In terms of actual box office dollars, brothers and directors Anthony and Joe Russo have to be the most successful filmmaking team in history, with such hits as Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War, as well as the last two Avengers films Infinity War and Endgame. On all of those titles, they worked from screenplays by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, marking one of the most fruitful collaborations in all of filmdom. So then why does the sci-fi adventure Electric State (based on the novel by Simon Stalenhag), a collaboration of these four creators, feel so subpar when you scratch even a little bit beneath its shiny surface?
The setting is an alternate reality, retro-futuristic version of the 1990s, a world in which robots rose up and fought back against their human oppressors and lost. We jump into the story in the aftermath, after a young woman named Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) loses her genius younger brother Chris (Woody Norman) and parents, leaving her orphaned. Her current foster father (Jason Alexander), like millions of others, spends most of his time in the virtual world and has little time to look after her, and it’s at this point she meets a mascot robot named Cosmo (voice by Alan Tudyk), who only speaks in catch phrases from his animated show. That makes communication difficult, but Michelle soon realizes that somehow her brother’s intellect inhabits this small robot and wants to lead her to where his real-life body is being kept by tech giant Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci).
Unfortunately for Michelle, finding her brother’s location forces her to enter the Exclusion Zone in the American southwest. You see, the robots didn’t all die; they actually signed an agreement (through their leader, Mr. Peanut, voiced by Woody Harrelson) with the government to live a peaceful life away from humans. Michelle and her Cosmo robot must get to this hidden city to find out where her brother is.
Along the way, she meets a low-rent smuggler named Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot companion Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), and the four reluctantly join forces on this journey. Part of the fun of The Electric State is the voice work for the robots they meet along their journey, including ones voiced by Colman Domingo, Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, Brian Cox, even Ron Gronkowksi. The production also hired Terry Notary, the great motion coordinator for the Planet of the Apes movies and the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit films, to do much of the motion-capture work for the robots.
We also get live-action supporting work from Ke Huy Quan (as a doctor who knows where Chris’s body is) and Holly Hunter (as a journalist), so it’s clear this film isn’t messing around when it comes to casting and hiring the best there is to make this movie. So naturally, it all feels a bit warmed over, with recognizable elements of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Transformers scattered throughout.
That doesn’t mean the film isn’t capable of pulling off the occasional emotional moment or solid action sequence. The special effects that help create the robots are undeniably impressive; the battle sequences of human drones versus robots are fairly epic and we know the Russos can handle epic. But there’s a dimension missing in The Electric State that mostly comes down to the way the characters are written.
These writers and directors also made 2022’s The Gray Man, which was also a big-budget Netflix streamer that looked and felt like something impressive, but also felt hollow. Maybe it’s simply the inability to watch these films on a big screen that makes them feel limited and something less than. But with this title, it all feels somewhat familiar to varying degrees. I responded a great deal to the story of the robot struggle, and Harrelson’s Mr. Peanut portrayal is actually surprisingly moving, partly because I’ve never seen anything like that before. But other elements, like the entirely of what Pratt is doing with his performance, feels like warmed-over, recycled sci-fi trope mining. The pieces are there to make something great, but they never quite come together as they should, and it ends up being the film’s ambition that keeps it from being one for the ages.
The film is now streaming on Netflix.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting Third Coast Review’s arts and culture coverage by making a donation. Choose the amount that works best for you, and know it goes directly to support our writers and contributors.