Netflix’s The Electric State Review: I Think The Russo Bros’ Latest Movie Looks Awesome, But It Proves They Should Make Some Career Changes

First brought to life (as it were) in 2018 as a photography-filled text by acclaimed Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, The Electric State is a singular journey about a past era that never existed but still feels as real as anything in a history book. The inspiring mix of past, present and future aesthetics isn’t entirely unlike other recent alt-history media, from Fallout to The Last of Us to another Stålenhag adaptation, Tales from the Loop.

In making the leap from the page to the screen as a 1990s-set adaptation that stretches the definition of “live-action” as much as some Disney’s modern-era remakes, The Electric State unfortunately falls short of matching the source material’s uniqueness and whimsy – despite boasting myriad talents both in front of the camera and behind it. It’d be no small feat for anyone to fully capture the book’s inherent charms, but one might think that Netflix’s seemingly depthless pockets would have allowed for something less fleeting.

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, filmmakers who honed their talents with brilliant TV comedies before vaulting into big-budget Marvel Studios fare, The Electric State often feels like the equivalent of prettied-up meals in fast food commercials: a feast for the eyes, but lacking most of the caloric value that keeps one’s brain on track. This would be perfectly fine if we were all robots without functioning biologies, but my human tastes desire something more substantial.

Anthony and Joe Russo are as skilled as can be at directing CGI-filled spectacles.

The Electric State is set in a Jetsons-esque reality where household bots were the norm until a worldwide Us Vs. Them war destroyed all the good vibes, leaving the remaining automatons to congregate in the “Exclusion Zone,” in which humans are not welcome. Millie Bobby Brown plays the tech-rejecting teen Michelle, whose family was seemingly killed off years earlier during the big war, and she still mourns the loss of her brainiac brother Christopher (Woody Norman).

After the robotic avatar of a beloved cartoon character crosses paths with Michelle, she discovers that it somehow appears to contain the life essence of her brother, which ties into some deep-state conspiracy plotting involving a VR-esque company run by Stanley Tucci’s Ethan Skate that allows users’ to split their brainpower between functioning in a virtual realm and powering mecha-drones in the real world. Shades of Ready Player One and District 9 shine through the semi-frequent exposition dumps.

Having acquired the rights to Stålenhag’s book back in 2017, while still in post-production on Avengers: Infinity War, the Russos weren’t even originally planning to helm the adaptation themselves, despite their Marvel collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely handling the script. They officially signed on to spearhead the project in 2020 as a follow-up to their Chris Evans-starring actioner The Gray Man, with Netflix joining the fray in 2022.

All of this is to say that a lot of time was spent in preparation mode for this movie, which required a massive amount of pre-production design work for the multitudes of droids and mechanoids populating the Exclusion Zone, as well as a variety of touched-up landscapes and U.S. skylines. And it’s abundantly clear that vast amounts of meticulous efforts were made to guarantee the best-looking CGI creations and effects possible. In a soundless vacuum-bot, this certainly qualifies as one of the Russo brothers’ best looking movies to date.

For all the gorgeous visuals that honor the source material, The Electric State’s story and dialogue are entirely predictable and forgettable.

The eye-popping and personality-speckled assortment of digitally designed machinery is a wonder only made possible through modern means, but the same cannot be said for the screenplay credited to the Russos’ frequent collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. The Electric State’s big-picture themes of overcoming adversities and being skeptical of capitalist consumerism are timeless enough, the story beats and dialogue might as well have come from a 1993 screenplay that someone in this very movie finds near a busted printer in the EZ.

I’ve already seen plenty of iterations of the story that Brown’s Michelle is both showing with her performance, and also needlessly telling through clunky conversations. And I’m not even sure that Chris Pratt’s Keats has a story to be told, with a performance that’s a MAD Magazine fold-in of Star-Lord and Andy Dwyer. The excellent supporting cast of Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander and Ke Huy Quan are unfortunately saddled with one-dimensional roles that do nothing beyond further the plot, and a lot of their work is further hindered by being delivered through low-res face screens.

Too early into the runtime — like, barely past the opening chunk of exposition delivered by the late MTV News great Kurt Loder and a Bill Clinton impersonator — I wanted to ignore all the humans and take my time exploring the shapes, sizes and intelligence levels of every bot in this world, silently hoping to run into Futurama’s Hedonism bot somewhere. As Michelle’s sidekick, the Alan Tuduk voiced Cosmo Kid boasts a fixed expression and a limited number of pre-recorded phrases, and it’s just flat-out a better performance than what we get from the rest of the ensemble.

This version of The Electric State should have been a spinoff focusing entirely on imaginative creations like the stage-magician bot Perplexo (voiced by Hank Azaria), aging baseball-oriented droid Popfly (Brian Cox), do-good postal worker Penny Pal (Jenny Slate), and monocled local leader Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson). As Herman, the nesting-robot sidekick of Chris Pratt’s Keats, Anthony Mackie is the bot with the most amount of dialogue, and thus sounds the most like a Saturday Morning cartoon.

Perhaps the most baffling thing about this wildly expensive movie is that I can only remember a dozen or so instances where my brain actively recognized some form of humor being attempted, and at no point was I laughing at any of it. I suppose I can appreciate that Pratt isn’t horking quips the entire time, but one of the key verbally comedic sequences involves Keats instructing Michelle to temporarily go by the fake name “Veronica,” and she questions whether he said “Beronica.”

To be clear, that joke would only ever work in the very first issue of Archie Comics, which would have still been published 55 years before that hi-larious misunderstanding happened.

The Russos should always make memorable characters a bigger priority than complicated plots or special effects.

It’s undeniable that Markus and McFeely’s script could have used some exposition snips and an infusion of comedic festiveness. But I also think one of The Electric State‘s imbalances lies in Anthony and Joe Russo having come so far from their directing roots that high-effort splendor and magnificence seem to take precedence over creating memorable characters – at least outside the MCU.

To be sure, I fully understand that most of their past directorial efforts that I happen to love the most were part of TV comedies that are notorious for intentionally complicated plotting and boundary-pushing stories: Arrested Development and Community. But those are both also ensemble-driven affairs, and much like the Avengers movies, a ton of characters are able to shine in memorable ways that complement the surrounding chaos.

But for all the quirky CGI bits and bobs sprinkled throughout, The Electric State doesn’t give any of its living and breathing characters a single hero moment that feels destined to inspire any fan art, and there isn’t a single line of dialogue that I can imagine ever entering the pop culture lexicon. I honestly can’t remember if Pratt’s character had a purpose or a goal, and that’s not the kind of thing that fans of the Russos expect.

The brothers’ work within the MCU is not yet done, of course, but once they return to non-Marvel storytelling, I can only hope they find a way to return to character-first storytelling, and if the plots also happen to be amazing and full of digital effects wizardry, so be it. Now, somebody pass me one of those VR helmets.