Jennifer Lopez's new Netflix sci-fi movie Atlas was loosely inspired by Titanfall, like many assumed after the mech suit-filled first trailer debuted online a few weeks back. According to director Brad Peyton, though, it's more "Cast Away in Space" than first-person shooter video game...
"Science-fiction is something I've been passionate about since I was a kid," the filmmaker, whose previous works include San Andreas and Rampage, tells Total Film in our new issue out on Thursday April 25, which features Furiosa on the cover. "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.
"So that was Avatar, Aliens... Titanfall, a few other old movies I loved from the 80s – and then to make sure the scale of mine was different," Peyton continues. "The shape of mine was different. The movement was different. I wanted this to be its own thing."
Also starring Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' Simu Liu, Once Upon A Time's Lana Parrilla, American Fiction's Sterling K. Brown, and Mark Strong, Atlas follows Shepherd (Lopez), "a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence", as she signs up to a team tasked with capturing a renegade robot with whom she shares a complicated history.
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When things go sideways, though, Atlas' finds herself isolated in space and her "only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it." Essentially, Lopez is Tom Hanks and, well, the AI is... Wilson.
Atlas releases on Netflix on May 24. You can read more about it and a whole lot else besides in the new issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, April 25.
Check out the covers below:
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