Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi adventure The Electric State adapts a much-loved art book by Simon Stalenhag. Or does it? We weigh up what counts as an adaptation.
Does Netflix read YouTube comments? If so, it’s a wonder what it makes of the 2,200 (and counting) responses beneath the debut trailer for its upcoming movie, The Electric State. They’re not what you’d call enthusiastic.
“It’s literally an art book,” reads one. “How did they make it look so wrong.”
“The tone looks nothing like the book whatsoever,” reads another. “I loved the hopeless, lonely, and dystopian feel of the source material.”
It’s churlish to judge a film too harshly based on its marketing, of course, but watching the 147-second promo for Netflix’s upcoming, (reported) $320m sci-fi adventure raises a number of questions. Most pressingly: why option Swedish artist and author Simon Stalenhag’s graphic novel of the same name if you aren’t going to bother adapting it?
The broad strokes are there at first glance. The Electric State is, like its source material, set in an alternate version of late 1990s USA. Society has, following some form of high-tech civil war, completely collapsed, leaving the landscape strewn with the shattered husks of gigantic robots and flying machines. The story’s largely told from the perspective of a teenager named Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown in the film), who’s on a journey across the Mojave desert with a silent, childlike robot companion named Skip.
Beyond that, the movie adaptation – directed by the Russo brothers and written by Marvel regulars Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely – appears to diverge significantly from the graphic novel. In Stalenhag’s story, robots and drones are controlled by humans via a device called a Neurocaster, which looks like a virtual reality helmet. Created by a gigantic tech firm called Sentre, Neurocasters began as a piece of military hardware before their usage spilled out into the wider population. The Neurocaster turned out to be so highly addictive that humans became lost in it, neglecting themselves to such an extent that they either starved to death or roamed the land like be-helmeted zombies, all consumed by some form of hive intelligence.
In the movie, the Neurocaster helmets are still ubiquitous, but they weren’t used to fight a disastrous, drone-powered civil war. Instead, the Russos have opted to graft in another robot uprising, the staple of everything from Karel Capek’s seminal play Rossum’s Universal Robots (referenced in DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot, out now), to 2004’s action thriller I, Robot (another very loose adaptation of its source text) and more besides.
As significant as the story changes, though, is the film’s seeming shift in tone. The Electric State book told a minimal, lonely story about two figures dwarfed by an extraordinary landscape, their destination and mission initially left obscure. The movie, if the trailer’s an accurate depiction, is a breezy adventure about a fresh-faced kid on a quest to find her missing brother. Where the Michelle of the graphic novel was largely on her own for much of the story, Millie Bobby Brown’s character is surrounded by colourful friends who all quip and bicker in that distinctly Marvel-feeling way. The Russos have even roped in Chris Pratt – by now Hollywood’s go-to generic action guy – to press home the film’s blockbuster credentials.
In terms of a shift in style and tone, it’s akin to taking Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and turning its hauntingly, brutally minimal prose into an Amblin-style summer movie starring Dwayne Johnson and a CGI canine sidekick. Or taking Naughty Dog’s hit videogame The Last Of Us and adapting it into a post-apocalyptic stoner comedy about a sentient mushroom uprising. Sure, you could do either of these. But why even bother optioning the original source material in the first place?
Admittedly, it’s quite possible that the finished film is less goofy and kitsch than the trailer implies. But given that its writers have evidently thrown in about a dozen characters that weren’t in the graphic novel – including Giancarlo Esposito playing an ambulating television – and it’s clear that more than a few liberties have been taken. As for the trailer’s use of Oasis’ ode to the restorative powers of powdered substances, Champagne Supernova – well, we can only assume this is some oblique reference to the addictive power of those Neurocaster headsets.
Beautifully rendered and written, Stalenhag’s original story was at least partly about the all-consuming allure of technology and how rushing headlong into a deeply interconnected future might be a bad idea – particularly when that technology is made by gigantic corporations who care more about profits than consequences. It’s possible that the sentiment hit a little too close to home for Netflix.
The Electric State will stream on Netflix from the 14th March 2025.
