The Electric State should have been a video game

Director brothers Joe and Anthony Russo love to dream big, on screen and off. After delivering the grandest season finale of all time, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the duo set off in a million different directions, including franchise-building at Netflix, partnering with Epic on Fortnite, and pontificating on the future of AI in movies. They do seem to love cinema (especially Heat), but in interviews, the filmmakers often sound more like engineers than storytellers — fascinated by parts and eager to experiment with tools that will let them go as big as possible. 

So maybe it’s no surprise that the Russos would jump at the chance to adapt Simon Stålenhag’s retrofuture robot-forward dystopian sci-fi tale The Electric State, or that, with a reported $300 million-plus budget to throw around, their new Netflix movie is all nuts and bolts and no soul. Despite the Russos’ clear appreciation for the Swedish artist behind Tales from the Loop (and its various incarnations as a TTRPG, board game, and TV show), and his haunting art in The Electric State, their Netflix adaptation opens by pouring out metric tons of exposition like concrete. Then it nudges its characters across the resulting smooth-brained surface like a couple of giraffes in roller skates. The finished product is a mess, and a sign that the Russos’ taste for “going big” might be unfit for the medium of film.

Written by the Russos’ MCU cohorts Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, The Electric State stars Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a rebellious teenager living in an alternate 1990s that’s mellowing out after a robot uprising. As we learn in a dizzying data dump, humans were nearly outnumbered by worker bots until Muskian douchenozzle Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) invented the “Neurocaster,” a helmet interface that allowed fleshbags to inhabit the bodies of cyborgs and go toe to toe against the robotic rebels. 

Michelle finds society’s postwar dependency on Neurocasters like, totally wack, but her technological worldviews are upended when she meets Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), a cartoonish bot possibly possessed by her believed-to-be-dead genius brother, but suffering from Bumblebee syndrome, in that it can only speak through canned catchphrases. The two, with the help of ex-soldier Keats (Chris Pratt) and his own quippy robo-pal Herman (Anthony Mackie), hit the road to hunt down Skate, who Michelle believes is holding her brother captive.

Ostensibly a straightforward road movie through the decimated landscapes of post-robowar America, The Electric State ends up flooded by whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys. Michelle and Keats are blank heroes who amass a battalion of metallic friends (a mailbot voiced by Jenny Slate; a Mr. Peanut automaton played by Woody Harrelson), all apparently programmed to be Saturday morning cartoon sidekicks. Muddy action fills the gaps between revelations about Skate’s ultimate plans, and so often, it’s rendered in drab colors and shadows. Ironically, the blend of live-action backdrops and polished visual effects puppetry lacks the depth of the 2D illustrations in Stålenhag’s book. The Electric State, the movie, is devoid of majesty.

A Spielbergian throwback full of pre-visualized laser fire, quippy CG creations, and trailercore ’90s covers (that made me wonder if the Russos were a little jealous they didn’t get to make a Guardians of the Galaxy movie) probably made sense on paper for a creative team who needed to distill a Hollywood story from Stålenhag’s source material. But it overlooks a key part of the book: just basking in the art. At many points on Michelle’s journey, I was desperate for the plot to stop so I could stand still and soak up this strange alternate universe. I wanted to wander around the abandoned mall, now a sanctuary for refugee robots. I wanted to chitchat with the robo-cook. I wanted to play The Electric State.

When I queued up the Russos’ movie, I was about 30 hours into Eternal Strands, the recent action/fantasy RPG produced by former BioWare devs. The game’s physics-based combat makes a truly chaotic but exhilarating experience out of fighting titan automatons and discovering traces of an ancient but fallen civilization. The mythology was not so unique that I sat through every NPC companion’s dialogue or read every scrawled bit of backstory — Fallout might be my standard-bearer for world-building gravy I want to lap up — but I luxuriated in Eternal Strands’ scale and elemental jank (complimentary). Watching The Electric State, as the characters zipped past abandoned bot husks and brushed against the larger political upheaval of the war, made me pine for the epistolary experience I was having over in Eternal Strands, where I got to set the pace. Instead, I got the speedrun.

Branded mascots, pop culture references, and 1993 footage of Bill Clinton addressing a missile attack on Iraq’s intelligence headquarters edited to suggest he’s talking about the robowars aren’t enough to ground The Electric State in lived-in reality. The screenplay never brings viewers close to the conflict, past or present. It’s not a necessity for the story to do so — there’s a long history of post-apocalyptic fiction and other road movies that consider the weight of American culture through the eyes of one person’s drama — but Brown can’t do much with the stock character work on the page, and The Electric State is not Bones and All for robots. So the Russos rely solely on iconography to immerse us in the story. They probably needed 80 more hours and Unreal Engine 5 to pull it off. 

In two-hour cinematic form, The Electric State is the most generic version of what it could possibly be. Even the big finale fight scene feels like a mishmash of Endgame (nondescript overcast industrial lawn battleground) and Mad Max: Fury Road (Doof Warrior stand-in in the form of a robot taco). Saying that this movie feels like blockbuster entertainment written by AI seems a little rude — computers would probably have a deeper understanding of the robotic struggle — but it’s just that vacant. I don’t expect the official Electric State video game, a mobile-friendly puzzler produced by Netflix and the Russos, to fill in too many gaps.

The Electric State is now streaming on Netflix.