Movie Review: 'The Electric State'

The Electric State

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

Written by Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeeley

Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan

Release Date March 14th, 2025

Published March 18th, 2025

The Electric State stars Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a human exposition machine. Michelle’s job is to give us reams of backstory before we can finally get to some passable action scenes. Thus we get an opening movie monologue where a too touchy pair of brother and sister, Brown and Woody Norman as Michelle’s little brother Chris, having a most unnatural conversation introducing their backstory. Chris is a genius who is headed to college at a very young age. He doesn’t want to go, fearing being away from his big sister.

Naturally, this is setting up a story where they will be separated, something you know just because you’ve experienced stories being told before. Chris is subsequently kidnapped though Michelle is told that Chris and her father have died in a car wreck. Cut to an unspecified amount of time later, Michelle is somehow still a teenager, still in High School. The film does little to let us know how old she’s supposed to be but one scene she’s fretting over her little brother getting to college before her and after a time jump, she’s somehow still in High School.

Having been placed in the foster care system, Michelle is stuck living with an abusive creep played by Jason Alexander. Also, in this new future, most of the world is happening in the digital realm. People own these V.R helmets that allow them to live in a fantasy world while also projecting part of their consciousness into a sentient robot that can carry out the daily tasks of life that the person is otherwise neglecting as they melt into their gamer chairs and recliners. That is, everyone with the exception of Michelle. She prefers the real world and refuses to use the helmet contraption.

This comes with no advantages whatsoever. The plot of The Electric State kicks in when a robot arrives at Michelle’s house and claims to be her little brother. Chris has propelled his consciousness into a robot from his favorite childhood cartoon and he plans to lead Michelle on an adventure to help him free himself from the clutches of an evil industrialist, Skate, played by Stanley Tucci, who has been using Chris’s big brain to create the A.I tech that everyone in the world is addicted to.

Complicating matters is that robots, like the one Chris is piloting are outlawed. In the time jump that I mentioned earlier, humans went to war with robots, ending in a tenuous peace treaty that leaves robots exiled to a space in an unspecified southwestern desert. If Michelle is seen with Chris, she could be arrested and the robot could be disassembled. They need to get to where the robots are located if they are going to begin to find Chris and that will require help. What luck then, or script convenience, however you want to look at it, that the pair stumble onto a smuggler named Keats and his robot pal, Herm (Anthony Mackie), who happen to specialize in smuggling things between the robots and the rest of America.

Yada, yada, yada, humans and robots unite and try to save the day or something. The Electric State plays exactly as you expect it to. Chris Pratt plays Chris Pratt, channeling the same Han Solo as comedy sidekick character that has grown less and less appealing since he perfected the schtick in Guardians of the Galaxy. Millie Bobby Brown is not bad but saddled with so much expository dialogue and moping, she doesn’t get many chances to show her range. The rest of the cast, including Giancarlo Esposito, Woody Harrelson as the voice of Mr. Peanut, for some reason, and Stanley Tucci, offer next to nothing. You can almost see just how bored Stanley Tucci is as he plays a more ruthless version of the character he played in the similarly bloated and exhausting Transformers sequels.

I can’t say I didn’t laugh during The Electric State, the film caught me off guard a couple of times thanks to the voicework of Jenny Slate as a mail lady robot and Brian Cox’s bizarre voicework as a Scottish baseball pitching machine, maybe, but he has a bat and talks like Brian Cox? I don’t know, but it was oddly funny. That minor praise out of the way, I don’t have any other nice things to say about The Electric State. This is a $320 million dollar movie that looks like it cost less than half that sum. It’s gray and dreary for the most part, with dirt and grime covering every frame. I get that it is intended to create a post-war dystopian setting, but that doesn’t make it appealing to look at.

There are much better ways to spend $320 million dollars than making the most generic sci-fi action comedy imaginable. Hot take, I know. But I am just frustrated with streaming networks seemingly perfecting the Golan and Globus/Cannon Films model of setting a few million dollars on fire while keeping the rest and claiming a profit. Netflix’s money making model doesn’t make sense and how they manage to justify massive budgets for movies that look like they cost half of that reported budget is a scheme only a regulator could untangle. Sadly, we have fired all of the regulators.

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