The Russo brothers move from Marvel to maximalist sci-fi action with The Electric State, on Netflix this week. Here’s our review:
The trailers were not misleading. They promised a big, frothy sci-fi action adventure, peppered with 1990s nostalgia and Marvel-style quips, and that’s exactly what Netflix gives us with The Electric State. Directed by the Russo brothers, it’s essentially a high-concept summer blockbuster – except it isn’t the summer, and it’ll be playing on your television (or mobile phone) rather than on a cinema screen. (Universal Studios was set to distribute, but the film was later sold to Netflix.)
What’s perplexing about The Electric State is that it’s nominally adapted from the visual novel of the same name by artist Simon Stalenhag. His book was a melancholy trek across a dystopian, post-apocalyptic America, its pages dripping with atmosphere rather than big, colourful action. The Russos and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely handle Stalenhag’s work in much the same way that, say, director Rob Letterman treated Gulliver’s Travels in 2010. It’s less a respectful adaptation than a loose jumping-off point; a $300m-ish vehicle for stars Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt.
A few visual allusions aside, The Electric State feels closer in style to Gareth Edwards’ 2023 sci-fi thriller, The Creator – particularly in its opening news footage, which details an alternate past in which Disney Imagineers created sentient robots which later demanded freedom from their servitude. A war between humans and machines ensued, with humans ultimately winning the conflict thanks to the invention of a billionaire industrialist named Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci). His company, Sentre, created a kind of VR headset which allows users to remotely control humanoid machines, thus allowing our species to fight the robots on an equal footing.
Read more: The Electric State on Netflix | When is an adaptation not an adaptation?
The war has left America strewn with the remains of robots large and small, many of them still bearing the garish paint and cartoon eyes of the company mascots they used to embody. By 1994, surviving robots have been rounded up and kept in a walled exclusion zone, much like the ones seen in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) or Edwards’ Monsters (2010). Meanwhile, Sentre’s Neurocaster helmets have filtered out to the wider population, and the tech has proven so absorbing that US citizens spend hours in a virtual world and essentially under the zombified control of Stanley Tucci’s Steve Jobs-like tech CEO.
Against this backdrop, we meet Millie Bobby Brown’s rebellious teenager Michelle, who finds an escaped, bobble-headed robot in her trash-strewn back garden one afternoon and sets off on an adventure. The robot, named Cosmo (Alan Tudyk) appears to contain the consciousness of her maths genius brother, whom she previously thought had died in a car accident years earlier. Under Cosmo’s prompting, she heads into the exclusion zone to find answers, roping in a Gen-X slacker named Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot sidekick Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie) for maximum banter potential.
In such movies as Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame, the Russos made light work of juggling huge ensemble casts and sprawling action set-pieces. In The Electric State, that level of control seems to escape them; for what is on paper a road trip movie, it spends an awful long time not heading anywhere in particular.
The characters are part of the problem. Pratt is given little to work with, and instead falls back on his old Guardians Of The Galaxy charm but to diminishing effect; Herm, his mechanical buddy, feels like a similarly seen-it-before amalgam of Groot and Rocket Raccoon.
The villains have an even harder time of it; the usually brilliant Giancarlo Esposito spends the entire film with his head trapped inside a VR helmet. As the cool-sounding Butcher of Schenectady, Esposito plays a robot bounty hunter with a 2D graphic of his own expressionless face projected onto it. The results are about as intimidating as that sounds.
Millie Bobby Brown fares a little better, but that’s largely because she gets a handful of flashback sequences with Woody Norman, who plays her brother. There’s a sincerity and chemistry to these moments that is in such marked contrast to the CG-heavy glibness elsewhere that they almost feel as though they were edited in from a separate production.
This is, after all, a film that spends more time rounding out the personality and opinions of a robot based on the real-world Planters Peanuts mascot. Where an Oscar-winning actor like Ke Huy Quan is frittered away on a nothing scientist role, Mr Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) is given long speeches and even the heroic fight scene befitting a brave corporate logo. (The Electric State also ropes in other celebrities to voice its doe-eyed robots, including Colman Domingo and Brian Cox.)
There are positives to be found in The Electric State, but many of them originated in Stalenhag’s book. The shots of huge, ungainly robot husks strewn over deserts and shattered buildings still have real power, and its 90s retro-futurism has a certain charm, even if you could nitpick at some details (not least all the ill-fitting wigs – the film’s designers seemed to be labouring under the thinking that everyone in the 1990s had straggly permed hair).
The visual effects are similarly impressive, with the joins between practical and CGI robots being almost impossible to spot. But again, it’s all in service to an Amblin-esque adventure that seems afraid to let the audience feel too much of anything. Action sequences are punctuated by annoying dialogue that describes what we’ve already seen (“Sonofabitch threw a fridge at us!”); the poignant relationship between Michelle and her brother is intercut with battle scenes in which nobody appears to be in any particular danger.
Beneath the action, The Electric State touches on contemporary sci-fi themes: our over-reliance on technology, and how dangerous human beings can be when they lack empathy. Little time is really spent digging into any of these sentiments, however, and even with a duration running at more than two hours, the film fails to say much about our species other than a gallingly pat message that, hey, maybe we should all turn off our mobile phones and look at a tree instead.
The Electric State’s lack of sincerity looks all the more glaring when compared to Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, which came out just a few weeks before it. Joon-ho’s film dared to weave a messy yet personality-filled fable about love and compassion overcoming heartless capitalism. The Electric State by contrast, simultaneously sounds an alarm about addictive tech even as it swaddles us in corporate branding and nostalgia.
“Remember, kids: phones are no substitute for real human friendship,” The Electric State says. “Now, here’s a word from our sponsor, Planters Peanuts.”
The Electric State will stream on Netflix from the 14th March.
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