An eye-watering $320 million budget. The Russo Brothers directing. Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown in lead roles. Supporting roles of various degrees by the likes of Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito, and Ke Huy Quan. What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out… almost everything. If the word tiresome didn’t already exist, we’d probably have to invent it just to describe The Electric State – based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel – a huge ‘Netflix Original’ movie that, ironically, has barely an original thought in its torturous two-hour running time.
We’re in an alternative 1990s timeline (so already we’re being encouraged not to give much of a damn), robots have risen up against humankind, and there’s been a war that’s left the world in a bit of a mess. Tech CEO Ethan Skate (Tucci) has managed to create ‘Neurocaster’ technology that allows humans to upload their minds into drone robots, bringing the war to an end and banishing remaining rebel robots to a so-called exclusion zone.
Meanwhile, teenage orphan Michelle (Brown) is approached by a sentient robot called Cosmo, who convinces her that he is controlled by her younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman), who has long been assumed to be dead. The pair set out across a war-torn, dystopian landscape in search of the real Christopher, teaming up on the way with former soldier Keats (Pratt, surely in line with David Schwimmer in Goosebumps: The Vanishing for the ‘Stupidest Screen Wig 2025’ award) and a random bunch of odd-looking sentient robots as they attempt to uncover the dark truth about Skate and his ‘Neurocaster’ technology. If you actually care about any of this, then hats off to you.
The Electric State is a deadening, empty experience. It’s a film that doesn’t seem entirely sure what audience it’s aiming at; the robots are childish and simplistic (the leader of the robot revolution is called ‘Mr Peanuts’), their design evoking both Lewis Carroll and 1985’s Return To Oz, but the themes of mind-control and sentient machines seem to speak to AI-jittery adults. It’s not impossible for a film to work on two levels, but the predominant tone here is relentlessly bland, inane, and woefully unsophisticated.
Attempts at humour are facile and witless, and the script gives its talented cast absolutely nothing to work with. Pratt’s “everyman hero” shtick is getting wearying now, and Millie Bobby Brown, the first Netflix-created movie star, looks desperately uninterested (and uninteresting) in a role that plays to none of her wide-eyed strengths. Yes, the effects are astonishing, but they’d really better be on this sort of budget. Perhaps a few bucks could have been diverted from the CGI fund and directed into a sharper, less derivative and lifeless script that paid a bit more respect to its source material.
This is worryingly generic stuff from the Russo Brothers, and we can only hope they bring their A game back into play for their upcoming return to the MCU in the next two Avengers movies. Until then, this film is an absolute state with very little electric about it.
THE ELECTRIC STATE is available to stream on Netflix now
