Atlas (2024) is lousy with unconvincing CGI visual effects and nonsensical plot points, yet the least realistic, hardest thing to believe about it is Jennifer Lopez as a super tech wiz. Atlas Shepherd is supposed to be exceedingly smart. We know that because she’s on a 71-0 chess-match winning streak against her home AI system. Even if chess proficiency were a marker of a superior intellect, how do we know Atlas didn’t program the computer to lose on purpose? Another sign of Atlas’s alleged genius is when she finds out the whereabouts of rogue humanoid artificial intelligence Harlan (Simu Liu) by tricking Harlan’s main henchman. “When you thought I found Harlan in your code, you checked to make sure that I didn’t. Your fear led me right to him.” You’d think a brilliant mind like Atlas would know robots don’t have emotions. That alone should have tipped her off that it was a trap. That and the fact that the henchman chose to reemerge after a long time under a recognizable likeness that would quickly lead to its capture, instead of uploading itself onto a different body. The filmmakers aren’t as clever as they fancied themselves to be either. Harlan’s henchman is called Casca Decius (Abraham Popoola), after Publius Servilius Casca and Gaius Messius Quintus Trajanus Decius. What’s more evil than a killer of Julius Caesar and a persecutor of Christians? I appreciate the esoteric references, but neither makes sense in this context. Caesar was a great man in many respects, and his assassins are synonymous with treason; then again, Caesar was also a genocidal maniac who bragged about killing a million people and enslaving a million more — surely his killers couldn’t have been entirely wrong. Furthermore, Atlas does not present a Terminator-like scenario; humans are not a minority persecuted by machines. At most, the AIs are a fringe, fanatic terrorist cell — if anyone has a thematic connection to early Christians, it’s them. Atlas learns that Harlan has absconded to a deserted planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. Never mind how Harlan got along in terms of energy and maintenance — traveling at the speed of light (the fastest speed there is), it would take 2.5 million years to reach the Andromeda Galaxy. Somehow, it took Harlan no more than 28 years, and an “International Coalition of Nations” military mission much less time, to get there from Earth. There appears to be some sort of wormhole technology at play here, but since Harlan chose this planet for instability and inhospitality to humans rather than for distance (an obviously non-existent concept in the world of this movie), there was no need for the filmmakers to move the action to an entirely different galaxy. Humans having mastered intergalactic travel makes it difficult to believe they’re having trouble with a puny artificial intelligence — but then what part of this film doesn’t strain credibility?