Of course Netflix is making a film about learning to love AI

The logline for Netflix’s upcoming film, Atlas, reads, “Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.” Which begs the question… did an AI write this?

Technically, no. The film was penned by Leo Sardarian (StartUp) and Aron Eli Coleite (The Spiderwick Chronicles), and directed by Brad Peyton (San Andreas), who are all, as far as this writer can tell, human. But that fact doesn’t really diminish the whole “please bow to our robot overlords” vibe this project is giving, especially considering the fact that Netflix just made headlines for using undisclosed generative AI to manipulate photos in a documentary of all things.

The film’s first trailer, which Netflix dropped today, pretty much covers the entire arc detailed above. Lopez—looking as at home in this CGI-space romp as she did in her own CGI semi-biopic—is forced to team with an AI named Smith to take down a different AI named Harlan (played by a glowing-contact-wearing Simu Liu), who she’s been hunting her whole life. Also, if you couldn’t already surmise Atlas and Harlan’s “mysterious connection” from the logline, IMDb straight up spoils what seems to be the film’s central twist, so proceed with either caution or curiosity depending on how you feel about courting the scorn of the robots in your computer.

Atlas has a pretty stacked cast beyond just Lopez and Liu. Sterling K. Brown and Mark Strong also show up in the trailer, along with Gregory James Cohan, Abraham Popoola, and Lana Parrilla. Atlas hits Netflix May 24.