Yes, I watched it after 13 hours on the interstate. And yes, the kids were making a racket in the next room. But the new Netflix movie by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, of Avengers: Endgame fame, would have been a disaster in even the most tranquil of circumstances. Screen it in a one-man space pod after an excellent night’s sleep. Nothing will alter The Electric State’s disorienting, tone-deaf incompetence.
The film tells the story of Michelle Greene, a teenage orphan who crosses a dystopian desertscape in search of her lost brother. Played by Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things, Michelle is neither likable nor believable as the spunky heroine the screenplay envisions. Instead, our protagonist moves sullenly from scene to scene, deploying sad or mad faces as events require. To say that the sentient machines with whom Michelle travels are the more interesting characters is like praising tax season as superior to actual death.
Michelle’s brother, Chris, is played by the English child actor Woody Norman, whose performance toggles between mawkishness and irritability. In a nod to the series that made Norman’s co-star famous, Chris possesses mental powers and has been kidnapped by high-placed goons. When, in the film’s opening act, Michelle encounters Cosmo, a robot with her sibling’s mannerisms, she sets off to rescue Chris, convinced that his consciousness has taken charge of the bot even as his body remains captive somewhere in the American southwest.
How this is meant to work is explained in an early flashback montage disguised as a news report. The year is 1994, and humans have just fought a war of survival against the robots who were once their domestic servants. Facilitating mankind’s victory has been an invention that allows flesh-and-blood soldiers to control mechanized drone bodies with half their minds while the other halves enjoy, say, margaritas on a digital beach. If this “neural bifurcation” strikes a little too closely to Apple TV+’s Severance, that is far from The Electric State’s only lapse into derivativeness. Indeed, the film is a positive cornucopia of ham-fisted allusion, hat-tipping, and theft.
If the Russos had an original idea at any point in the moviemaking process, it didn’t make the final cut. Merely to name the picture’s influences is to condemn it by comparison. Scenes in which Michelle first shelters then flees with Cosmo will remind viewers of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), as will the film’s general suspicion of government agents. A vast “exclusion zone” in which robot POWs languish is ripped directly from Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), which placed alien refugees in a similar encampment. Even the aforementioned table-setting newscast feels like a cut-rate episode of For All Mankind, Apple’s brilliant alternate-history take on the space race. Never mind that The Electric State owes its very existence to Philip K. Dick, Battlestar Galactica, and The Matrix. The movie is every bit as indebted to others in its particulars.
Of course, referential mashups can be great fun, especially when, as is clearly intended here, no one takes the proceedings too seriously. The Electric State’s problem is that it can’t get a handle on tone and shifts awkwardly from toddler prankishness to adolescent bada**ery. Case in point, the robot war concludes when a mechanized Mr. Peanut surrenders to Bill Clinton on the White House lawn. I will let that sentence hang for a moment. Yet the movie also contains, by my count, more than a dozen significant obscenities, as well as enough death to scar the Bluey crowd for life. Had my own middle graders come in from the other room, they would have been alternately horrified, scandalized, and bored.
If the film has a single redeeming feature, it is the performance of Chris Pratt as John D. Keats, an outlaw and smuggler who accompanies Michelle into the exclusion zone. To be clear, Pratt can’t act and barely tries. I kept waiting for him to shout “Yowzers,” so cartoonish is his affected, Shaggy-ish glee. Yet the Jurassic World star is at least having a good time, unlike every single one of his companions onscreen. There for the reported $20 million payday, Pratt has the good sense to smile occasionally and to treat his lines with the amused irreverence that they deserve.
Does so obnoxious a movie deserve even negative attention? Sadly, the answer is “yes.” As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, the Russo brothers have invested their Marvel profits in an Industrial Light & Magic-style studio designed with “transmedia” in mind. If, as the pair believe, the future of storytelling lies in AI assets that “can be made once, then reused for a movie, a game, a theme-park ride, [or] a television show,” we can expect further entrées into The Electric State’s world. Dear God, please let those plans come to nothing.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
