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The Electric State Review: Good visuals but nothing you haven’t seen before
While The Electric State looks great, it plays out like a greatest hits riff on other, better films. The post The Electric State Review: Good visuals but nothing you haven’t seen before appeared first on JoBlo.
PLOT: In an alternate 1990s devasted by a war between humans and robots, a young woman (Millie Bobby Brown) teams up with a former soldier (Chris Pratt) to find her long-lost brother, who’s somewhere in a no man’s land populated by the robots who once fought mankind.
REVIEW: The Electric State is perhaps Netflix’s most ambitious film to date. Sporting a budget that’s said to be in the $320 million range, which would make it one of the most expensive movies ever made, it’s as lavish and high-concept as anything you’d find in theaters. Yet, it also takes intriguing source material, in this case, Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel of the same title, and turns it into episodic, easy-to-watch fare you can wander in and out of without missing much plot. As such, it’s impressively mounted but still a streaming movie to its core for better or for worse. While it will no doubt earn impressive streaming numbers for Netflix, it lacks the excitement of the best stuff made by its directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, who are about to make a welcome return to the MCU.
Fans of the graphic novel will be disappointed by the fact that the grim story has been given a family-friendly, upbeat makeover. Much of the film plays out like an homage to Who Framed Roger Rabbit—albeit with robots instead of toons and a healthy dose of Star Wars mixed in.
Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle, a teenager living in a world that’s been ravaged by a war with machines – albeit not the sinister AI-driven kind we’re being threatened by nowadays. Rather, the robots are old, charming mascots, such as the Woody Harrelson-voiced Mr. Peanut, Jenny Slate’s mail-delivery robot Penny Pal, and dozens of other models that are purposely designed to look like Disney theme park mascots for the fifties and sixties.
The war with the robots is very thinly sketched out, with none of them seeming to possess any kind of advanced weapons (the most dangerous one is an old baseball robot voiced by Brian Cox, who clubs people with his bat), so I don’t quite understand how they were ever a threat to humanity? At any rate, the world was saved by Stanley Tucci, a tech guru who invented a VR network where humans could occupy mindless robot drones to work for them while they enjoyed a life in virtual reality. Naturally, humankind has been virtually enslaved, but like the war with the robots, what this would actually be like barely registers.
Brown plays a plucky heroine who’s approached by the robot mascot from her dead younger brother’s favourite cartoon, which, we realize, is being controlled by his consciousness. With the notion that her brother is somewhere in the Electric State populated by robots, she travels there with the help of a smuggler, played by Chris Pratt, who’s so heavily inspired by Han Solo that he even wears a similar vest. Of course, being set in an alternate nineties, the movie is jam-packed with Guardians of the Galaxy-style needle drops, while Pratt essentially seems to be reprising Peter Quill, albeit a less capable version, with him mostly serving as comic relief.
Given that the Russo Brothers made it, you’d expect some bold action, but outside of an ending that riffs on the Ewoks’ Battle for Endor in Return of the Jedi (albeit with robots instead of furry friends), the movie is a lot of build-ups and world-building, with very little payoff. Millie Bobby Brown is always likeable, but neither her nor Pratt are given much to do except play off the robot characters, who are the real stars of the movie. Pratt in particular seems to be relying on his old bag of tricks, with him given a fast-talking robot sidekick (Anthony Mackie – with his voice raised a couple of octaves), and acting very much like his Parks & Rec character, crossed with more than a little Peter Quill (or Big Trouble in Little China‘s Jack Burton). He was much better in The Terminal List, and in the underrated The Tomorrow War.
The robot designs are impressive, as is the impeccable CGI. Technically, one can’t find much fault with the movie, with it well photographed by Stephen F. Windon while Alan Silvestri contributes a score reminiscent of some of his eighties and nineties classics. But, the writing is thin, with the Russo Bros seemingly a lot more interested in the aesthetic of the world than the premise, with it just playing out as a hodgepodge of riffs on classic 80s fare like Star Wars, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and a few others.
While the supporting cast is peppered with big names, including Stanley Tucci as the movie’s big bad and Giancarlo Esposito as a bounty hunter, their talents are wasted in thin roles. Esposito, especially, mostly appears as an avatar on a robot body. It really is one of those movies where the actors feel extraneous – like anyone could have played their roles.
While technically impressive, The Electric State ultimately feels disposable, and even if the streaming numbers are big (which I’m sure they will be), it seems unlikely to spawn the kind of franchise Netflix might be hoping for (similar to another recent Russo Bros film – The Gray Man – which was more entertaining than this). This is a cool to look at disappointment, with it being the kind of thing that has a few nifty looking scenes, but ultimately just feels like forgettable streaming fare.
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