‘The Electric State’ Review: The Russo Brothers’ Joyless Netflix Mockbuster Is Only Compelling as an Argument for Letting the Movies Die
Whatever your expectations for a (supposedly) $320 million Russo brothers Netflix movie starring Chris Pratt as a Chris Pratt type, Millie Bobby Brown as a wannabe Edward Furlong, and Woody Harrelson as the voice of an animatronic Mr. Peanut, I would recommend that you lower them.
A derivative, self-impressed, and seriously confused adventure set in the aftermath of a global war between humans and the talking robots that were “invented” by Walt Disney to amuse tourists at his theme parks (suck it, William Grey Walter!), “The Electric State” is essentially a feature-length adaptation of the argument its directors have been making in the press since “Avengers: Endgame,” the scale and success of which seemed to convince them it was the ultimate film in every sense of the word, and thus inspired them to proselytize about how cinema as we know it is about to be replaced by AI holograms of Tom Cruise or whatever.
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Soon to be followed by what feels like a tail-between-the-legs return to the Marvel factory, the Russos’ latest mockbuster takes pains to suggest the world ought to accommodate the technology it creates at any cost. It insists that “progress” has a will of its own, and that people are limiting their own humanity by trying to exert control or fight back. And it insists that our addiction to the way things were might ultimately prove to be our undoing, even though this Netflix movie’s trillionaire villain (Stanley Tucci as Italian Steve Jobs) has made his money by creating the “Neurocaster,” an addictive headset that isolates people with their own private screens at the expense of a collective experience. As I said: seriously confused. At least you get to hear a baseball robot — modeled after Mr. Met, and voiced by Brian Cox — tell someone that he’s going to “poop [them] out raw.” That’s gotta be worth the latest uptick in Netflix’s price, right?
Truth be told, there isn’t a single laugh — or even a knowing smile — to be found in this relentlessly stale ordeal, which does for sci-fi adventure comedies what “The Gray Man” did for action thrillers: absolutely nothing. Instead, the movie is saran-wrapped in a thin veneer of artificial fun, which holds all the way through the super predictable eye-roller of a final shot even though no part of “The Electric State” proper manages to match the creative frisson of its expository opening montage.
Diluted and distorted from Simon St?lenhag’s comparatively somber illustrated novel of the same name, which has more evocative ideas in its first paragraph than this movie does in its entire running time, “The Electric State” takes place in an alternate timeline where the worker robots of the world began to rebel against their indentured servitude at some point during 1990. Led by mecha Mr. Peanut, and antagonized by humanity’s violent reaction to the demand for machine rights, the robots found themselves in a seemingly bloodless war for survival — a war they were certain to win until tech mogul Ethan Skate (Tucci) invented a tool that allowed soldiers to operate cyborg drones from a distance. Homo sapiens prevailed in 1994, Kid Rock headlined a massive victory concert (the robot uprising must have accelerated his breakthrough success by five years), and Skate celebrated by creating a consumer version of the Neurocaster device that had turned the tides of battle.
Everyone lived docilely ever after except for a teenage rebel named Michelle (Brown), whose genius younger brother Christopher (“C’mon C’mon” star Woody Norman) and their parents were killed in a car crash during the war. Forced to live with her Neurocaster-addicted foster dad (Jason Alexander) in nowhere, USA, Michelle is apparently too much of a free-thinker to wear the headset that has fast become a required teaching instrument in America’s public schools.
You’d think her resistance to the technology might be rooted in some character-driven animus toward Skate’s invention, or in anything else for that matter, but you’d be wrong. Her entire personality is sneering at people and saying things like, “Are you trying to be a dick, or does that just come naturally to you?” Michelle is a miserable hang, Brown doesn’t even bother to look for a way to enliven her, and the character might as well be crushed to death under the weight of the messiah narrative this movie drops on her shoulders when Christopher shows up at her door in the form of a child-sized robot modeled after his favorite cartoon.
Robochristopher can only speak in pre-recorded catchphrases (delivered by Alan Tudyk), but that’s enough to convey that his real body is being kept alive somewhere, and to convince Michelle that they should journey into the heart of the Exclusion Zone — a vast stretch of desert where all of the remaining mechas have been walled in and left to rust — in order to reunite the ghost with its shell. To do that, they’ll have to team up with a disillusioned soldier turned sarcastic arms smuggler named Keats (Pratt, of course), who has a robot BFF of his own (voiced by an unrecognizably auto-tuned Anthony Mackie, whose year could be going better). What a rare and thrilling opportunity to watch Chris Pratt exchange snarky but affectionate banter with a small, smart-mouthed CGI companion! Only on Netflix.
Mercifully, the cast broadens to include a forgettable array of other robots (the Russo brothers’ regular screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely struggle to create original characters of their own), most notably a mecha mailwoman voiced by Jenny Slate and Brian Cox’s aforementioned Popfly. The script labors to make Harrelson’s Mr. Peanut into something of a Ulysses S. Grant figure, but it’s surprisingly difficult to foster an emotional connection with the lurching mechanical version of a corporate mascot who the real world already mourned when it died during the 2020 Super Bowl. Wikipedia insists that former NFL star Rob Gronkowski voices a robot named “Blitz,” but it’s been more than 15 minutes since I saw this movie so it’s no longer possible for me to remember whether or not that’s true.
My only fondness was reserved for an automated hair salon chair named Mrs. Scissors (Susan Leslie), who’s so happy to have some new human wigs to cut, and eventually has the pleasure of transforming Pratt from the hottest Van Halen roadie of all time to the generic hero type the algorithm requires. Of course, it’s hard to say whether Keats was actually into a hair metal-adjacent band like Van Halen, or if they even existed in the movie’s timeline, as “The Electric State” displays a galling disinterest in detailing its cultural flashpoints.
There isn’t a single narrative-driven reason why this story is set in 1994. The Russo brothers do less than nothing to create a specific place in time, and their small handful of Zemeckis-worthy needle drops only serve to further diminish the film’s non-existent specificity as they scream for the cheap seats. It’s bad enough that Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law” plays when Keats breaks the law, and even worse that The Clash’s “I Fought the Law” pipes over the soundtrack when he does it again (though nothing drove me as crazy as the climactic piano cover of “Wonderwall,” a song that wasn’t recorded until 1995). It’s been rumored that Netflix encourages people to make content that people can follow while looking at their phones, and that’s never been easier to believe than it is here.
While “The Electric State” lacks even a single memorable image (unforgivable for something adapted from an illustrated book filled with them), anyone who does happen to glance up from the game of “Balatro” will at least be rewarded with some of the most tactile movie robots ever generated by computer. I have no idea what producer Angela Russo-Otstot meant when she insisted that “this fusion between live action and animation” has “never been done before,” but it looks pretty great regardless.
All function and no purpose, these neglected bots exude their own sentient life force even when the film’s human characters don’t (which is always), to the point that Ke Huy Quan — playing a doctor who’s deeply involved with the invention of the Neurocaster — is outshone by a droid whose monitor displays a pixel animation of the actor’s face. The robots aren’t funny or interesting by any stretch of the imagination, even if the sight of Mr. Peanut fighting robo Giancarlo Esposito feels like a “30 Rock” joke come to life, but not for a second does it feel like they aren’t sharing the same physical space with Pratt and Brown.
A better and more intellectually curious film might have leveraged the quality of its effects in a way that deepened this story’s glancing parallels to our real-world crises; there’s a half-assed hint of social commentary buried somewhere deep inside the villain’s strategy to manufacture hate out of fear, and complacency out of dehumanization, but “The Electric State” is content to waste its cutting-edge tech on one-joke “WALL-E” rejects who eventually band together to fight Skate for their freedom. Most of the action is limited to the climactic assault on the bad guy’s Seattle headquarters, and while the sequence is a bit more organic than anything from “Endgame” (a little grass and sky go a long way!), it’s also completely undone by our lack of interest and understanding in what’s at stake.
We’re never given any legitimate reason to care about Michelle’s quest to find her brother (a handful of flashbacks hurt more than they help), nor any explanation for why Keats becomes so determined to join her. Is he longing for the human connection he lost after the war? Probably, but there’s precious little evidence for that in the film’s script, which is so lacking in humanity itself that it doesn’t feel like it was written by AI so much as it feels like it was written for AI.
And what are Michelle and her mecha friends ultimately even hoping to achieve? The film’s villain has paralyzed the human species with a piece of technology that melds the body together with a machine and relies on empty fantasy to seduce its human users towards utter isolation. That would imply the film’s heroes, by contrast, are fighting to create a future in which people and technology might exist side-by-side — a future in which our species has the courage to live with the consequences of its own reckless need to push forward. Either way, humanity and technology have become too mutually symbiotic to survive without each other, and “The Electric State” would have you believe there’s no use trying to close Pandora’s box. That’s just the way things are, it insists, and we all need to make peace with the fact that what’s coming tomorrow may take us further afield from what we loved about yesterday.
Indeed, this awful movie is so resigned to the cinematic enshittification it epitomizes with every frame that it doesn’t even seem to realize how its idea of a happy ending effectively requires Michelle to turn back the clock and return her civilization to the way things used to be. There’s no undoing the war, but at least there might be a faint hope of redrafting the treaty that ended it. “The Electric State” is emotionally incoherent because the moral of its story is contradicted by the emphasis of its telling. It’s no wonder the filmmakers appear to side with their villain. As Skate puts it: “Our world is a tire fire floating in an ocean of piss.” Despite all of the clout and capital at their disposal, the Russo brothers can think of nothing better to do than stick our faces in it.
Grade: D-
“The Electric State” is now playing in select theaters. It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, March 14.
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