2025 | PG-13 | starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Kwan, Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito | directed by Joe and Anthony Russo | 2h 5m | 2 out of 5 stars |
In an alternate 90s, robots that look like theme park characters were created to serve mankind. Naturally and inexplicably, they got tired of serving us and rebelled, forcing a robot/human war that humans ultimately won via the creation of robot-puppeting human technology invented by tech billionaire Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci). The result put the robots behind a walled off refugee camp called The Electric State and addicted humans to their VR robot headsets. In this world, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) meets a young robot who claims to be her long-death brother (Woody Norman) and the two go on a quest with rag-tag junk dealer Keats (Chris Pratt) to find out the truth about the Electric State and Skate’s evil tech company.
Back in 2018, the Russo brothers were rightfully praised for knocking out what seemed like an impossible task: pulling all the desperate storylines from 10 years of Marvel movies into a massive cast team-up film in which everyone got their moment, and everything felt effortless with Avengers: Infinity War. Then they did it again with Avengers: Endgame. Now, with The Electric State they can’t keep one storyline standing on its own legs. A mile wide and an inch deep, full of goofy CGI creations in place of actual world-building (this movie couldn’t care less about the details of how this world runs or how we got here) and filled with tiny voice-only parts that can be used to bump up the cast roster with big names, The Electric State is a dreary movie in the vein of a Speilbergian summer blockbuster that serves more as propaganda in our own upcoming war with AI than any actual piece of entertainment.
Where to start? Let’s hit the obvious first and move on. Because Hollywood isn’t about talent and people are just anointed to star in movies, Electric State is the latest attempt by Netflix to signal boost professional screen-hogger Millie Bobby Brown, sporting a crimped 90s hairstyle. Alongside her is Chris Pratt, once the savior of studio action movies able to lend charm to a leading man role, now a parody of himself stuffed under a bag wig and a Han Solo vest. Both leads are terrible, but everyone in this movie is terrible. Tucci and Esposito sleepwalk through the entire runtime. Despite being part of a massive global tech company that has enslaved mankind in VR, they never feel like much of a force of antagonism. The best character in the movie, or at least the one that looks the most fun, is Pratt’s robot sidekick Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie) who perpetually changes size and shape and gives a bro razzing to Keats that feels like the most honest thing going here. That’s one in a line of various call-in favors the movie does to fill both robot voices and robot drone screens with credit-padding names. Woody Harrelson, Brian Cox, my girl Jenny Slate, Alan Tudyk, Hank Azaria and, on a grainy screen, Coleman Domingo fill out the voice cast of actors who never stood in the same room together.
I like the initial concept here. If robots were going to wage war on humans they wouldn’t look like scary Terminator exo-skeletons, they would look friendly, cartoonish, with a permanent smile painted on their faces initially pretending to help us. Ultimately, the movie ditches that idea, first kicking off with the usual sci-fi trope that the robots became sentient and started wanting freedom (how?) and ending with the usual message that humans are evil and robots are more human than humans. In an age where AI is forced down our throats with every google search, billboard ad and instagram video, this is all so transparent and tiresome. It is the solution to something that isn’t a problem and a supply that fills no market demand, but it’s coming anyway, go pound sand.
In its most ok moments, Electric State conjures up enough life to recall the perfect movie to compare it against – Steven Speilberg’s Ready Player One. It’s not the use of CGI battle scenes and giant robots that can sink your film, it’s what you do with it. Ready Player One is an animated video game come to life and yet Speilberg has the filmmaking savvy to punch every twist, milk every moment of suspense and hit the bests just right to turn it all into a cheer-the-heroes piece of popcorn entertainment. I say that like it’s all in the hands of the Russo’s here which it admittedly isn’t. The material itself is too lazy and dark to twist a few dials in the sound and editing to make it work. This is after all, a PG-13 popcorn film that centers around a dead kid and the sister who grieves him. There is a creepiness to this movie’s final reveal that isn’t not ready to reckon with and it clashes sharply with the fun summer movie vibe it’s all going for.