When it comes to its line-up of exclusive blockbusters, Netflix has never been one to spare any expense — even if it means hitting subscribers with another price hike.
Netflix’s latest big-ticket release arrives in the form of The Electric State, a $US320 million adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s dystopic graphic novel, which sits among the most expensive movies ever made.
What: In an alternate sci-fi vision of the 90s where robots have been outlawed, a teenage girl goes searching for her brother with a smuggler and a team of misfit machines.
Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito
Directed by: The Russo Brothers
Where: Streaming now on Netflix
Likely to make you feel: Negatively charged
Its directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, are no strangers to titanic Hollywood productions. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame had a combined price tag of a billion dollars and demonstrated the brothers’ unparalleled talent for finding a clear path through an impenetrable thicket of plot lines, acting schedules, CGI punch-ons and merchandising deals.
The Electric State has no shortage of other Avengers alumni. Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy) stars as another Han Solo rip-off, whose robot sidekick is voiced by Anthony Mackie (Captain America: Brave New World). Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, editor Jeffrey Ford and composer Alan Silvestri also collaborated with the Russos on Endgame.
Anthony and Joseph Russo worked on episodes of cult comedy shows Arrested Development and Community, but they’re best known for directing Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. (Supplied: Netflix)
But even when re-assembled with the talents behind their record-breaking superhero hits and equipped with a blank cheque, the film suffocates within the brothers’ narrow creative limits.
Stålenhag’s enigmatic approach to world building is immediately jettisoned via an opening info-dump montage: an alternate timeline of the 90s has seen animatronics revolt against their human masters, resulting in all-out war. The machines are on the precipice of winning — until tech CEO Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) invents an army of humanoid drones (controlled via neural interface) that turn the tide.
The Electric State kicks off several years after the war, where the surviving robots have been contained within a walled-off chunk of New Mexico termed the ‘Exclusion Zone’, and Skate’s technology has enjoyed widespread adoption in the form of ‘Neurocasters’: chunky helmets that silo brainwaves into remote work and VR leisure simultaneously, leaving its users drooling and slack-jawed underneath.
The movie is strongest when it leans into the famous imagery from Stålenhag’s graphic novel, particularly the disintegrating machines left to rust away after the war. (Supplied: Netflix)
Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle, a rebellious teenager whose family died in a car accident during the war. At home, her foster dad lords over her primarily in drone form; at school, she resists the mandatory use of Neurocasters.
When the mind of her genius brother Christopher (Woody Norman; C’mon C’mon) suddenly resurfaces as the robot mascot from their favourite cartoon, she embarks on a road trip to the Exclusion Zone — picking up Pratt’s roguish smuggler Keats along the way — to uncover the truth behind his apparent death.
The sooner movies abandon Gen X nostalgia, the better. The Electric State isn’t a sci-fi adventure so much as it is a saccharine skip down memory lane; tributes are lovingly paid to a bygone American era of strip malls and twinkies, littered with twee covers of rock anthems.
Nowhere is the film’s consumerist zeal more grating than in the prominence of real-life peanut butter mascot Mr Peanut, who’s first glimpsed negotiating a peace treaty with Bill Clinton — an absurd sight gag that grows less funny the more screen time he’s afforded. Voiced by Woody Harrelson, he’s the leader of a group of animatronics who’ve made a new home within the Zone, and inexplicably becomes a driving voice of reason and compassion within the film.
Mr Peanut was killed off during a Superbowl commercial in 2020. Now he’s the face of the revolution, for some reason.
There are other characters that exist within the Russos’ new film, but none of them manage to crawl out from the shadow cast by this civil rights figurehead wrought from a walking, talking, and ghoulishly rendered advertising meme.
Besides, what else is there to say about Chris Pratt’s reluctant manchild hero, except that he’s clearly too old to still be doing this shtick? Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once), on the other hand, has been criminally underutilised in his post-Oscars career — and is stuck playing a mysterious scientist working for Skate, with a screen time of mere minutes. Both are straddled with the least-convincing wigs $US320 million can buy.
The Electric State briefly switches on when it recreates Stålenhag’s famous imagery, particularly that of hulking mechanical colossi rusting away in misty fields, or the parasitic headsets lodged to people’s faces. The more disquieting implications of its world, as well as the despairing, melancholic tone of the Swedish artist’s work, are understandably elided in this family-friendly blockbuster, yet raises questions of why the graphic novel was adapted in the first place.
The enormous budget seemingly doesn’t extend to the wig department in Electric State. (Supplied: Netflix)
From their beginnings in experimental film to their pitch-perfect genre parodies in Community, it’s apparent the Russo brothers have some affection for the medium. Yet their output over the past decade suggests a far greater passion for distilling cinema into content. Their films have increasingly challenged how flat and colourless an action blockbuster can be, and how hard the backs of CGI artists can be broken.
They bill themselves as independent filmmakers, only to use their extraordinary capital, goodwill and creative largesse to cook up different flavours of generic, straight-to-streaming slop.
The Electric State not only suggests that robots can have a soul — it convincingly argues that its filmmakers are still searching for one.
