The Electric State, the 2017 graphic novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, is a haunting journey through a burned-out retrofuture. The book collects dozens of landscapes following a young woman and an android traveling across an American Southwest littered with abandoned military and commercial robots, and populated only by emaciated human drones who have lost themselves to a drug-like virtual reality that the reader never sees. Alongside the art are short vignettes written from the characters’ perspectives reflecting on the collapse of their world, the nature of consciousness and the people they loved and lost. It’s gut-wrenching, thought-provoking and strangely romantic.
THE ELECTRIC STATE ★ (1/4 stars)
Directed by: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Written by: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci
Running time: 128 mins.
So, naturally, the direct-to-Netflix film adaptation of The Electric State from Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony & Joe Russo is a dumb, unfunny action movie for children.
Millie Bobby Brown stars as Michelle, a rebellious teenage orphan living in an alternate 1994 where humans have triumphed over a robot uprising. Michelle’s miserable life in foster care is interrupted when she’s visited by a robot containing her late brother’s consciousness. Now on the run for harboring a fugitive robot, Michelle seeks answers in the walled-off desert ghetto to which the mechanical survivors of the robot war have been exiled. Along the way, she teams up with a pair of roguish scavengers, Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot pal Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), and joins the machines in a righteous battle against the evil tech magnate (Stanley Tucci) whose company has brought doom to humans and robots alike.
Despite all the interesting ideas and images that the Russos and longtime screenwriting collaborators Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely have retained from the source material, their Electric State is dull as dirt, the latest in the tradition of unfathomably expensive streaming titles that feel like they were designed by an algorithm and assembled in a factory. Stock characters performed by bankable stars play out a rote adventure story on a muddy canvas slathered with way too many visual effects. Nonstop lazy quips keep the kiddies chuckling while played-out ‘80s and ‘90s needle drops appeal to the nostalgic hearts of their Millennial parents. Every bit part is filled by a familiar face or voice, providing a kick of recognition to distract you from how boring the actual film is, as well as to show off how much goddamned money this movie cost.
Jason Alexander portrays Michelle’s cartoonishly evil foster dad for five minutes, Coleman Domingo plays a one-scene character who is just a face on a screen, Patti Harrison appears and has no lines, and Brian Cox voices a robotic pitching machine. Woody Harrelson provides the voice of Mr. Peanut, the snack food mascot who led the ill-fated robot rights movement.
The Electric State offers an impressive assemblage of talent, all operating at about 10% capacity. Chris Pratt sleepwalks as his latest Star-Lord clone. Giancarlo Esposito plays yet another stone-faced killer — a robot-hunting, drone-piloting gunslinger — a role that could have been recorded over a Zoom call. Ke Huy Quan plays two different totally disposable characters. Millie Bobby Brown is strangely unconvincing as a traumatized young revolutionary (her bread and butter!). Meanwhile, the film’s most impressive performance comes from one of its few lesser-known actors, Woody Norman, who made a splash in the 2021 indie C’mon C’mon. Norman plays Christopher, Michelle’s supergenius brother whose apparent death in a car accident is the film’s inciting incident. Norman appears in only a handful of scenes (his robot avatar is a CGI character voiced by Alan Tudyk, because of course it is), but makes the kind of impression that cemented his on-screen sister as a star in the first place, a portrait of a brilliant but vulnerable kid at the mercy of forces beyond his control.
It helps that Norman’s scenes are the ones in which there’s the least amount of distracting stuff on screen. The Electric State is weighed down by a staggering tonnage of stuff, dozens of CGI robots wandering around and muttering off-camera jokes, clunky newsreels dumping details that end up contributing very little (but featuring MTV News anchor Kurt Loder as himself!), a total overload of boring, gray dreck.
The script promotes familiar themes of tolerance found in stories about AI, casting its exiled robots as a disenfranchised worker caste that humanity mistreated because they could get away with doing so. The Electric State has nothing to add to this conversation, which — along with the incessant low-effort jokes and the deliberately bloodless mechanized violence — is what makes it feel like a kids’ movie. Ironically, the film also makes a direct appeal to the audience to try putting down their phones for a while, a direct affront to Netflix’s strategy of competing for nonstop audience attention. Not to worry, as this movie won’t be persuading anyone to do anything except, perhaps, to see what else there is to watch.
While textually anti-corporate and anti-escapism, the movie version of The Electric State is the perfect artifact of our current soulless technocracy. It’s one of the most expensive films ever made, perhaps because someone at the Netflix C-Suite decided it would create the appearance of success, which in turn builds investor confidence and raises stock prices. Will Netflix actually gain or retain $300+ million in subscription dollars thanks to this film? Almost certainly not. The movie itself is vaporware. It will be remembered by no one, except some of the people who made it, but probably not by Coleman Domingo or any of the other overqualified actors who contributed 10 minutes’ work in order to expand the algorithmic web of users to whom the film will be recommended on Netflix.
And, crucially, no one will suffer consequences for its critical failure and entirely hypothetical commercial success. The Electric State will no doubt top Netflix’s self-reported viewing statistics for a week and be vaunted as a success at their next stockholder’s meeting. The Russo Brothers will — after a two-film return to Marvel’s Avengers — no doubt get to make another bloated streaming project that no one will care about. (Remember The Gray Man? Remember Citadel?) At best, this film might at least attract more attention to the work of Simon Stålenhag, which deserved so much better than this vapid cinematic slop.
