Netflix’s The Electric State Is a $320 Million Piece of Junk

Before they were given the keys to the Marvel kingdom, Joe and Anthony Russo were known primarily for their comedy work in movies like You, Me, and Dupree (2006) and shows such as Arrested Development and Community. Their levity made for a good fit with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which had established its wisecracking tone with Jon Favreau’s first Iron Man and developed it further with Joss Whedon’s Avengers. For years, Marvel films worked this jocular-fantastic angle, in pointed contrast to the grimdark expectorations of their DC counterparts, who were drowning in a morass of runaway budgets and brooding slo-mo. Whatever we critics might have thought of the results (and for the record, I enjoyed the Russos’ Captain America movies, and quite liked Avengers: Infinity War, while not caring much for Avengers: Endgame), the Russos were able captains of the colorful Marvel ship, which they steered toward greater and greater financial returns.

Watching their turgid new Netflix sci-fi epic, The Electric State, I began to wonder where those Russo brothers went. It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself this question; the thought had also occurred while watching their inert and stone-faced 2022 Netflix thriller, The Gray Man. How did these filmmakers who so confidently walked the fine tonal line of Marvel’s most ambitious period manage to find themselves bogged down in such lumbering humorlessness? Okay, The Gray Man was merely grim and lifeless, a forgettable action flick; those happen. But The Electric State begs for playfulness, dynamism, some sense of dash and charm. Honestly … it could use the comic expertise of the Joe and Anthony Russo of 20 years ago. It’s an action fantasy built on silliness. Without a light touch, it becomes actively annoying.

The film, (very) loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 retro-sci-fi illustrated book of the same name, takes place in an alternate 1990s in which humanity has gone to war with a race of robots. But they’re not just any old robots: Initially introduced by Walt Disney in the 1950s, these robots worked for decades as task-specific servants — they delivered our mail, cooked our food, built our houses — but then grew sentient and demanded their freedom. This led to protests, uprisings, peace agreements, then an apocalyptic, full-on war. (The film’s intro gives us fun clips of Bill Clinton signing a treaty with a giant mechanical Mr. Peanut, the leader of the robot resistance.) Humans defeated the robots through a mechanized drone army controlled remotely by people wearing headsets. After the war, that technology, developed by a painfully pretentious guru named Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), was sold to the public as a way of keeping them sedated and immersed in imaginary worlds. The surviving robots, meanwhile, got sent to a giant prison colony somewhere in the deserts of the American Southwest. 

The story follows Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a juvenile delinquent and foster kid who lost her parents and her beloved genius younger brother, Chris (Woody Norman), in a car accident some years ago. One night a robot version of Kid Cosmo, a once-popular cartoon that Chris loved, sneaks into her house and insists that it is her brother, or at least his consciousness, being controlled from an indeterminate location. Michelle and Cosmo set off on a journey to locate Chris’s physical body. To do so, they must join forces with Chris Pratt’s John Keats (!), a former soldier turned black marketeer, who with his trusty construction-robot partner, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), smuggles goods out of the forbidden robot zone. Because robots aren’t allowed to interact with humans, they are pursued every step of the way by drone soldiers, in particular Colonel Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito), a relentless, robot-hating war hero known as the Butcher of Schenectady. 

This is, to put it delicately, a ridiculous premise, not the least because the robots that our heroes come in contact with aren’t exactly alien androids but rather highly specific branded figures who’ve adapted themselves beyond their initial uses. There is, of course, the aforementioned Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson). There’s a letter carrier called Penny Pal (Jenny Slate) that can rip people’s hearts out. There’s a gruff and garrulous baseball pitching and hitting machine called Pop Fly (Brian Cox). There’s a mechanical magician named Perplexo (Hank Azaria). There’s a huge runaway football helmet (Rob Gronkowski). There’s a sentient barber’s chair armed with scissors, and a giant, piano-playing taco. 

You’d think something like this would be somewhat funny. And while there are wisecracks and blandly humorous asides here and there (most of them delivered by Pratt, who to his credit does give it his discount Harrison Ford best), the Russos mostly play it straight. So straight, in fact, that they seem afraid of the whole thing becoming too much of a comedy. Are they running from their former selves? Did they buy into criticisms of the MCU as being too jokey? Maybe it’s just that they’ve got vague metaphors about intolerance and technological repression and mass-hypnosis to deliver, and a brutal robot slaughter to depict, and weak tears to jerk. (One also wonders if there’s a personal angle to this tale of Disney-anointed subordinates who become self-aware and seek to break their chains and be taken seriously.) 

Regardless, the filmmakers have clearly invested all their energies in making this world feel real, in trying to make us care for this absurd cast of characters. That might be an admirable aim, but it’s also a disastrously misguided one — so disastrous, it made me consider giving Adam Sandler’s video-games-come-to-life sci-fi fantasy, Pixels, another shot. To be clear, Pixels is not a good movie, but at least it embraced its inherent goofiness. If nothing else, Sandler would have understood the basic comedy of a line like “You broke the treaty, Mr. Peanut!” instead of trying to play it as a moment of disturbing violence.

Meanwhile, the buoyancy Millie Bobby Brown brought to her Netflix-produced Enola Holmes films has completely vanished. She’s proven herself to be a good actress (I even liked her in the gritty fantasy Damsel, another Netflix production), but she can’t do tearful melodrama in the midst of a story this stupid. Who can? Watching Brown try to take the role of Michelle seriously — the tough rebel, made tender by a reconnection to her tragic past — one feels a weird twinge of secondhand embarrassment for the performer, as if the whole film had been designed as a dry, cruel joke on her.

There’s something truly off-putting about The Electric State’s palette of junk and colorless branded robots. By trying to give this world such weight and grit, the filmmakers have doubled down on its ugliness. The Russos’ functional visual style isn’t enough to bring any real creativity into this universe. (Do they know any other way to introduce a character besides an ominous close-up of their feet? Can they shoot two kids doing a fancy handshake without resorting to eight separate cuts?) For all the specificity of the designs involved, the action scenes lack inspiration and invention, seeing as how they’re mostly tedious and programmed fights between robots and drones. Yes, Penny Pal rains letters down on her opponent, and yes, Pop Fly shoots balls out at them — but these are just ideas, and the confrontations themselves are devoid of charge or conviction. One longs for the sinewy action of a Transformers flick, or the imaginative gravity of something like the first Pacific Rim. Or, hell, the CGI-fueled long takes of the Russos’ own Avengers pictures. Even Real Steel pulled off the whole discarded-robot thing reasonably well. There are ways to make this kind of stuff work, but it takes more than just a massive effects budget.

The Electric State reportedly cost $320 million to produce, which would make it one of the most expensive films ever made. To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with people getting paid, and such budget matters should be mostly irrelevant to the matter of whether we enjoy a movie or not. (I say this as someone who happily paid full price to own Waterworld on 4K last year, and who will follow George Miller to the ends of the earth.) At the same time, the thought does cross one’s mind while watching this film: They paid $320 million for this? Didn’t anyone at Netflix try to stop these people? Maybe studio notes aren’t always such a bad thing. Yes, it does cost money to make all those giant robots look real, to cover them in soot, and to get them to trudge convincingly across Monument Valley. And yes, actors cost money, even if they’re just doing voices. And yes, the film has an out-of-nowhere pop soundtrack that includes the Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” and an orchestral version of Oasis’s “Wonderwall.” But there’s something genuinely absurd about spending that much money to make a movie look this bad.