Just watched two movies in a row that are worlds apart and yet surprisingly in sync. The first was the steampunk adaptation City of Ember (2008) and the second was the excessively AI-heavy Atlas (2024). Both hit the mark, however, because they understood the need for equal opposites, pairing a male and female protagonist in the service of a common goal. Let’s hope the rest of entertainment land, if not the Western world, takes heed!

By Emad Aysha
City of Ember begins with the world coming to an end, and what’s left of mankind building an underground city to preserve a kernel of humanity and rise again after an arbitrarily chosen 200 years. I didn’t get positive vibes from this feature, given the annoying-cute cast, with Saoirse Ronan as Lina Mayfleet and Harry Treadaway as Doon Harrow.

PATRONISING POLITICS: Bill Murry as Mayor Cole, a man who's secretly built a bunker for when everything fails on his watch.

Lina and Doon are childhood friends and trade jobs when they get their random assignments. He ends up being a water pipe fixer and she a messenger. Fortunately, his father is an engineer and former rebel, and she’s the descendant of a former mayor who was entrusted with a box set with a 200-year timelock.

The box contains instructions on how to get topside, without getting killed. This couldn’t have come at a better time, since the city is crumbling, with food shortages and power blackouts.

The current mayor, hilariously played by Bill Murray, is also corrupt, hoarding food and trying to find a way to get topside himself.

I won’t bore you with the details, but you realise with time that Lina and Doon can’t make it by themselves, both completing each other’s abilities to solve the puzzle of the past. They also represent a family unit since Lina has her kid sister too, with her father dying while trying to escape.

Likewise Doon’s mother is dead, so more yin and yang antics are going on. Synchronicity also operates between young and old, since Doon’s boss is an old-timer who doesn’t ask questions but is nonetheless experienced. In contrast, Doon follows his curiosity but needs the old man's help at one point.

Enter the Netflix production Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez as Atlas Shepherd, a computer analyst at war with AI after a rogue android her mother designed declared war on humanity. The AI, Harlan Shepherd (Simu Liu), is designated a terrorist and killed her mom when she was a little girl. She’s dedicated her life to beating him since then.

28 years later, they finally find out where he hides, on a hostile alien world, and they send a ship with a ranger team armed with robot suits to take him down. Typically, Atlas is on board, for revenge, and it all goes awry.

The only thing that saves her is her mecha suit, piloted by an AI named Smith. (A tribute to Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith?) The catch is she refuses to sync with him, lest he access her inner secrets and influence her.

EMOTIONAL MUSCLE: JLo in 2025, still a looker and somebody who can act with her facial expressions and body language better than she can with lines.

That’s how Harlan broke his programming the first time. But with Earth at stake, she finally does the unthinkable, and they can just about defeat Harlan.

I wondered why the default AI had a male voice. The mecha suit for the ranger commander, Colonel Elias Banks (Sterling K. Brown), is female. The ranger team are also multiracial, with men and women, representing the best that humanity has to offer.

The same goes for the UN-type military alliance they work for. But it’s the male-female pairing that makes things work, just like the syncing makes Atlas and Smith more than the sum of their parts.

In one of the more touching scenes in the movie, you find Atlas talking about her now-absent dad, an outdoorsy type who loved camping and nature. His wife’s obsession with AI, however, drove him away. And it was this same obsession that led the young Atlas to free Harlan inadvertently.

Elias is overly macho but learns to be humbled when his plans go wrong and comes to have faith in Atlas. She learns to respect his heroism and can’t fight back and escape without his help.

There are hints at religion and fate here too since Smith believes all things are alive, part of an invisible network of energy that persists beyond death, while Atlas is the avowed materialist atheist.

Harlan likewise believes his creation and freeing, by Atlas, was meant for a reason – to save the earth from humanity’s self-destructive tendencies. His troops likewise are multiracial. Disturbingly, he wants to lead what’s left of humanity on a cleansed earth, since AI is the better mirror image of man.

Atlas wins in the end and attains her dream of becoming a ranger, paired with a Smith once more. She also gets a pet plant, which she discovered and named on the alien world. A bit cutsy, I know, but the action, snazzy and exotic alien landscapes and the humour do sell you on the premise.

That puts it in the same category as City of Ember, amazingly enough, since nature topside has flourished and the skies are blue once again, with lush vegetation and oversized animals.

Something else I noticed is that the older movie is 1.5 hours long, whereas the Lopez flick is 2 hours long!

UNDERCLASS OF THEIR OWN: Harry Treadaway and Saoirse Ronan in handknit but colourfully Dickensian clothes, another addition to the steampunk ethic of this delightful picture.

Could it be that studios are realising that longer movies are okay, given the ubiquity of the pause button at home, and cinema is following suit? Project Hail Mary was 2 and a half hours long, and you didn’t feel the time at all, given how intriguing, exciting, and heart-warming it all was.

There’s hope for us all. It’s an indicator that Hollywood and streaming services are beginning to regain some confidence in themselves, and the audience.

The same for the male/female dynamics. You can be a feminist all you like, but the simple fact of the matter is that entertainment works best when you have banter and likeable contrasts and character growth in tandem.

If AI can tame Jennifer Lopez’s ego, then there really is hope for us all!