Review: The Electric State
Spending an ungodly amount of money, Netflix’s latest massive blockbuster, The Electric State, is a mish-mash of ideas that were expressed better in other films and a genuinely terrible script that seems to have contributed to some truly awful performances from the main cast.
Set in an alternate 1994 following a massive war between robots and humans, the film follows Michelle Green (Millie Bobby Brown), who is in foster care after the deaths of her parents and brother. When a robot resembling cartoon character Kid Cosmo arrives and has clues that her brother Christopher (Woody Norman) is still alive, Michelle sets out on a quest into the exclusion zone, where the remaining robots are kept separate from humanity. On the way, she meets Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robotic partner Herman (Anthony Mackie), who regularly make excursions into the exclusion zone to smuggle out collectibles they sell on the black market. The movie’s tone is all over the place, with attempts at actual social commentary or dramatic beats clashing with the goofy nature of all the robotic characters or quips that deflate the tension and drama. It’s tough to take a speech about freedom and what it means to be alive seriously when it comes from Mr. Peanut, who Woody Harrelson voiced. The movie brushes over most of the background and technology, which seems interesting for cringe humor. It has a cliche-ridden plot that flies in the face of the more serious and grounded graphic novel inspired by the movie. The Electric State is somehow a stupider version of the Ready Player One movie mixed with stuff like Surrogates, I, Robot, and The Matrix that doesn’t offer anything new or interesting. If you want to save yourself time and brain cells, “The Second Renaissance Parts 1 and 2″ from The Animatrix covers similar ground in a much more thoughtful and compelling way, so watch that instead.
Whether it’s the directing, the script, or a combination of both, most of the cast in The Electric State is giving terrible or seemingly uninterested performances. Millie Bobby Brown is completely uncompelling and bland in the lead, hitting one note the entire film and never deviating from it, making her feel more robotic than the robots around her. Chris Pratt feels like he’s doing rejected bits from Guardians of the Galaxy with none of his quips particularly clever or funny. Stanley Tucci is sleepwalking through the movie as the main villain, Skate, who runs the company that provides the VR technology and drone tech that powers the world following the robot war and mostly speaks in villainous cliches. Some of the cast manages to come out unscathed, like Ke Huy Quan as the regretful scientist who developed the “Neurocaster” tech and some of the side robot characters are fun, like Brian Cox as baseball robot Popfly or Hank Azaria as a shitty magician robot called Perplexo.
You can tell that the $300 million this movie cost was spent on the visuals because they are impressive for the most part. All the robots, as goofy as they are, are nicely realized and feel like they are actually in the space with the human characters. There are some solid set pieces, including the big climactic battle, but there’s not enough to offset how bland and terrible the other parts of the movie are.
Ultimately, The Electric State is a frustratingly expensive misfire that drowns its few redeeming elements in a sea of bad writing, poor performances, and unoriginal ideas, making it a colossal waste of both budget and potential.
