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Even J.Lo in a mech suit can’t save Netflix’s by-the-numbers AI thriller

It tries too hard to be serious.

Atlas takes place almost three decades after an uprising that saw an advanced AI bot named Harlan (Simu Liu) help liberate other machines, who then proceeded to bypass their security protocols and start a war with humanity. This fear extends particularly to a device called a Neural Link ( not to be confused with the Elon Musk-backed Neuralink), which lets a human mind connect directly to an AI companion. Inevitably, Atlas finds herself with no choice but to use a Neural Link to connect to an AI named Smith (Gregory James Cohan) who looks just like Siri and is housed inside of a mech suit ripped right out of Titanfall.

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