The star plays a data analyst forced to team up with an AI robot in order to prevent an apocalypse orchestrated by a different AI robot in Brad Peyton’s film co-starring Sterling K. Brown.

Technically, Atlas is a sci-fi flick. Set some unspecified number of years in the future, the Brad Peyton-directed feature concerns a data analyst (Jennifer Lopez) tasked with stopping “the world’s first AI terrorist,” a robot named Harlan (Simu Liu) who’d broken his own programming to orchestrate the slaughter of millions.

Like its prickly heroine, though, Atlas takes time to reveal its true self. The first act plays like a glossier ripoff of Aliens, with Atlas being recruited by international military general Booth (Mark Strong) to help corner Harlan on the remote planet he’s been hiding on for the past 28 years. Not only is Atlas a genius, as telegraphed by a morning routine that includes beating her holographic virtual assistant at chess for the 71st game in a row. She knows Harlan more intimately than perhaps any living soul: The daughter of his late creator (Lana Parilla), she’s the closest thing he has to a sister.

It is here that Atlas‘ real journey finally reveals itself. Atlas and Smith press on with their original mission to neutralize Harlan, under relentless attack from his forces. But long stretches of the two-hour run time see Atlas alone in her suit with only Smith for company. She lets her guard down bit by bit, opening up about her childhood and engaging in friendly-ish debate about what counts as life. He grows more fluent in her native language of sarcasm. We might not be rooting for them to kiss — honestly, I don’t even know how that’d work — but Cohan and Lopez’s chemistry elevates otherwise unremarkable dialogue into passably amusing, occasionally touching banter.

As the danger around them intensifies, so does their connection. Atlas and Smith inch closer to 100% synchronization, at which point they will become, as Banks had previously explained, “not human or AI but something new, a perfect symbiosis.” This looks much less cool than it sounds; onscreen, it primarily manifests as an annoying habit of finishing each other’s sentences.

Atlas demonstrates very little curiosity in general about the social or philosophical issues raised by its premise. What’s to prevent the current generation of androids from going rogue as Harlan once did? Atlas vaguely explains the new models are just “better.” Who are the AIs without their homo sapiens counterparts? We never meet any solo AIs but Harlan. How did our relationship to technology change after Harlan broke so many machines free of their programming? We don’t see enough of everyday life in this world to guess.

The interstellar conflict comes to a head, of course, in the last and longest of the movie’s polished but totally unmemorable CG-heavy action sequences. But its emotional climax arrives just afterward in the form of a heartfelt speech extolling, among other things, “small quiet gestures of affection.”

For a futuristic, planet-hopping adventure, Atlas feels awfully tiny; as a romance (minus the actual romance), it treads no new emotional terrain. But there’s something oddly relatable, even romantic about its hope that healing one’s heart might be the first step in saving the world.