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'The Electric State' Is What You Get When You Turn Movies Into Content
Simon Stålenhag's graphic novel gets the Netflix faux-blockbuster treatment, and the result is like a 10,000 volt charge to your groin.
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There’s art, there’s entertainment — and then there’s “content,” the catch-all term that refers to the endless supply of stuff that is pumped out in the name of numbers and inventory. Art enlightens. Entertainment provides escapism. Content is simply there, clogging up the arteries of streaming services and clickbait sites, offering up buffets of empty calories and almost instant amnesia. It’s not interested in exploring the human experience, passing on public-service information, delighting, distracting, making you laugh, cry, or pump your fist in the air. It exists only to be consumed, forgotten, and give an algorithm one more nano-morsel of data in order to serve you more of the same.
The Electric State is exactly what you get when you turn movies into content, and while Anthony and Joe Russo’s dystopian sci-fi trash heap shouldn’t be forced to suffer for all of the sins of an industry in crisis, it does exemplify what’s now become a regrettable subgenre: the Netflix faux blockbuster. Other streamers have them too (looking at you, Amazon and Apple), but the pioneering service colonized this space first and set the template. The idea is to hire movie stars, back up a brink’s truck of money, throw in the usual generic ingredients — explosions, quips, and either glamorous, globetrotting locations or stylized digital environments — and leave no cultural footprint whatsoever. (Remember Red Notice, The Gray Man, and The Adam Project? We don’t either, and we had to go to IMDb to recall each title.) Because these big-tent projects rarely get any theatrical release of note, viewers are also deprived of one of the primary pleasures of these types of movies, which is enjoying a larger-than-life, thrills-spills-chills experience with a crowd.
To be fair, however, The Electric State would be an endurance test regardless of the screen’s size, the number of fellow audience members present or how much popcorn you had on hand. It’s a bad movie, full stop. Which is a pity, because the pedigree looks great on paper. Say what you will about the Russo brothers and the Marvel Entertainment Industrial Complex, but the gents understood the MCU assignment; it couldn’t have been easy to keep all those plates spinning and tie up all the loose plot threads in Avengers: Endgame (2019), yet they managed to pull it off with honors. The screenwriters for that film, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, are on board here as well. The lead, Millie Bobby Brown, was the best thing about both the Enola Holmes franchise and the dragon-friendly Damsel (2024). And the source material is a graphic novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, in which the aftermath of a war between sentient machines and man is rendered in haunting, striking full-page panels.
No one expected the Russos to make a faithful translation of Stålenhag’s book, which would have resulted in arthouse melancholia with a gajillion-dollar price tag. But we don’t think anyone was asking for something as clumsy or cut-rate as this, either. Set in an alternate 1990s in which robots — invented by Walt Disney in the 1930s, and quickly adopted as corporate mascots — rebel against their flesh-and-blood overlords, the story drops us into a world in which Homo sapiens once again reign supreme. Despite having an automaton Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) as their MLK, the retro-looking ‘bots have been defeated, courtesy of something called a “neurocaster” — i.e., a sort of remote-control drone device invented by a tech billionaire (Stanley Tucci). Machines have now been exiled to a place called the Exclusion Zone, which resembles a Palm Springs scrapyard. Humans are content to live endless virtual realities, rarely engaging in the outside world. It’s presented as an ironic, bitter victory. Don’t just sit in front of screens or binge on endless digital content, people! This PSA has been brought to you by [checks notes] Netflix.
Our tour guide for this near-apocalyptic wasteland is Michelle (Brown), a young woman who lost her parents and genius younger brother, Christopher (Woody Norman), in a car accident years ago. Out of the blue, she’s visited by a robot, who tells her that sibling is actually alive. She needs to go to the off-limits Exclusion Zone, however, to find him. Michelle and her new friend stow away in the back of a semi-truck owned by a smuggler named Keats (Chris Pratt, in autopilot mode). He was an ex-soldier who fought in the robot wars and became disillusioned by what he saw. Now, Keats hawks black-market goods with his mecha-sidekick Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), who suffers from Insufferable Wisecracking Comic Relief Syndrome. He takes pity on Michelle and the quartet manage to sneak into the no-man’s land south of the border, in search of a scientist (Ke Huy Quan) who knows Christopher’s exact location. Meanwhile, a zealous robot hunter (Giancarlo Esposito) is hot on their trail.
Chris Pratt in ‘The Electric State.’ NetflixFrom here, The Electric State sticks to the same predictable script of a million other similar quest movies. Things go boom, and bang, and pow. Vintage music cues are designed to either evoke nostalgia, meta-commentary, or some flavorless combination of both. (“I don’t want to die to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch!” wails Keats, as “Good Vibrations” plays over the soundtrack for no real reason other than to set up a joke about Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.) Action sequences are the pixelized equivalent of talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothing. Famous faces and voices — Holly Hunter, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Colman Domingo, Jason Alexander, Alan Tudyk, Hank Azaria, Patti Harrison — come and go. Even the fun of seeing giant old-timey robots, who appear to have been designed by a metalworker in Portland, Oregon, with a curly mustache, on a rampage wears off quickly.
The movies started off as a disposable novelty, playing to undiscerning audiences in nickelodeons who were more taken by the technical wizardry of making pictures move than by what was happening in those pictures. The Electric State feels like it was made for those viewers. It just happened to be 115 years too late. At its best, this attempt to turn a thought-provoking, critically acclaimed graphic novel into what passes for a summer-movie extravaganza these days is merely fodder for a “Because you watched I, Robot …” algorithm-generated list of suggested viewing. At worst, it feels like you’re getting 10,000 volts of electricity applied directly to your groin. The one good thing about content, however? You’ll instantly forget everything about this, other than the fact that those two hours of your life are gone forever.
