The Electric State Is the Most Banal Way You Can Spend $320 Million

Perhaps in the years to come, movie geeks and film industry observers will look back at the release of Netflix’s The Electric State as a prominent historical footnote of some kind–a high-water mark for the era of streaming juggernauts throwing seemingly unlimited funding at tawdry, blockbuster-style entertainment. By way of comparison: In the now deeply receding world of craft beer, it now seems borderline fantastical to look back at the pie-in-the-sky optimism of the mid-2010s, an era when San Diego craft brewery Ballast Point sold to Constellation Brands for an insane $1 billion. Four years later, the same brewery was sold to a small Chicago-area company for fractions on the dollar as the market began to contract. Today, that brand is a shadow of the would-be national juggernaut it was envisioned to be. Is it possible that a few years from now, we’ll look back at something like the Russo brothers’ The Electric State with the kind of hindsight that allows us to marvel at the notion that it could possibly have commanded a $320 million budget? Perhaps, but it would take media titans like Netflix acknowledging that simply throwing inconceivable amounts of VFX and licensed music at their audience does not connote actual filmmaking or a worthwhile endeavor.

Which is all to say: The Electric State is one hell of an artistically neutered, sanitized boondoggle, awe-inspiring in its deployment of expensive visuals but largely bereft of any kind of genuine wit, humor, warmth or adaptational deftness. It’s an exercise in acquiring a sought-after internet aesthetic–the striking, somber, immersive post-apocalypse digital paintings of Swedish illustrator-writer Simon Stålenhag–and then squishing and sanding that aesthetic down into something a $400 billion corporation sees as desirable to a mythical median consumer who doesn’t even exist. In practice, this is all the more ironic, given the themes of media obsession, enslavement and corporate dehumanization present in creator Stålenhag’s source text. In effect, Netflix purchased a critique of itself and then tried to repackage said satire as an endless procession of millennial-baiting nostalgia, oblivious to the subtext of its actions.

Somehow, that task seems both appropriate and a little odd to assign to Anthony and Joe Russo, the Disney-sanctified helmers of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Appropriate, in the sense that the duo has handled weighty FX extravaganzas and insanely expensive responsibilities like this before, playing with the most valuable of toys and all-star casts. Odd, in that the oeuvre of someone like Simon Stålenhag is very much a niche internet fandom, rather than a massive, world-straddling IP like Marvel comics and its Marvel Cinematic Universe. People who are even familiar with Stålenhag’s name will end up making a tiny sliver of the global audience for The Electric State, which theoretically confers upon the Russos and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely a significant degree of freedom in their adaptation. Too bad they’ve used that leeway primarily to obliterate any meaning from the text and perform a slavishly devoted tribute to dozens of other movies that the algorithm divined would be most pleasing to the median millennial target demo.

Ostensibly, The Electric State is a science fiction adventure film, set in an alternate version of the U.S. where Walt Disney of all people pioneered sentient robot science in the 1940s, only for the robots to steadily grow more disgruntled until they begin a nation-spanning civil war for independence in the 1990s. The robots, which come in a huge array of shapes and sizes, from doll-sized pipsqueaks to building-sized behemoths, were ultimately defeated thanks to the help of ambitious industrialist/obvious villain Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci as Elon Musk, except you can actually imagine how someone might be charmed by him), whose revolutionary “neurocaster” device leads to the development of powerful, human-controlled drones. The story picks up in an alternate 1994, a few years after the end of robot hostilities, as the robots have been shunted into an Exclusion Zone and humanity has–with shocking swiftness–succumbed to the soporific delights of the now commercially available neurocaster, and most people spend all day prone, escaping into fantasy à la Ready Player One. All except Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), who objects to the use of the neurocaster in her school, and rebels against the confines of her neglectful foster care, while pining for her deceased parents and super-genius younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman). That is, until an anthropomorphic representation of her supposedly dead brother’s favorite robot character, Kid Cosmo, shows up at her door, ready to lead her on a quirky adventure to find out what really happened to him.

Brown has headlined a handful of decent, Y.A.-appropriate fantasy and mystery films for Netflix in the last few years as we await the final conclusion of Stranger Things, and has managed to feel like a budding star in the likes of Enola Holmes and Damsel. But she can’t even pretend to vibe with this material, coming off as permanently disaffected or even outright dismissive of her dialogue, particularly when the screenplay calls for her to get melodramatic or weepy. In her quest to find a way into the Exclusion Zone and find what happened to her brother, she quickly runs across legendary outlaw Star Lord–I mean, Chris Pratt–I mean, uh … “Keats” … a smuggler who works for the highest bidder with his own robot wingman and quip machine Herman (Anthony Mackie). Thus is established our bickering buddy comedy duo, as Brown and Pratt trade perfunctory barbs as they trudge in the direction of Seattle, where Christopher seemingly awaits, accompanied by an endless parade of licensed music tracks designed to confer on them some kind of aura of cool.

Once in robot territory, the film turns into a guest star parade of quirky supporting characters cycling through to deliver a few lines: Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, Colman Domingo, Ke Huy Quan and so many others stop by to snap up a paycheck. Woody Harrelson gets a special shout-out, as his ghoulish-faced Mr. Peanut robot is an Abraham Lincoln-like mechanical statesman and leader of the robot cause. Yes, this is a film where you get to revel in patently absurd phrases like “Mr. Peanut signed the treaty of surrender with President Clinton today…” Each additional robot character feels like they’re checking boxes off some kind of arcane “make blockbuster film” checklist with a criteria known only to The Algorithm, and none are allowed to demonstrate any of the humanity they claim to possess. The Electric State loves to breathlessly raise thorny science fiction issues related to its robots, on topics such as consciousness, servitude and classism, and then just blow past all of those issues without engaging in any of them in a meaningful way. All that matters is getting to:

A. More quips,