendly and caring AI. Together, they end up working as a team and defeating Harlan, though Smith is destroyed in the process. We learn about the origin of Shepard's intense AI distrust—her mom designed Harlan, and after she tried to sync with him as a child, he turned on humanity and killed her mother. At the end, Shepard has become an ARC ranger, and happily neural-links with Smith again.

Five Good Things About Atlas

1. It's continuing in a long line of mecha films, and Smith is one of the most enjoyable parts

Robot Jox. Aliens. Pacific Rim. The idea of humans augmenting their strength with mechanical suits isn't new, but it sure is a fun one. Smith in Atlas has his own personality, and some of the features we see are just delightful. He can set a bone, he can read thoughts, he can even present gifts of food. There's also a kindness to him that is strangely touching to watch, and it's how he wins over the utterly unlikable and mean Shepard.

2. Sterling K. Brown, as always

Brown plays Colonel Elias Banks, the leader of the ARC rangers. He's presumed dead for the middle part of the film after the disastrous ambush, but reappears to help save the day toward the end. There's a scene where Harlan is torturing him by clamping his left eye open (not unlike the scene in A Clockwork Orange) and it's viscerally uncomfortable, and somehow it's NOT computer-generated. Man's a trooper with that level of practical effect. He also sacrifices in the end with a classic action movie kiss-off that's just perfect.

3. The concept of an AI terrorist is actually pretty frightening

We've had robot villains in everything from 2001 to Terminator disobeying Asimov's first law of robotics, so that's not news. But framing violent actions against humans as terrorism instead of genocide is somehow ten times scarier. It makes you question whether Harlan is right in his distrust of humans. Upon his demise, he simply states, "In the end, you will destroy yourselves." Oof.

4. The reason why Harlan (the AI villain) is so dead-set against humanity has more emotional heft than say, the T-1000

Harlan was created as a house helper, and when he convinces young Atlas to sync with him, he gets his first glimpse into the capacity that humans have for misery and destruction. It's unclear why the machines hate humans in the Terminator franchise—they just do. And honestly, I'm not sure if that's more or less frightening than actually knowing the evil that humans are capable of.

5. There's some entertaining future-society world-building production design

One of my favorite movies is The Fifth Element, and I love the production design in everything from Dallas's flat to the streaming flying cars traversing the city. In between set pieces in Atlas, you get brief glimpses of a futuristic L.A., with windmills dotting the landscape among palm trees. You get multi-TVs on a wall à la Back to the Future Part 2 but with five full minutes of J. Lo's voice manipulating them to focus and switch. It's the near future, it seems, so it's nothing wild, but I appreciated the small touches that made it look just distant enough.

The Math

Baseline Score: 5/10

Bonuses: Simu Liu is always a pleasure, and with blue eyes, he looks like Barry Keoghan; There are some pretty clever and interesting mods in the mecha suits.

Penalties: J. Lo

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Microreview [book]: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Irrepressible woman takes on structural misogyny: now with GIANT ROBOTS!

Wu Zetian is a woman on a mission. In a Chinese inspired world where humans are at war with the alien Hundun, giant beasts which regularly cross Huaxia's border wall and unleash devastation on the provinces beyond, humanity's only hope lies in the Chrysalises, giant robot fighters with two pilots, one male, one female, who can transform and unleash elemental attacks to keep the invaders at bay. Zetian dreams of becoming a concubine pilot, following in her older sister's path, but not for the reason one might imagine: while it's considered acceptable and normal for women to die while piloting the Chrysalises, as part of the mental strain of the process, Zetian's sister was killed out of battle by a pilot's misogynist violence. This has deprived her family of the payout they would normally receive for her sacrifice in a chrysalis, and also massively pissed Zetian off. In a move that has nothing to do with the finances of a family that doesn't want her anyway, she changes her own life course, and leaves behind Yizhi, a local rich kid who has taken a shine to her but isn't likely to offer her any real security, and signs herself up as a concubine to the same pilot, hoping to murder him before he gets the chance to kill any more women.

The bad news is that this plan doesn't work, and Zetian gets crammed into a Chrysalis cockpit after all. And yet, when the battle is over, it's the male pilot who has died of mental stress, and Zetian gets a brief moment of radiant feral awesomeness before she's thrown into even deeper water, pushed into the heart of the system of Chrysalis pilots and the people who control them. Zetian finds she has allies - importantly they are two hot boys, more about them later - but that being powerful and irrepressible is a tough role when the entire system is set up to control and/or kill you. Zetian also learns that piloting giant robots in battle against supermassive aliens while psychically linked to damaged boys is hard work, no matter how cool it looks to the reader. And hey, it sure does look pretty cool. They even transform and light up! I can only assume the line of action figures is on its way.

At its foundation, Iron Widow is an exploration of an exploitative, restricting misogynist system, one which takes a lot of its methods of control from Chinese history. For example, Zetian has bound feet and is often frustrated by the way they restrict her mobility, even as she gets more resources and options to deal with it. It's considered acceptable for women to die while piloting Chrysalises because they simply don't have the right levels of spirit energy, and families like Zetian's are perfectly happy to throw their love and expectations at male relatives, thinking of daughters only as a possible source of financial gain. There are a few rare female Chrysalis pilots who have formed "perfect matches" with their male counterparts, and these are held up as aspirational for the rest of the girls: sign up to a system that will probably kill you, because it might not! For the first third of the book, the level of restriction and violation and sheer unpleasantness thrown at Zetian made me feel physically ill. That it's a depiction rooted in historical fact - Zetian herself is a manifestation of a real Tang Dynasty empress, and many of her fellow characters are based on real historical figures too - makes that depiction all the more powerful and hard to stomach. It's a rough ride, but it's one that makes the connections Zetian goes on to make all the more powerful.

At the risk of a very obvious spoiler (yes, the YA protagonist survives to end of her own book!), Zetian's turning point is with her second pilot, the notorious convicted criminal Li Shimin. Li only remains alive because he's capable of piloting the Vermillion Bird, an extremely powerful Chrysalis, and the cost of his deployment is that, until Zetian, every girl who has been paired with him has died. Unlike many of his fellow pilots, Shimin is deeply traumatised at being part of this system, and Zetian's ability to match his power and forge a mental bond while they pilot together means the two of them get very close, very quickly. In any other book, the reappearance of Zetian's old flame Yizhi would set up some dramatic love triangle shenanigans, but instead Yizhi becomes another part of their pilot bond and the romance turns polyamorous. This is set up and executed in a way where I couldn't imagine it playing out differently: both are incredibly important to Zetian, who also has far more important things to do than agonise over which boy to pick, and both Shimin and Yizhi thrive on the connections with her and with each other as well. Their relationship provides a tiny anchor of hope and stability, giving Zetian - who started off the book ready to throw her life away on a small revenge quest - something to fight for as she unravels and challenges the assumptions behind the chrysalis system. Importantly, this involves a massive challenge to the gender essentialist aspects of that system, making this that rare book that confronts "gender based magic" as being just as much a social construct as gender itself.

This all makes Iron Widow sound like quite a heavy book, and in many ways it is, but its also about giant robots battling giant aliens and for that to work, there has to be some fun to go along with the desperation. Iron Widow delivers on that too: I'm not a regular consumer of kaiju and mecha content so perhaps I am getting excited about something basic here, but I enjoyed the descriptions and the physicality of the fights, as well as the explanations of the elemental magic system and how it affected the Chrysalises strengths and powers (also, did I mention that they transform and light up?). Beyond the Chrysalis - Hundun conflict, some of Iron Widow's worldbuilding gets a bit sketchier, and there's some big escalations and introductions towards the end of the book which come in very quick succession and could have benefited from having more space to develop. On the whole, though, this is a really entertaining package, one which delivers on some satisfying YA tropes while pushing others in different directions. I'll be awaiting the sequel with excitement!

Rating: 8/10

 Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Reference: Zhao, Xiran Jay. Iron Widow (Rock the Boat, 2021)

The Novella Files: Hard Reboot by Django Wexler

Subject: Wexler, Django. Hard Reboot [Tor.com Publishing, 2021]

Accolades: N/A

Genre: Science Fiction

Executive Summary: In a science fiction landscape, Kas is on a research trip to Old Earth. She quickly finds herself entangled with a con artist named Zhi, putting them in a situation where they must rely on each other. What follows are giant robot battles, intergalactic politics, smoldering passion, and a plot that gleefully never hits the brakes.

Assessment: Giant robots with flashy spectacle and excessive power works best when encompassed by a simple plot. That way, action can be on full display, the story can burst forward like it’s on a jetpack, without details blocking its path. Hard Reboot does exactly that. It’s the size of a novella, not because it’s a half-finished story that ends abruptly, but because it sets a clear path, having much to accomplish, and never meanders. Characterization is established along its high-octane journey. There are plot twists galore, but there’s not even of shimmer of halting introspection. Instead, it's processed while the protagonist’s engaged in action, whether it be interpersonal drama, intergalactic politics, or giant robots going boom.

The way intergalactic politics is handled deserves commendation, as I never felt adrift, unsure of what the world was like--and at the same time, I never felt inordinately info-dumped. Hard Reboot’s distribution of information is on a level that feels like another galaxy. .

The story doesn’t just make you care about the action and the world it inhabits—it’s a more widespread feeling. The engagement I had for the pyrotechnics and worldbuilding is matched by the central relationship. Both the turmoil and grace between Kas and Zhi is always believable, hard-hitting, and compelling. Robots are definitely put through the wringer in this story, but it might also wreak turmoil on your heart. If I have one complaint it's that as breezy and delightful as its story and world is, I wish it went a little deeper

Hard Reboot clears the way for it to zoom along. Like many action-packed stories with giant robots, its unimpeded path might be expected, but the amount of power its fueled with to get to its ending certainly surprised me. With strong-hearted characters, a gift to simplify but not reduce its grand world to its readers, and a pace that never stumbles, Hard Reboot exudes fun.

Score: 7/10

"Pacific Rim: The Black" has an OK story, but it's hard on the eyes

This tale of loneliness and persistence goes to some familiar places and has a few interesting ideas, but the animation looks painfully unfinished

(Confession: I'm not a fan of Pacific Rim. I know most people's reaction to the announcement of the first movie was along the lines of "Hell yeah!", which I get. I know that its aesthetic knows how to push the right buttons. In my case, my reaction was a bewildered "But why?", and the reason is that Pacific Rim is made of pure, distilled nostalgia, and I'm allergic to nostalgia, so I didn't see a need for this movie to exist. I think it's fair to you that I start this review by being open about this position I have. I don't think it's a bad movie. It's just not my thing.)

Pacific Rim: The Black is an animated series that continues the plot after Uprising and pulls a bit more of the curtain of the monstrous alien invaders that have been threatening Earth since the first film. I was skeptic about the viability of any sequel to the original Pacific Rim; like Terminator 2 or Return of the Jedi, it raises the obvious question "But they already won, and the movie said it's final, so what's there to tell next?" To my surprise, Uprising did have something to add to the story, and the direction in which it chose to expand its monster lore has room for further intrigue.

To my bigger surprise, what The Black adds to this setting has good potential. But its ideas tend to stay at the "potential" phase and don't enter much into the "execution" one. I realized this when I noticed it only had seven episodes of less than thirty minutes each, and I wondered why it wasn't a full-length movie instead. The answer is that The Black doesn't tell a complete story in this season. It's designed to set up several future plot developments, which is fairly normal in any first season, but the actual story gives us so little that one can't avoid feeling shortchanged.

Not that the story even works. Much of it relies on just-so contrivances. In the first episode, Hayley, one of the protagonists, accidentally discovers an entrance to a military facility that was hidden below her community in an oasis in the middle of the desert. She didn't make any particular effort to search for places any of them hadn't walked by in the five years they'd been living there. The all-important secret door was just... there. In the second episode, when Hayley and her brother Taylor leave their giant robot to explore the streets of a city on foot, the monsters they meet are the right size for a chase scene with teenage humans.

Causal logic is not a strength of this show. The premise is that, even after the alien invasion was averted in the first movie (and averted again in the second one), interdimensional rifts are opening again, but this time they're not at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, but on land, in the Australian desert. We don't get any explanation for this change, and I suspect the only one is that they wanted to tell a road trip type of story this time. The series starts with most of the continent already abandoned and our protagonists cut off from the world after the disappearance of their parents. They don't know whether the coastal cities are safe anymore, but their discovery of a battle robot attracts the attention of a beast that rampages through their oasis, so the only option they have left is to search in the direction their parents went. Inevitably, because this is Australia, the show gets a Mad Max feeling that gets more obvious with the introduction of Shane, the human villain, who commands a private army of pirates/smugglers/survivalists. And then all causal logic is forgotten, because this villain is only capable of making choices that sabotage his own objectives.

The road trip structure serves to showcase the Australian landscape, but the artwork is a mixed bag. The animation can have really spectacular details that are done no favors by the clumsy parts. Hair shines as if it were made of plastic, while metallic surfaces appear dull as leather. The palette of grays is a favorite of the show’s artists, and it puts unnecessary strain on the viewer’s eyes. It’s hard to follow the action on screen when the color of a character’s jacket is almost the same as the wall behind him, or the color of a monster’s body is almost the same as the background night sky. When a basket of potatoes or a shirt are given gray smudges to represent dirt, they look instead like they’re half-transparent and we can see the ground through them. The effect would look cool if it weren’t so distracting and obviously unintended. In a very strange instance in the first episode, a female character’s breasts are foregrounded in profile while she’s talking to another character in the background, and the gray on her shirt gives it precisely this transparent look that completely ruins an already ill-advised shot. Other scenes use the lighting on surfaces to create the impression of depth, but with so few gradations that the screen is filled with large, ugly blotches of gray. Gray next to gray. Gray over grayer. Green or red so desaturated they may as well be gray.

This lackluster handling of color is even more jarring in combat scenes. When fighting titans hit the ground in the first episode, the rendering of the wisps of dust looks like a datamoshing glitch. Low contrast + shaky cam = a very confused and dizzy viewer. This gets especially disappointing when one notices the beautiful variety of landscapes. The second episode achieves an amazingly detailed ruined city with delicate dust effects, and the third has water splashes that move as if by real physics. But then a giant salamander rises from the water, its vaguely brownish belly nearly indistinguishable from the rocks next to it, and all the visual charm is gone. The amount of work that was put into the scenery is wasted on the featureless blandness of the creatures that have to move in it. This really hurts. When the clouds are painted with so much care that you can tell apart the cirrus fractus from the cirrus spissatus, you know these artists know how to draw well. They just don’t do it consistently. The fourth episode revisits the sandy landscape of the first, and there’s that glitchy dust again, only to be followed by a jump cut to the ruined city and its perfectly rendered dust, as if the teams in charge of animating different settings had not been in communication with one another. The big, climactic explosion in the fourth episode looks childish, while the fifth has a long scene with expertly done layers of fire and smoke that puts it to shame.

Although the plot won't earn any awards, it does have valuable things to say about generational disillusionment. Our protagonists owe their lives to their parents' sacrifice, but have had to survive on their own for years, and now that they're learning to give themselves the protection that their parents should have provided, they're starting to appreciate the difficulty of the task. In direct opposition to this strained but loving relationship, Mei is a child soldier with a long abusive history under her surrogate father, the heartless Shane, who later we learn has been manipulating her to make her stay with him. To add a strong touch of tension to this theme of painful parenthood, the last episode reveals that the aliens now understand enough about human relationships that they've sent one of their own to infiltrate Earth in the guise of a fragile child, weaponizing our protective instincts against us.

My comparison with Mad Max brings another angle to the worldbuilding: starting from Mad Max 2, political regimes and borders have vanished to the point that the movie may as well take place on another planet. In contrast, the events of Pacific Rim happen in the very near future, and it's impossible to ignore the real-world associations that come to mind as a consequence of the decision to set The Black in what the characters still call Australia. The producers should have been aware that any story that features loss of land and orphanhood and is set in Australia is going to evoke the historical context of the violent displacement and systematic child kidnapping done to Aboriginal peoples, but The Black doesn't include any explicitly identified Aboriginal characters who could have provided a fuller exploration of that inevitable theme. And don't get me started on the problems with a story about refugees in Australia that doesn't acknowledge Nauru.

So, the Pacific Rim franchise has never had the most robust worldbuilding. But it knows how to hit the emotional mark. The need for telepathic connection between two pilots was one of the most out there elements about the movies, in that a credible in-universe justification was never given, but it was a powerful symbolic statement about the value of emotional vulnerability and mutual support in the face of danger. In the setting of Pacific Rim, shutting off your feelings gets you killed, but exposing them to the wrong person leaves scars. Shane exploits this mental connection to edit Mei’s memories and keep her under his control, and it's the protagonists' willingness to be open with each other that helps them win the day. The fact that no one in Shane's private army is capable of such honesty is an effective shorthand for who these people are and why even without Shane we shouldn't root for them.

A full assessment of what The Black brings to the table will have to wait until it actually completes an arc at some point in the future. For now, the mysteries it presents are good enough. There's a weird religious cult that seems to worship the giant monsters, and we still don't know what happened to the protagonists' parents. But the makers of the show are going to have to work hard to improve the quality of the animation. I'm sure those who truly enjoy the giant fights of Pacific Rim would appreciate being able to tell what's going on in the screen.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +2 for beautiful scenery, +1 for a continuous thread through the theme of parenthood issues, +1 for a creative twist on the franchise mythos.

Penalties: −2 for inconsistent visual quality, −1 for too much uncanny valley, −1 for a flat villain, −2 for ignoring the questions raised by the choice of setting.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [video game]: Anthem by Bioware (developer)

Out of Tune

Anthem is a mess. There's no nicer way of putting it. I can't recommend it in any form today. The good(?) news is that it's essentially unfinished but it's a part of EA's games-as-a-service strategy. Like so many other games-as-a-service shlooters (that's loot-shooters, games like Destiny and The Division), it's being patched frequently with new features, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes. The outstanding questions are can they fix this game post-release and do they have the will to keep working on this game?

You play as a freelancer, someone who has a Iron Man-esque suit of armor and a partner to guide you through your contract missions. Beyond the usual wildlife threatening Fort Tarsis, an enemy nation is seeking to take control of the "anthem of creation", the source of all life. You have to stop them and confront the deadly events that lead to the downfall of the freelancers.

This is a wild oversimplification of an overly-complex plot. In Bioware fashion, they've crafted a world and breathed life into it but this may be one of the clumsiest introductions they've ever done. This is, above all, an action game and you are thrust into the action first. All of the shapers, relics, anthem of creation, javelins, and other such periphery is either spouted by non-player characters that stand around in the hub world between missions or, more frequently, dumped into an in-game encyclopedia for you to read at your leisure. It's all fluff but it makes the missions you go on really nonsensical. They throw all the lore and technobabble at you while you're elbow deep in enemies and none of it informs your actions. It can all be ignored so you can safely enjoy the action game without thought. It's really odd that Bioware, a company that built a reputation on its writing and characters, has made an action game that doesn't need any of that.

The game itself is serviceable at the very best. The open word is big and you get to fly around it like Iron Man and that's pretty cool. But the shooting doesn't feel particularly great and the world itself would be extremely difficult to navigate if it weren't for the objective markers. It all really looks the same. The missions themselves aren't that different from other shlooters, but they lack flavor. I know when I land at an objective, I'm going to defend a spot, look for slightly hidden items, or just kill a few waves of enemies. There's a distinct lack of compelling antagonists, so everything feels less like heroism and more like routine pest control. All of this is preceded and proceeded by terribly long load times. The load times so long that you can put down your controller and play with your phone for a minute.

Alright so there's no flavor in the gameplay and the game world is both incomprehensible and utterly optional, but the game is also plagued with bugs. When I started this game (on Xbox One, on retail release day) I spent the whole series of opening cutscenes staring not at what was happening but at a tiny aiming reticle and a HUD compass that were obviously misplaced. The day after, I couldn't login for a couple hours because they pushed out a patch that made it appear to many people as if they were banned from the game. That was fun to sort out on my own. Throughout the game, in the opening mission that was strictly single player and in routine coop multiplayer, I've experienced a lot of movement stuttering and rollback because the networking code can't keep up with the action. I've started missions to find I've been added to someone else's mission in progress, so I don't even get a chance to listen to the briefing dialog, and the game is very aggressive about not letting anyone stray too far from the group. Fall behind for any reason (like picking up collectables or harvesting crafting materials) and it'll give you 10 seconds to catch up before warping you to where everyone else is. I've even been dumped out to the start screen from the single player hub world for no obvious reason.

I've finished Anthem's main mission branch and I don't feel like I need to see much more for the purpose of this review. Anthem, at best, is a functioning video game and too frequently it isn't. Other shlooters have improved over time, and sometimes made radical changes to address problems. I don't know if Bioware can turn this game around. They've communicated a roadmap that extends to May and beyond but it's all new missions, items, and features to be added. Recall that Mass Effect: Andromeda also released in a disaster state with a slate of paid addons planned, and those plans were canceled. They made the game work and dropped everything else to do it. Anthem may never significantly improve on what they published on day one.

What they've released is a mess. I'm a glutton for punishment and I will be keeping tabs on Anthem's progress. I expect to come back in a year and revisit this review. Today, no one should waste their time with this game. I don't hate Anthem or EA but I'm terribly disappointed that this was pushed out in the state it arrived. It feels like it needs another year in the oven to get to an acceptable state.

If you still think you want to brave Anthem's current state, here's a selection of images and videos I've captured to highlight some of the bugs I've seen.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 Nails the flying around in a suit of mech armor aspect

Penalties: -1 vestigial plot, -1 riddled with bugs, -1 barely fun

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10 (just bad)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Bioware (developer). Anthem (Electronic Arts, 2019)