ATLAS
Jennifer Lopez suits up to save us from AI in Brad Peyton’s mech-savvy sci-fi…
We’re calling it: “Castaway in space, if Wilson talked back”,’ laughs Canadian filmmaker Brad Peyton. Swap Tom Hanks for Jennifer Lopez and the grubby loincloth for a giant killer robot mech suit, and you’ll have some idea of what Atlas is shaping up to be.
‘Science-fiction is something I’ve been passionate about since I was a kid,’ says the director, speaking from the edit deck of Atlas as he puts the final touches on the film that’s been more than five years in the making.
‘I’m one of those people that’s seen all the Rutger Hauer movies that no one else has seen – I’m that guy. To me, science-fiction is hallowed ground. And because of that, I don’t want to retread what’s been done well before.’
Handed a script about a rogue robot and the woman who, in trying to stop it, gets stranded in an armoured walker on a remote planet, Peyton found the seed of an idea that felt fresh. ‘It was a very rudimentary version of the final film but it had this concept that I loved, which was this woman who doesn’t trust artificial intelligence being trapped inside a mech suit, who then has to befriend another AI if she wants to survive.’
Where arguments around the morality of AI all feel very 2023/2024, Atlas has been in the works since 2019 – back when ChatGPT and Hollywood writers’ strikes hinged around auto-generated scripts were all still science-fiction themselves. ‘When I started the movie, what drew me in wasn’t so much the AI aspect, it was the character of this woman who didn’t trust anyone,’ says Peyton, then fresh from Dwayne Johnson’s Rampage and Netflix’s Daybreak. ‘The conversation that I wanted this film to take part in was technology
being an ever-evolving thing, just like humanity is.’
Into this battlefield comes Jennifer Lopez as agent Atlas Shepherd – crash-landing while tracking a robot gone bad (Simu Liu, channelling the T-1000) and forced to rely on the help of the ‘friendly’ AI sat-nav built into the military mech suit she has to strap into to survive.
‘We’re in a Jen-naissance right now,’ laughs Peyton, who was instantly sold on the idea of casting Lopez in the lead when her name first came up. ‘Jen is known for a lot of things – but she’s mostly known for being fearless and being a hard worker, and those are two things that I really latched on to for this role. And I say that because this shoot was very strange. It’s not a normal movie. Eight weeks of this was Jennifer by herself, stood on a huge gimbal in the middle of an empty warehouse...’
