The Russos are cooked. At this point, Netflix’s unwavering commitment to funding the brothers’ algorithmically engineered blockbusters feels like an expensive experiment in diminishing returns. A bloated and deeply confused adaptation of Simon Stalenhag’s somber, visually arresting illustrated novel, The Electric State is the latest in the streaming giant’s ceaseless quest to manufacture spectacle without substance. What does $320 million get you? A low-impact sci-fi adventure that mistakes regurgitated pop culture references and sentimental sludge for world-building, it seems.
Stalenhag’s original was a meditation on the decaying wreckage of a civilisation overdosed on its own technological ambition. This adaptation trades in all that melancholy for a paint-by-numbers action romp that desperately wants to be Spielbergian. Gone is the brutal quiet of Stalenhag’s landscapes, replaced with Chris Pratt quipping his way through another paycheck and Millie Bobby Brown looking increasingly disillusioned with her career choices.
A still from ‘The Electric State’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix
The premise is actually quite compelling: In an alternate version of the 1990s, humanity has barely survived a war against sentient robots, and the remnants of society are clinging to life under the grip of a VR addiction enabled by the nefarious tech mogul Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci, doing his best “evil Steve Jobs” impression). Brown’s character, Michelle, embarks on a cross-country journey with a robot that may or may not contain the consciousness of her deceased younger brother.
Chris Pratt, once again playing a slightly scruffier version of Chris Pratt, tags along as a roguish smuggler named Keats, only to prove that his entire range as an actor exists between “cocky space guy” and “cocky dinosaur guy.” Meanwhile, Woody Harrelson voices a robot modeled after Mr. Peanut, which is somehow both the funniest and most tragic part of this movie. The voice cast is stacked — Anthony Mackie, Alan Tudyk, Brian Cox, and Jenny Slate all make appearances — but their talents are largely wasted on a shoddy script that treats them as sentient exposition machines.
Tonally, The Electric State can’t decide whether it wants to be a dystopian fable or a wise-cracking road-trip comedy, so it splits the difference and excels at neither. The movie’s pathos involves Michelle staring longingly at a projected cartoon re-runs while synth music swells in the background. Though it gestures at deeper themes — corporate greed, the isolating effects of technology, the ethical implications of AI — it never actually engages with any of them meaningfully.
The robot designs are striking, and some of the landscape shots evoke a certain bleak beauty, but for a movie based on one of the most visually distinct sci-fi books of the last decade, The Electric State has shockingly little aesthetic personality. The color palette is bland, the action sequences are a snooze-fest, and the CGI is nauseatingly omnipresent. And let’s not even get started on the most on-the-nose needle drops imaginable (Breaking the Law during a getaway scene, Wonderwall as a dramatic piano ballad, please make it end).
It’s hard to muster any genuine investment in the characters, save for the delightfully eager Mrs. Scissors bot — whose dejected whirs upon vocational rejection might be the film’s most honest moment — and Giancarlo Esposito’s robo-bounty hunter, who, in a rare moment of true audience relatability, opts to simply take a seat and power down rather than endure another scene.
A still from ‘The Electric State’
| Photo Credit:
Netflix
The Electric State is ultimately yet another example of what happens when blockbuster filmmaking is treated as a purely algorithmic exercise. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of sci-fi tropes, stitched together from better films but devoid of any soul. The Russos once brought some semblance of depth to Marvel’s Infinity War and Endgame. Now they seem content producing flavorless, easily digestible, green-screen slop that barely registers as cinema.
For a film so desperate to remind us of the ineffable magic of human connection, The Electric State sure feels like an extravagant contradiction. In an ethos where AI is being treated like the bogeyman of creativity, the Russos have crafted a film that preaches the value of tangible relationships while existing as a solitary streaming experience, siphoning viewers away from the very communal magic of the theatrical space it claims to champion. The irony is almost poetic if it weren’t so predictable.
Simon Stalenhag’s novel left readers with a sense of loss, and a future nostalgia of sorts. Netflix’s The Electric State leaves you with the growing urge to cancel your subscription.
The Electric State is currently available to stream on Netflix
Published – March 14, 2025 05:46 pm IST
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