‘Atlas’ May Be One Of the Last Netflix Original Movies of Its Kind: Bloated, Bad, and Expensive

Atlas—the new Jennifer Lopez Netflix movie that began streaming today—is bad. This won’t come as a shock to anyone who has ever watched any of Netflix’s big-budget sci-fi action flicks. (Rebel Moon, The Adam Project, Army of the Dead, Project Power, Bright—just to name a few.) They are, with few exceptions, bad movies. They are bloated, confusing, boring, green-screen-laden messes. But there is good news: Netflix’s new head of film, Dan Lin, has promised an era of “fewer and better” Netflix original movies. We can only hope this means Atlas might be the last of its kind.

Atlas stars Lopez as a prickly data analyst in a distant future, in which evil AI robots have waged war on humanity. Lopez’s character, Atlas Shepherd, ends up stranded on an alien planet inside an AI-powered robo-suit. She’s the only hope to stop the evil AI robot (Simu Liu), but first she has to learn to trust the good, helpful AI robot (voiced by Gregory James Cohan).

It’s kind of like Westworld, if instead of moody, brilliant world-building, Westworld had opened with a hackneyed joke about how no one uses paper anymore. (Someone razzes Lopez for handing out print-outs by exclaiming, “Paper? Where’d you get the printer?” with a smirk. His buddies crack up like this is the funniest joke they’ve ever heard. You can’t make this stuff up!) Lopez spends most of the movie in a small mechanical pod, marching in place in front of a green screen, arguing with a Siri rip-off. It’s very silly, but the movie treats it very seriously. The result is—you guessed it!—bad.

Atlas was directed by Brad Peyton (known for his collabs with Dwayne Johnson, Rampage and San Andres), with a script by Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite. There hasn’t yet been concrete reporting on the film’s production budget, but it’s rumored to be around $100 million, based on the California tax credit the film received. That number would put Atlas on the list of Netflix’s most expensive original films list, which is topped by The Gray Man at $200 million.

Also on that list are similarly tiresome, CGI-heavy sci-fi-action movies including Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon (a combined, estimate budget of $166 million for both parts), Ryan Reynold’s The Adam Project (around $116 million), and Will Smith’s Bright (around $90 million). Critics don’t like these movies, generally. They don’t look good. They’re tedious. Cliché. All of the above listed films have less 70 percent on the review aggregation site, Rotten Tomatoes.

Audiences and critics often disagree, of course. But there’s evidence that Netflix is beginning to feel the cost of these stinkers is not worth the weeks the films spend on the streamer’s “trending titles” list. There are rumblings that the streamer might stop throwing money at movies that are at least 80 percent bad CGI and effects. All I can say to that is: Please, God, yes.

According to a recent Hollywood Reporter feature, these expensive, bad movies will be much fewer and far between under the direction of Dan Lin, who took over for Scott Stuber as Netflix’s top film boss in April. That feature reports that “insiders” say, under Lin, Netflix will shift focus to “a majority of midsized offerings, with the streamer having found its biggest hits with comedies, rom-coms and family films,” and a few “big movies,” as well as highbrow films from big directors targeted toward award season.

Big-budget, sci-fi and action flicks are noticeably absent from the list. Lin—who comes from his own company Rideback (Sherlock Holmes, The Lego Movie, IT: Chapter 2)—has a reputation for frugality, so that makes sense. After all, Rebel Moon Part One got about half the views as Netflix’s mid-budget thriller, Leave the World Behind, and cost far more.

It’s all speculation, of course. Maybe Netflix will find that Atlas pays off. The last Lopez-led action movie, The Mother, became one of the streamer’s most popular original films, and Lopez’s considerable star power might work its magic again. Maybe that will prompt Lin to greenlight a dozen more boring, generic, blurry space movies that yours truly will have to sit through in the coming years. There’s already at least one more Netflix action film, Jessica Alba’s Trigger Warning, coming to the streamer next month. (That said, it looks more mid-budget than big-budget.)

But here’s to hoping Atlas is the beginning of the end for Netflix’s bloated, bad, sci-fi money sucks. May we never have to watch a movie star march in place in front of a green screen again.