FULL METAL JACKET

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.’

‘Eight weeks of this was Jennifer by herself, stood on ahuge gimbal in the middle of an empty warehouse’

BRAD PEYTON

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...’

Exteriors took the production to explosive battlefield sets in New Zealand – and brought in support from the likes of Sterling K. Brown and Mark Strong – but the majority of the film saw Lopez acting alone, strapped into a metal armature surrounded by enough cameras to capture every moment of her solo survival story.

‘People are gonna think I’m totally nuts, but what was great about that set-up was that we built the perfect stage for Jennifer to perform in,’ says Peyton. ‘I had a couple of markers in place – little wires and sticks so she knew where certain buttons were – but once she had the hand movements figured out, I pulled those away. She was thrown by all the cameras at first, but once she got used to it she really embraced the freedom. She didn’t have to lock in any eyelines, and she was free to do whatever she wanted. It was an endless stage for creativity. It allowed us to capture what I think is one of the best performances of her career.’

Almost as much a main character, the robo-suit (called an ‘Ark’ here) needed enough of its own identity to stand out from the sci-fi crowd, as well as looking and feeling like a fully functional mecha that Atlas lives, fights and survives in for almost the entire film.

‘My general approach was to look at everything that I could find that already existed,’ says Peyton. ‘So that was Avatar, Aliens, [videogame] Titanfall, a few other old movies I loved from the 80s – and then to make sure the scale of mine was different. The shape of mine was different. The movement was different. I wanted this to be its own thing.

‘We started out looking at Virgil Abloh’s fashion designs. At the interior for his Mercedes Maybach. When we designed it, we actually started with an F-15 and then thought about the lineage from there, so it had a timeline that was grounded in reality. I think I drove the design team a little crazy!’ Originally hired just to feed lines to Lopez on set, Gregory James Cohan became the final voice of ‘Smith’, the suit’s own AI, becoming the last piece of the odd sort-of-solo mission at the heart of Atlas, described as much as a ‘funny buddy-cop movie’ as a tough-as-nails survival adventure that tackles real-world heartache.

‘I think people will go into it thinking, “Yeah, this is a big robot thing with Jennifer Lopez… it’ll be fun, whatever”, but then they’ll come out feeling genuinely emotional, and that’s the biggest reward for me,’ says Peyton. That, and the working scale model of the Ark suit that’s now sitting in his office – a gift from the design team he drove so mad in getting it right. ‘It’s literally the coolest thing ever…’

ATLAS STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM 24 MAY.