J-Lo's banter and CGI crash and burn in this big-budget misfire

You wouldn't know it. Atlas has some of the worst CGI I've ever seen.

Backgrounds and even foregrounds look like bad matte paintings from the pre-digital era, space battles look like video games - it's hard to know where the budget went. It's a comment on the state of movie costs that $100 million isn't even a remarkable sum nowadays: budgets two and three times that are common.

Presumably a lot of money and time and effort went into the creation of the mech-suits that the military characters operate. They generally look good, but too much of the rest is so poorly done, it's distracting.

Screenwriters Leo Sardarian and Aron Eli Coleite have tossed together a bunch of ideas familiar from other movies - Aliens, and the Terminator series, to name two - and haven't done much interesting or novel with them. The film is overlong and while undemandingly watchable, is certainly not inspired or essential to see.

Atlas begins well enough, efficiently filling in the backstory. Renegade robot Harlan (Simu Lu from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) led an AI rebellion 28 years earlier, killing millions of people before an international coalition fought back (it's good to see there's something can unite countries).

Harlan fled from Earth but there's always the possibility he (it? the actor is a man so let's go with the male pronoun) will come back for more.

Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez) is a top cyber analyst who's misanthropic and fiercely against artificial intelligence (though she's not averse to the high-tech coffee maker, chess set and other gadgets in her apartment). She also has a connection with Harlan - not revealed until later in the film - that's behind her anti-AI attitude. When Casca (Abraham Popoola), a Harlan sleeper agent, is captured, Atlas comes to interrogate him. She finds out that Harlan is in the Andromeda galaxy.

So far, so good. Atlas demands to go on the ensuing mission to capture Harlan, making the reasonable point that she knows him better than anyone.

But then things deteriorate. Atlas will eventually wind up in one of those mechs, despite never having operated one before - didn't anyone think of that? - and she manages to gain some control over it.

However, unlike her comrades, she refuses to interface her mind with the onboard AI system, imaginatively named Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan), so both can operate at peak efficiency.

It takes a long time for her to accept that the mindmeld is going to be the best, if not only, way to survive and, possibly, deal with Harlan. A very long time.

Meanwhile, we're treated to a lot of not-so-witty banter between Atlas and Smith as the latter tries to get to know and adjust to his human - learning lots of swear words as she is quite a grump. We get some philosophical discussions and attempts to show they're bonding, but nothing memorable.

Director Brad Peyton's previous films include Cats and Dogs: the Revenge of Kitty Galore and San Andreas (a sequel to which is in the works) so he should know his way around action movies and combining live action and CGI.

Apparently the video game Titanfall was an inspiration for this film and with the mechs playing such a big role, that's easy to believe.

Jennifer Lopez seems to get a lot of flak, for both her professional and personal activities, and if you're not fond of her, you really won't like this movie. A lot of the movie takes place in the cockpit of the mech, so there's a lot of J-Lo to enjoy, or not.

She isn't bad, considering what she has to work with here, which isn't much.