…and Woody Harrelson AS … (dramatic pause) … Mr. Peanut! The Electric State is the newest megabudget bucket o’ Netflix slop, stacked to the stratosphere with big names, crammed with action and noise, and spending an absurdly whopping $320 million of the streamer’s money – or YOUR money, considering that recent price increase, if you want to look at it that way. So this is what you get for your beefed-up subscription fee: Reigning Netflix queen Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt headlining a robots-vs.-humans sci-fi extravaganza based on a graphic novel by Simon Stalenhag (see also: Tales from the Loop) and directed by Marvel Cinematic Universe vets Anthony and Joe Russo. It’s a large-scale, FX-heavy adventure saga that some people will watch on their little tiny phones, and it’s essentially about how we should detach ourselves from algorithms and learn to experience life in a more analog way. So the question is, does Netflix even know what the hell it’s doing? (Maybe the more pertinent question is, does Netflix even care? Probably not.)
THE ELECTRIC STATE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: 1990: BEFORE THE WAR. We meet Michelle (Brown), who’s super tight with her little genius brother Christopher (Woody Norman). The kid’s such a genius, he rambles on about how consciousness can transcend the human body etc. etc., and that’s why he’s going to college before she does, and that’s also a big flashing neon sign screaming: FORESHADOWING (blink) FORESHADOWING (blink) FORESHADOWING. Next, a steaming heap of exposition which requires us to don our waders for the history of this story’s alt-history: In the ’50s, robots were implemented into society and they eventually became sentient and revolted against humans for civil rights. The robots lost the war and, as the narrator goes, “Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson!) signed a treaty of surrender with President Clinton,” prompting their exile to a corner of the American Southwest. (Note: Many of the robots are corporate mascots, which gives the film an excuse to deploy willy-nilly product placement.) The separatist treaty dictates that robots are illegal in human areas and vice-versa. Meanwhile, a big-tech arrogant pissant named Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) invented a headset allowing people to propagate robot avatars to do all their work for them while they lean back and go on virtual vacation, and that’s all anybody ever does now. Sound familiar, doomscrollers?
Now: 1994: AFTER THE WAR. Michelle has more gigantic bangs than anybody in 1994 ever had, but we have to accept that in this alt-timeline, bangs have evolved into Ludicrous Bangs. She was orphaned after her parents and Christopher were killed in a car crash, and lives with a foster dad who exists to embarrass the living shit out of Jason Alexander. One fateful day, a robot known as Kid Cosmo, a character from Christopher’s favorite cartoon, drops by and informs Michelle that Christopher’s mind is inside his robot noggin. This, despite Chrisbot only being able to communicate in the cartoon’s catchphrases, but Michelle gets the gist – although it took me a minute, because there’s so much bric-a-brac and junkinthatrunk of this bouncing Uncle Buck-ass jalopy of a movie I often felt my mind occupying other things too. After much screaming, denials, noise and nonjokes Michelle and the Chrisbot hop a train to New Mexico to find Chris’ real body while my mind hopped a train of thought to the grocery list and whether one can give an enema to a profoundly constipated cat. (This is all true. Scout’s honor.)
During the journey, Michelle encounters a biker-trucker-smuggler-doofus-malorkus in a denim vest named Keats (Pratt), who gets out of a truck to the mellifluous tones of Danzig’s “Mother” (because he’s tough as hell) as a breeze runs its fingers through his godawful f—ing wig. Seriously, the hair budget for this movie had to have been north of $15 mil. He’s a former soldier who quit the war because it was wrong, which is why he and his ’bot buddy Herm (Anthony Mackie) agree to help Michelle, but not until after much screaming, denials, noise and nonjokes, because the Russos obviously have an astronomical action-comedy quota to meet here. During this quest, we see and/or hear the voices of the following Hollywood stars: Colman Domingo, Ke Huy Quan, Giancarlo Esposito, Marin Hinkle, Alan Tudyk, Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, Rob Gronkowski… and Brian Cox as The Voice Of The Baseball Robot That Spits Baseballs. No, I didn’t hallucinate this movie. Promise. If I had, it almost certainly would’ve been better.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A list of all the movies Stupid Hair: The Mov-, er, I mean, The Electric State blatantly rips off or references: RoboCop, E.T., Star Wars, Transformers, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Escape from New York, Ready Player One, Mad Max, WALL-E, The Tomorrow War and Toy Story, but the biting-on-tinfoil Chappie energy is off the charts for this one, folks. It’s one profane Die Antwoord outburst away from killing you on the spot.
Performance Worth Watching: Unlike the humiliation of The Parenting, which showed us Cox sans trou and projectile-vomiting, at least we only hear his voice in The Electric State. And he gives his dopey character more energy and verve than the rest of his uninspired castmates.
Memorable Dialogue: “Our world is a tire fire floating in an ocean of piss.” – Ethan Skate
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: To paraphrase the words of a wise man, The Electric State is a tire fire floating in an ocean of piss. OK, maybe it’s not that bad. “Bad” doesn’t necessarily equate to “unwatchable,” because this movie is surely watchable, in a way that only absolute and relentless mediocrity allows. The Russos have churned out the ultimate overpriced, overblown widget, a conglomeration of compelling IP rendered generic, wearisome needle drops, slumming-for-bucks talent and unceasing green-screenery, all executed with nary a smidgen of artistic vision. It’s a formula that’s positively Netflixian.
Again: Three hundred and twenty million dollars. Monthly plans start at $7.99 with ads, $17.99 without ads and $24.99 for 4K. Unmanned customer service bots are standing by, ready to accept credit card payment.
Part of the Netflix maxim involves stranding its cast with flimsy material and garbing them up all silly for maximum memeworthiness. I’ve said enough about the hair, which pushed me so far around the sphere of self-image that it temporarily left me grateful for the harsh reality of my chronic male pattern baldness. Pratt plays his role like it’s Snake Plissken if he sucked and should’ve been played by Jason Momoa, who’s just generally better at being gratingly obnoxious. (He gets the only decent line here: “I’m not dying to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch!”, which quite remarkably mirrors how I felt about the movie.) Brown is left deadlifting a featherweight character who’s stuck navigating a last-minute crocodile-tears moral conundrum at the climax, the movie’s Hail Mary for something resembling human emotion falling 35 yards short of the goal line.
Thematically, though, The Electric State is 10,000 dogs woofing “The Star Spangled Banner” in C-flat. This movie dares to ask the most profound question, What Does It Mean To Be Human? And in the context of the platform on which the movie is streaming, To Be Human is to let it play on repeat all weekend, passively feeding the machine, justifying the next empty quasi-blockbuster behemoth (maybe it’ll cost $400 million!) and ignoring what Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt are reciting blandly in the script about unplugging yourself and experiencing the world with your own eyes. I’m not usually one to point out hypocrisy among my fellow humans (or corporate conglomerates), because we’re all walking contradictions who contain multitudes, and let he who is without sin, etc., but this is too blatant and arrogant, and too big a target to keep the stones pocketed. It’s almost as if undermining the message with forgettable, lifeless filmmaking is part of the formula now, too.
Our Call: Electrocuted. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
