Yet while Lopez throws herself into the role of Atlas, everyone around her visibly struggles to maintain a straight face. They include Simu Liu (Marvel’s Shang-Chi) as evil robot overlord Harlan – a mash-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator and a smart speaker on your coffee table.
Harlan was created by Atlas’s mother (Lana Parrilla), a naive scientist who, having apparently never watched a science fiction movie or played a video game, did not anticipate the machines rising up against their creators. Of course, Harlan did precisely that and led his fellow AI in a war against humankind.
Decades later, Harlan has been tracked to a planet lightyears from Earth. Having known the bad bot since her childhood, Atlas agrees to accompany the marine squad sent to take him out. These sequences with the marines (whose leader is played with palpable reluctance by Sterling K Brown) are a shameless homage to James Cameron’s Aliens. Here, Lopez inherits the Sigourney Weaver role of the shell-shocked veteran who knows they’re all going to die.
As she expected, things don’t go according to plan, and the story descends into a noisy extended action scene. The CGI is iffy, the plot twists absurd. The dialogue, meanwhile, contains more cardboard than a recycling centre. “Atlas, I admit that I underestimated you – but it does not matter,” one of Harlan’s minions.
Still, the entire affair is powered by a B-movie air of cheesy fun, and Lopez makes for a convincing high-kicking heroine when she buddies up with the mech robot snappily voiced by Gregory James Cohan. It’s an action film an AI could have scripted but you’d have to have a circuit loose not to get caught up in the high-octane silliness.
PG-13 1hr 58min; streaming on Netflix now