A Love Story

Jennifer Lopez has always led with her heart. Now, newly wed and about to release a highly personal album, she has achieved something hard-won: true happiness.

- By Rob Haskell. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz

On a disquietingly hot and windy October day at the outer edges of the San Fernando Valley, Jennifer Lopez—who has never been accused of lacking ambition—is saving the world. Not this world, though it surely also needs saving, but an imagined dystopia some century ahead in which robots, according to their frustrating custom, threaten the human race.

“To me, it’s a love story,” says Lopez, and she laughs.

She laughs because of course she would see it thus, because love is her big project in this world, her messy, public, decades-long, sometimes glamorous, sometimes treacherous, often thwarted project, the lens that when it comes down over her eyes can’t help but turn everything as pink as the sixcarat diamond with which Ben Affleck proposed to her the first time, in 2002. But Atlas—the movie she is shooting today, part of a new deal between her film company, Nuyorican Productions, and Netflix—isn’t most people’s idea of a love story. In fact, it’s a straight-up sci-fi action thriller, in which Lopez plays a military intelligence analyst assigned to reconfigure a potentially lethal form of artificial intelligence. Though the costumery is more Mad Max than Wedding Planner, scholars of the Jennifer Lopez catalog will find in Atlas’s protagonist a familiar character: the headstrong careerist with little time for life’s mushier feelings until the right man (or droid) comes along.