This will come as a shock, but the Russo Brothers have delivered another bland, soulless piece of streaming content with The Electric State. The duo have been on quite the cold streak (Cherry, The Gray Man) since their Marvel Studios heights, and it’d be one thing if they made tiny movies that just failed to find an audience. But no, their movies are wildly expensive, bloated messes, with this one costing somewhere north of $300M. For that, The Electric State needed to be in theaters for months filling up the seats, but instead it arrives on Netflix as dead-eyed as the robots at the story’s core.
The Electric State is based on Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s haunting 2018 illustrated novel, which imagined an alternate ’90s dystopia of retro-future technology and the American Dream rendered as a giant scrapyard. There’s little in the Russos’ adaptation that sticks in the mind; it’s all too slick and lacking any kind of wit, humor, and humanity. Everything about it feels artificial. Even the way the the soulful story of the novel is stripped down, but loaded up with tons of characters as if the Russos were looking to sell some more action figures. This ain’t Marvel, guys.
Leading the cast is Netflix mainstay Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, who goes on a cross-country journey through postwar America to find her younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman), who was killed along with their parents in a car crash. Wait, then what’s there to find? Well, it’s possible Christopher is alive and piloting remotely a cheerful robot, Kid Cosmo, that comes wandering into Michelle’s home one night. Cosmo speaks in pre-recorded TV catchphrases, sort of like Bumblebee (this movie borrows liberally from a lot of sources, including Ready Player One) but less charming. They are quickly joined in their journey by Keats, a slovenly smuggler played by Chris Pratt. Pratt isn’t asked to do anything here that he hasn’t done in pretty much every movie he’s done. I like the guy, but if you’ve seen one Pratt performance you’ve seen them all. Keats has a robotic sidekick of his own, Herman, voiced by fellow Marvel alum Anthony Mackie. The Russos called in a lot of favors for this one.
What’s annoying about The Electric State is that it could be so much better, but as presented by the Russos it’s way too neat, clean, and vaguely Amblin-esque. We’re talking about an apocalyptic nightmare in which most of humanity has given up on reality. They instead rot away under VR helmets living their best virtual lives. People lay dead or dying, or lost in fantasy, in the streets everywhere. The mythology and lore is actually quite fascinating. Archival footage takes us back to the emergence of robots into society, and the inevitability that they would soon become indispensable. But when robots decided they wanted to work for themselves and be treated more like humans, well, people weren’t having it. We see Bill Clinton forcefully declaring a war on machines, a war we were losing until the brilliant inventor Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci, doing his Elon Musk impression) created the VR tech that turned the tide and ultimately hooked the nation. Tucci, like Giancarlo Esposito and others, had the easiest gigs of their lives as they are mostly seen through TV sets mounted on robot bodies. Other robots have all-star voices, too, including Colman Domingo, Woody Harrelson as Mr. Peanut, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Rob Gronkowski, and more. Easy days for all. Their android mascot characters crack jokes that aren’t very funny. Jokes are hard to come by in this place.
The Electric State looks great. Nobody will ever say the Russos don’t know how to fill the screen with bright, colorful characters that cost a pretty penny. They’ve had plenty of practice at it, just as they have generating forgettable, formulaic streaming content like this. But with the duo returning to Marvel’s sweet, lucrative embrace, the plug has finally been pulled.
