The Electric State, 2025.
Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo
Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci, Woody Norman, Anthony Mackie, Woody Harrelson, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, and Alan Tudyk.
SYNOPSIS:
Set in the aftermath of a robot uprising in an alternate version of the ’90s, The Electric State follows an orphaned teenager who ventures across the American West with a cartoon-inspired robot, a smuggler, and his sidekick in search of her younger brother.
The components for Netflix’s latest attempt at making a bonafide small-screen blockbuster were all in place on the box marked The Electric State; the directors behind Marvel Studios finest hour-or-three, with their writing team and Star-Lord in tow, and a source novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag that’s full of striking imagery depicting the aftermath of a robopocalypse. So it’s something of a shame to report that while this is glossy, gorgeous fare, with a toy box worth of creativity and a killer soundtrack, it’s nothing more than a solid three star movie that will vanish from your own database the minute Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots plays over the end credits.
The first thing Anthony and Joe Russo decide to do is abandon the melancholic beauty of the source novel, and with Stålenhag’s blessing, make something geared towards a younger audience. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, just don’t go in expecting this to be a dystopian hell-scape like The Last of Us. Brace yourself for Billy the Bass gags, Chris Pratt giving a Peter Quill-lite performance, and a much smaller movie than the robot war synopsis might suggest.
Yes, we journey through battlefields littered with decimated robots scarring the landscape, their twisted wreckage hinting at a darker lore upon which this more colourful story plays out, but the driving force of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley’s script isn’t Transformers-style battles, it’s the relationship between Millie Bobbie Brown’s orphaned teenager and her missing brother.
It’s a throughline that’s set-up with so much exposition dumped into the film’s opening twenty minutes that it threatens to short-circuit audience interest, but these are the guys who managed to stitch Marvel’s biggest-and-best phases together, so they just about pull off the tricky juggling act of dropping you into this world, and establishing the drama which has positioned Brown as the protagonist before she embarks on the film’s main narrative arc. It’s achieved using flashbacks, a wonderful world-building cartoon called Kid Cosmo, and the same kind of performance from the Stranger Things star that makes her the most consistently great thing about that show.
Make it through the heavy-coding of the first act and The Electric State splutters into life once Chris Pratt’s Solo-alike smuggler enters proceedings. Sure, he’s on autopilot, and much like the movie as a whole, he’s just an amalgamation of other film roles, but that goofy hero charm still works….for now. His arrival is also important because he brings with him a robotic sidekick named Herman, voiced by Anthony Mackie, who amongst a conveyor belt of weird, wonderful, and sad robot creations, is undoubtedly the film’s MVP.
On which, if you don’t buy into the mechanics of the human story, then the VFX on display with the likes of the self-explanatory Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson), postal carrier android Penny Pal (Jenny Slate), and dilapidated baseball pitching-bot Pop Fly (Brian Cox), coupled with their terrific voice performances, make for diverting entertainment until the next decent song choice pops up on the soundtrack.
Where this really needed a reboot was in the bad guy department. Stanley Tucci’s techno-villain feels lifted from something like Ready Player One, a film with which this shares quite a few tonal similarities, while Giancarlo Esposito’s virtual reality bounty hunter is about as threatening as those “Roger Roger” droids from The Phantom Menace.
Ultimately, The Electric State is a little like one of the beautifully designed robots at the heart of the story: clunky at times, assembled from recognisable parts, which occasionally sparks into life, and ultimately just about hangs together as a fun slice of disposable popcorn entertainment.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
