According to Atlas director, Jennifer Lopez’s dancing talent was the key to working as a Mech

A life full of science fiction, video games and comics led director Brad Peyton to the job of a lifetime: directing Jennifer Lopez in a damn mech-suit movie. Atlaswhich is now streaming on Netflix, was an easy yes: With two high-budget films by Dwayne Johnson in its luggage, Rampage And San AndreasPeyton was no stranger to A-list spectacle. Still, the film was an intimidating prospect for someone with a deep love of mech suits, mech tanks, oversized mechas, and all the contrived classifications in between.

“I was very I was aware of what had come out before me,” says Peyton. The director quotes James Cameron’s Aliens And User image as obvious but undeniable milestones in the art of on-screen mechs. He knew the Titanfall games put pressure on any new live-action attempt, as they allowed for a complete immersion in the experience of mech combat. But as he began to imagine how to reimagine mechs, he returned to the first piece of mecha media that really blew him away: Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox.

Peyton can’t explain exactly why Robot Jox was his holy grail, but when you talk to him, it’s obvious: Like Gordon’s stunning vision of the future, in which Earth’s conflicts are settled by colorful mech duels, Atlas needed a clear, well-defined logic that would ground the world-building, but also give him the opportunity to really get going with the action that would excite his inner child. And at the end of the day, he had to be original.

“My biggest problem was: I knew I had to get rid of everything,” says Peyton. “I had no interest in repeating myself. I said: Pac Rim‘S [mechs] Are The big. In User imageThey are The big. In Titanfall, They are The big. So mine will be The big. This one could be square and blocky, so mine will be round. I come from an animation background. A lot of it started with me sketching the silhouette and thinking about how I could make it unique and different.”

Atlas is set in a relatively sunny future that is still in the shadow of an impending apocalypse. Decades ago, a renegade artificial intelligence named Harlan (Shang Chi‘s Simu Liu) fled Earth to an alien planet with the intention of one day returning and destroying humanity. When scientists discover Harlan’s whereabouts, Terran forces launch a mission to take the fight to the robot army’s doorstep. Leading the attack is Atlas Shepherd (Lopez), a data analyst recruited to take on Harlan like Jack Ryan. Of course, the attack doesn’t go as smoothly as the Earthlings hope, and Atlas must reluctantly slip into an AI-controlled mech suit to survive on an alien planet populated by androids who want them dead.

The grounded futurism of Atlas“Earth led Peyton and his creative team to extrapolate current military technology for the mech’s design. Rounded edges and exhaust pipes come from F-18 aircraft. The internal control panels were built for theoretical functionality.

“I had to understand the whole technology from the ground up,” says Peyton. “Because of my experience on San Andreaswhere I had to understand how a helicopter works in detail to tell Dwayne which buttons to press and which not to press – at least if he listened to me! – I took that experience and wanted to have a similar experience for [Lopez]. I explained to the art department why there are screens in certain places and why there are holograms in other places. And then on the day itself, I give her little wires that say, ‘This is this screen. There’s the screen.’ After I went through the blocking, I pulled them away and she had to remember where they were.”

Drawings and schematics were only half the battle. After Peyton had a design in place, he set about bringing his vision to life. Since he had an animation background, that meant animating various walking cycles to see if the bipedal machine could move properly.

“The first few drafts we had when we were animating them to see how they would work – very simple animation, walking, running, walking, jogging, running – looked so clunky and awful,” says Peyton. The animation team found a groove when it came to illustrating the dynamic between man and machine.”[The mechs] are intuitive devices. The concept I came up with was that the soldier is the brain. It doesn’t have to be super-powerful. It’s not a simple soldier – the machine is the simple soldier. It’s the emotional cognitive device that syncs up with this thing. So it has to be able to be as fluid as a person trained in it.”

As Atlas traverses the biomes of Harlan’s base planet – from snow-covered tundras to swamps inspired by Peyton’s love of Return of the Jedi — the film’s heroine relaxes her “no AI” stance and forms a cognitive link with her mech’s digital interface. Like a twist on the buddy cop movie, the two team up for survival, resulting in more fluid mech movements. At the beginning, Atlas may be stumbling around a cliff. By the end, she’s running, rolling, and beating robot attackers to the punch with mech-fu. The early walk-cycle tests came in handy for the dramatic development, which Peyton was able to program into a giant soundstage gimbal that replaced the mech suit. Lopez was surprisingly well-suited to the demands of the mech choreography.

“Her background as a dancer has allowed her to assess this really quickly,” says Peyton. “As much as she looks like she’s going to walk, [the mech] leads her and she has to react as if she were walking. So her training as a dancer has enabled her to go straight into it.”

It also helps that Lopez regularly performs alone in front of thousands of people on a stadium stage. Peyton says Atlas It turned out to be one of the most demanding shoots of his career, simply because Lopez performed alone for six to seven weeks on a gimbal rig that was completely painted over with plate shots, VFX environments and other action sequences shot elsewhere. Occasionally, voice actor Gregory James Cohan would step in to speak the dialogue of Smith, her AI companion.

All the prep work that went into creating a ‘Mech capable of real combat and finding a star to pilot it was all about shaking up the audience, Peyton says. The first time we see the ‘Mechs in action is not an act of bravery; they are ambushed mid-flight. The carrier ship goes down – and Atlas in her gear. Peyton’s imagination was buzzing with possibilities, as the finished sequence shows. “[The mech] would tumble, spin, get hit by debris. What would it be like to be trapped in that tin can? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? And once I’ve had that experience, how can I up the ante? What if I fall through black clouds and basically get into a WWII-style dogfight, only with mechs and drones? […] This is just the first, I don’t know, 20 seconds of a two-minute sequence.

“That’s how I design,” he says. “I want to surprise you. I want to give you something you can’t see anywhere else.”

Atlas is now streaming on Netflix.