Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State is a haunting, melancholy vision of a dystopian 1990s that exists not so far from our present. The cover for this illustrated novel sees a young girl extending her hand to a goofy-looking yellow animatronic who itself is staring at a relic of a towering but now destroyed robot, ravaged by time. Behind them is a postcard-ready image of the great American West, a few sun-dappled mountains playing backdrop to an otherwise empty parking lot where a blue car, loaded up as if for a camping trip, sits idly beyond this unlikely duo. Like many of Stålenhag’s illustrations throughout The Electric State, this cover image asks more questions than it answers. But it perfectly captures a tone of wistful nostalgia mixed in with a wry kind of warning—for technology gone wrong, perhaps; for a world whose uncanny resemblance to our own is nothing more than a way to mirror back our own anxieties about technology and family, intimacy and entertainment.

None of that is found in directors Joe and Anthony Russo’s latest Netflix offering. The streamer’s Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely-penned adaptation of The Electric State may use the same title as that 2018 illustrated novel, but when it comes to its story or tone, the would-be action-adventure flick is creatively bankrupt. There’s no room for the bruising world-building Stålenhag created with his words and painterly landscapes. Instead, the Russo brothers crafted a crass commercialist product that both misunderstands and betrays its source material.

With a reported budget of over $320 million dollars, The Electric State has been marketed as an adventure ride of a film, where Chris Pratt’s exhausting quips and Millie Bobby Brown’s exhausted eye rolls anchor a ’90s-style blockbuster. The differences between novel and film can be summed by the poster. Boasting the insipid tag line “Rage With The Machines,” the image finds Pratt (in a bad wig, in his best Han Solo Temu costume) and Brown (in an equally hideous wig) flanked by two adorable robots. One looks like an ’80s-style android with pixelated facial expressions to match, the other is a yellow toy-like figure with wide eyes and a perma-smile on his spherical face. 

Gone is Stålenhag’s muted dystopia. Instead, this imagery feels of a piece with the IP-mining work the Russos have perfected at Marvel, and which has clearly colored the way they understand what films in general should do. Their film—set after a war against robots has been ended by new drone-like technology—finds Brown’s Michelle needing to recruit Pratt’s John to help her find the body of her younger brother (whose consciousness inhabits that yellow robot who only speaks in the cartoon catchphrases of the animated character it’s based on). At every turn, the emphasis is on a rollicking road trip film the entire family can presumably enjoy. This version of The Electric State wants to be a mix of Ready Player One and Transformers, filtered through the winking self-aware patina that so characterizes modern would-be box office hits—an odd aspiration given that there’ll be no box office to be collected from within Netflix’s algorithm-driven recommendations. 

This is all the more dispiriting given how achingly beautiful Stålenhag’s novel is. Here, for instance, is how he describes the threadbare plot that drives the novel’s narrative: “In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot travel west through a strange USA, where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside along with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline. As their car nears the edge of the continent, the world outside the window seems to unravel at an ever faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.”

Stålenhag’s images are as sparse as his prose. His is an artistic minimalism that calls on readers to color in (or outright sketch out) the world he’s creating. An image of the Mojave desert where wildflowers and sand have overtaken the landscape, with only a few skeletons visible from under the dust, each boasting an elongated VR-headset, is enough to conjure a vision of a world gone askew. The image is mysterious and evocative, but also quite effective in marrying nature and technology, perhaps even positing them as opposing forces. There is quiet ambiguity, and a desire to engage with the reader, to draw them in and have them decode what is happening within this frame. 

As in the film, the firsthand account The Electric State chronicles on the page is of a young teenager on an unlikely road trip in search of her brother. But where the adaptation paints that as the start of an action film where yet another robot insurrection may well take down a crazed tech billionaire (is there any other kind?), Stålenhag’s novel focuses instead on the sheer mundanity of that trek out west. He traces, in the process, the way a new and addictive way of consuming technology (through those headsets) was nothing short of an opium for the masses that, in turn, proved to be their downfall.

The 2018 novel is a patient meditation on addiction, on the ways technology alienates us from one another. The runaway girl at the heart of Stålenhag’s tale is called to remember, time and time again, how she was failed by those around her—by her mother and her foster parents, and on a grander scale, by the world around her, which let everyone ruin their lives for the passing pleasures found in a world offered within the screens of a headset. This is a terrifying dystopian vision precisely because it’s so like our own reality. So much so that even her budding relationship with another girl comes crashing down thanks to a religious doctrine that finds no room for the joys of queer folks. (That the Russo brothers’ adaptation does away with this subplot feels both telling and immaterial; theirs is a film that barely touches on the interiority of its central characters, let alone their visceral desires, sexual or otherwise.)

But more importantly, Stålenhag’s artwork constantly stresses the vastness of the environments he captures. There’s a reason he mostly paints landscapes where his human figures are dwarfed by mountains, skies, aircraft carriers, billboards, and ships. The Electric State uses its protagonist as a mere conduit to paint a portrait of this world in decay. Her memories of abusive foster homes and fleeting moments of happiness—not to mention her scouring and scavenging in the present as she heads west—are designed to present an engrossing vision of a world ravaged. 

In one passage, the book’s narrator explains the image Stålenhag offers on the following page: “The mountainsides were patterned with large slabs of snow, and the road was bordered by heaps of snow so dirty they were hard to distinguish from the gravel,” she says. “Somewhere far away I glimpsed a huge smiling face—an advertisement that winked into and out of view and disappeared behind the trees.” That smiling face was on the side of a spherical building owned by Sentre, the company who’d created those headsets and the virtual reality where so many wished to inhabit instead of their IRL doldrum. Stålenhag’s illustration is like a mix between a Bob Ross painting and a Star Wars proof of concept, the Sentre installation seeming both in and out of place amid its frozen surroundings.

But it’s what follows which really captures the tenor of Stålenhag’s creation: “Someone should really heave those installations from their foundations and let them roll down the mountains into the suburbs, where they could crush whatever was left of all the gardens, houses, and responsible mothers and fathers and their SUVs and finally lay themselves calmly to rest in the abandoned city centers as memorials to humankind.” That’s a bleak sentiment, one which is echoed throughout The Electric State. 

On the page, there is no push toward a neat resolution nor a redemptive one. There is no war to be fought (let alone won). There is no villain to be vanquished (let alone identified). The evils that lurk at the edges of Stålenhag’s frames are insidious, yes. But they’re structural. They’re represented by abandoned buildings and eerie installations, by neon advertisements and decommissioned drones. You get none of that in the Netflix film that carries that same title. The Russo brothers have no use for barren landscapes.

Quite the contrary. On the big screen (depending on how big your TV screen is), the Russos have created a muddled and crowded world. The still melancholy of Stålenhag’s illustrations has been scribbled and layered over with zany characters that all feel borrowed or Xeroxed from other, better films. Even when the filmmakers linger on shots that hope to mirror Stålenhag’s quietly devastating tableaus, the cacophony of their narrative and dialogue alike drowns out any emotion you’d wring out of them. Early in the film, Michelle stops her car in front of the Battle Of Fort Hull Rest Area (where giant robots and drones now litter the landscape). Yet the more she interacts with her brother/the Cosmo robot, the more the scene is drowned out by Alan Silvestri’s stridently romantic score and Alan Tudyk’s comic catchphrases as Cosmo, which are deployed as easy punchlines while the scene hammers its expository dialogue over and over again. Stålenhag tells readers little, the Russos act as if we needed CliffsNotes for a movie we’re still in the process of watching.

Therein lies what’s most disheartening about The Electric State. There’s a gorgeous kernel of a concept underneath everything the Russo brothers throw at this story. But Stålenhag’s words and images are reduced to “IP-to-be-developed” gray matter; ironic considering how much his illustrated novel is about the brain rot that comes from losing oneself in the world that tech oligarchs have created for those needing to escape the real life world. So why develop this source material if only to entirely betray its aesthetic and sensibility? When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you only imagine movies (or “content”) as quippy, family-friendly slop where things go “boom” in between nostalgia-driven set pieces, you can only ever make one kind of forgettable dreck—one that handily and giddily abandons Stålenhag’s artistry.