The Electric State

dir: Russo Brothers

2025

90s nostalgia doesn’t really do much for me. This flick would seem like it’s aiming for 90s nostalgia, in the way that Stranger Things owes much of its existence and probable popularity to 80s nostalgia, and in both cases it just comes across as lazy consumerist grasping.

I guess I remember the 90s well enough to not need to revisit it through some distorted lens. Yes, I get the references, yes I remember a lot of the music and the films. No, I don’t much care for American advertising. And I still don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Twinkie, so I don’t care about them either.

I don’t think the book this was based on by Simon Stålenhag was centred around 90s nostalgia or any deep love of American consumerism. If anything, it’s main intention was to deliver gloomy, somewhat macabre graphics of an American world falling apart because of a slow-rolling apocalypse due to technology. Giant robots, gloomy landscapes, and a population absorbed into a virtual reality environment that leaves their bodies as husks strewn across a landscape traversed by a teenaged girl and a robot.

Humanity is in decline, a hive mind has emerged, and its intentions are less than benevolent. Drones from a war litter the dying landscape. It’s like The Road, but slightly more techie and with less cannibals.

The Russos take that premise and tries to deliver a Steven Spielberg film, without having the grace to craft anything interesting around that desire. They were somehow given the baffling amount of money of $320 million earth dollars to make content for their streamer of choice, being Netflix. All that money, all the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what they made.

I don’t feel that it’s as bad as the critical pile-on would imply. It’s not a great film, but it’s mediocre within normal parameters. Its problem is that it’s so generic, so moulded / extruded into familiar shapes and sequences, with little that you can’t see coming from miles away. Nothing surprising, nothing exciting, no action sequences that really work that well. And there’s a final battle that pretty much implies the Russos not only want to ape Spielberg, but George Lucas too, with a battle that’s one set of robots (good ones) and bad ones (drones controlled by humans) that could have been from the end of The Phantom Menace.

Chris Pratt is in this. I think he’s here for comic relief(?) He has a robot buddy that he loves a lot, so he could be one of them there robosexuals that they warned about in Futurama. When he thinks his robot buddy Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie) is ‘dying’, he confesses that he maybe loves him more than just as a friend.

That’s spicy. Other than that terrible line, repeated, and then brought up again later, I have no idea why he’s in this film. He sports a terrible haircut for much of the flick, which is then replaced with a slightly less horrible one when he takes pity on a haircutting robot, who only seems to exist to cut human hair.

He is here because people have confused an actor with the dialogue someone wrote for him in other movies. By that logic he is funny in every film he’s in, because he was funny in some of those Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

Not here, though, oh no, not here. Though he wears a vest so maybe we’re meant to think he’s a scoundrel with a heart of gold.

Nope. At least Herman is a plot device that aids the main characters in their journey.

Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) is a teenager with terrible blonde extensions and frosted tips. She lost all of her family at some point, so she has a foster dad in the shape and form of Jason Alexander.

Name doesn’t ring any bells? But if I say the guy who tried to rape Julia Robert’s character Vivian in Pretty Woman, probably still a blank.

George Costanza from Seinfeld? Now you know. Eww. At one point he’s wearing a singlet and a pair of Adidas track suit pants. Double Ewww.

For all the years that she played Eleven on Stranger Things, I thought Millie Bobbie Brown was a talented actor, and in the other films she’s done, as a damsel in distress who saves herself from the dragon in Damsel, or as Sherlock Holmes’ younger, cooler sister in Enola Holmes. Watching her in this is… less than great. Her best scenes are mostly in flashbacks with her younger brother Chris (Woody Norman). Everything else, including her interactions with robots or humans, are less than convincing. Worst of all is dialogue expended between Pratt’s character and Michelle. There ain’t nothing clever about any of that.

Having lost her family in a car crash, Michelle is understandably surprised when a robot turns up saying it is her long lost brother Chris, or that at the very least a part of his consciousness resides within the mechanical construction.

His presence in her life is an issue, because in this alternate reality 1990s, a war has recently ended between humans and robots. The humans won, and all the robots that were invented by Walt Disney(!) have to be herded into a place called the Exclusion Zone as a condition of their surrender.

They’re robots. The whole point of the war is that robots want their freedom from servitude, but humans say “nu uh!” Why wouldn’t they squish them with steamrollers and use them to make shiny things afterwards, then?

The only reason the humans won is because they developed a technology that allowed them to operate robot drone bodies with these virtual reality headsets. Now that the robot menace is gone, the can go back to doing nothing.

Michelle can’t use these headsets in the book because of some neurological difference, but in the movie it just comes across as her being obtuse and difficult because she lost her family. You know, just like all teenagers?

Nevertheless, the robot drags Michelle on an “adventure”, one which I guess you can say is like the book, except…

Using a strange set of breadcrumbs that pointlessly extend the story in ways it never needed to go, the robot with a part of her brother’s consciousness wants her to EARN that ending, by making sure it doesn’t direct her to where he actually is, but to supposed allies, a doctor who is both responsible for everything evil that happened but also will solve all of the obstacles in their path (the great Ke Huy Quan, who has gone from not being in anything for thirty years to now being in everything, all at once), and only then will she actually find her brother.

They have replicated many of the looks of the robots from the book, but not the melancholy feel or the grim aspects of the context. They lean into the cutesy and the familiar, and none of the other conceptual stuff that made the book arresting and memorable in the first place.

It posits a villain, some tech guy played by Stanley Tucci, who plays the role with no nuance whatsoever. He’s a bad guy doing bad things and he wears black turtlenecks, as if we didn’t learn enough about how awful such people are from Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes and Michel Foucault wearing them. They try to give him a scrap of believability, by making him a chap that hangs out in virtual reality with a reconstruction of his mother who doesn’t drink and who makes his favourite meal, being stuffed peppers.

I fucking hate stuffed peppers. He then says out of context to someone else, who didn’t see his time in VR, that when she was sober, she was worse.

My, and isn’t that the laziest motivation ever given for all the murders you’ve committed and your ongoing crimes against humanity and people in comas and such.

In the book whatever it is that is happening isn’t happening because of one guy in a turtleneck – it happens because of something that maybe happened once enough people enslaved themselves with the headsets, leading to the spontaneous creation of a hive mind that seeks to meld tech with the biological imperative to procreate. It leads to a revelation about Michelle’s brother, and a choice, and then an ambiguous ending.

Here it’s the standard go to a place, press the off switch / kill the bad guy, then everything stops working, the good guys win, the bad guys go back to being tech billionaires on a dying planet, and most people keep living happily ever after.

They say, in this timeline, that robots were created in the 50s, but nothing indicates they have intelligence or self-awareness. Even if a peanut shaped robot asserts that these robots, created to perform menial labour, have personhood and self-awareness, I’m not sure how known anti-Semite Uncle Walt managed that.

The giant robots, the tiny ones, they’re not AIs. I’m all for them having their own society in the desert, in fact I never understood why they “kill” them at one stage, when they could have just switched them all off when they won the war, since they represented no threat if they couldn’t get to a power point quick enough. When we accept, if we do, that Michelle’s brother’s consciousness is in that robot Cosmo, or Skip in the book, well, what was that robot doing when his consciousness wasn’t in there? Was it going through the motions, contemplating the futility of its own existence, or just doing what it was programmed to do?

These questions I’m posing I have no doubt they’re totally fascinating, but the thing is I’ve put more constructive thought into posing these questions that what you see up on the screen. On the screen, what you see prompts you to think “well, 300 million plus sounds like freedom, but what it results in, is something progressively dumbed down perhaps into its dumbest, most meaningless form, to appeal to idiots everywhere who see it for the first time and still think it’s really familiar, so it must be good.”

I have seen this movie only once, but I have seen it hundreds of times already, because it could just as easily have been any number of flicks agglomerated and extruded out by a helpful algorithm, working for a streaming service, making more content.

Someone else, smarter than me, said the accurate word to describe this kind of production is just content. They took a book, they took out what made it interesting, they boiled it down until it tasted so generic, and then they released it a few days ago.

And I watched it, and I wrote a review about it, and that’s exactly what our robotic and bug-eyed salamander overlords wanted. Our eyeballs, and souls, probably.

The system works.

5 times even this overwhelming blandness doesn’t detract from the book, which is still worth a look out of 10

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“Oh. I'm sorry, I have a condition where I can only live in reality. Sucks, but you go right ahead!” – take that, authoritarian / late stage capitalism! - The Electric State