I knew that "The Electric State" was going to be a bad movie before I saw it. The reviews are abysmal. The reactions to the trailer elicited nothing but scorn. How did Netflix spend in excess of $300 million on this thing? However, I find the finished project fascinating. It's another one of those ambitious, grandiose fantasy projects in the vein of "Tomorrowland," "Jupiter Ascending," and "Mortal Engines" that takes a lot of big swings and totally fails to connect. And if you've been watching much dystopian media over the past decade, some of those swings are awfully familiar.
Joe and Anthony Russo have made a string of poorly received action projects in the wake of "Avengers: Endgame," including "Cherry," "The Gray Man," and the very expensive Amazon Prime series, "Citadel." None of these have been especially bad, just nothing that remotely meets the expectations created by being from the directors of some of the most expensive and lucrative films ever made. "The Electric State," loosely based on a book by Simon Stalenhag, is another big effects spectacular that takes place in an alternate history version of the United States, in the aftermath of a failed robot uprising. This is a version of the 1990s where humans spend most of their time living in virtual reality, piloting drones to do any physical fighting, while the remaining robots live in a dangerous "exclusion zone."
Our hero is an orphaned teenager named Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), who discovers that her younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman) might be alive, when she's contacted by a drone robot named Cosmo. She goes looking for a doctor (Ke Huy Quan) in the exclusion zone who might know where Christopher is, and along the way meets a goofy veteran named Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot pal Herman (Anthony Mackie), who work as smugglers. In the exclusion zone, they also befriend a ragtag community of robots, lead by an animatronic Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson). Enemies include the evil leader of the drone-creating Sentre corporation, Skate (Stanely Tucci), and the mercenary Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito).
What I primarily enjoy "The Electric State" for is its weird, fanciful worldbuilding. This is a world where robots are very prevalent, so we have anthropomorphized pitching machines, jukeboxes, and construction machinery running around. Most of the robots who went to war against humanity seem to have been advertising cartoon characters brought to life, which means that parts of the premise are awfully close to that old "Treehouse of Horror" segment, "Attack of the 50ft Eyesores," with Mr. Peanut filling in for Lard Lad. And what kind of deal had to be struck with Planters to make a robot version of their spokes-legume part of this movie?! There's a bipedal 7-Up can running around in the battle scenes, but not any other branded characters. Who else was under consideration that turned the filmmakers down? Bob's Big Boy? The Energizer Bunny? Charles Entertainment Cheese?
All due credit should go to the animators and effects professionals for making the movie's quasi-steampunk dystopian aesthetic look as good as it does. Some of the bots are delightfully rendered, including a post office robot voiced by Jenny Slate, and a piano-playing taco, who is responsible for some of the film's terrible needle-drops. Somehow, we get both "Don't Stop Believing" and "Wonderwall" in the same movie, even though "Wonderwall" was released after this movie is supposed to take place. Despite it all, I thought that Herman and Keats made a perfectly respectable comedic duo, trading the kind of silly banter and terrible pop culture references that always seem to show up in movies like this. Chris Pratt proves once again that he is really good at playing action doofuses, and "The Electric State" would be much worse without him.
By setting their film in the 1990s, the Russo brothers try to provide some kind of an excuse for their retro-futurist visuals, but the whole thing is still an oddball mishmash of different influences. Since Walt Disney is cited as the creator of the bots, this could take place in the same universe as Brad Bird's "Tomorrowland," and the use of IP and themes of internet addiction suggest ties to Spielberg's "Ready Player One." "The Electric State" is much less sophisticated than either of those films, but as children's media it's more accessible than both. Despite the allusions to "Astro Boy" and cameos by Billy the Big-Mouth Bass, "The Electric State" feels retro, but rarely nostalgic. And while it has all the bad habits of all the other over-bloated YA dystopian films of the last decade, I don't find it any worse than any of the other films I've referenced in this review.
Yes, "The Electric State" is a bad movie, but it's not a terrible one, and I've seen plenty of equally unimpressive fare lately that hasn't attracted this much scorn. At least "The Electric State" is taking some hefty risks, though I suspect this will be the Russos' last blank check for a long time.
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