The Electric State Review

Based on the stars and genre buttons pushed, I believe it's reasonable to predict that The Electric State will be a huge hit for Netflix in terms of viewership. I am saddened by this. It's not just that it's not very good; that's more annoying than depressing in and of itself. In fact, the unsatisfactory taste of this film may be somewhat detrimental to the cultural idea that we refer to as "The Movies."

In the same way that a knockoff looks like the original article, The Electric State looks like a lighthearted, imaginative blockbuster. It appears to be pricey, has some obvious design decisions based on its science fiction worldbuilding, and has actors you might recognize performing certain actions (e.g., Stanley Tucci saying "stuffed peppers"). If you don't look closely, you might believe you're seeing the real thing. Hell, you might even like using it and wonder why reviews like mine were so negative.

This is precisely the reason why knockoffs are so detrimental to the original work. The main goal of movies like this is to make you believe that what you're experiencing is enjoyable and that it's a real movie. The entire moviegoing experience is devalued if it is successful and you leave believing this is what a movie is. Even though you may not be aware of it, you think about movies less now than you did before. To put it plainly, movies can and ought to be better than this.

Science Fiction Ideas That Should Be Cool Are Just Boring in the Electric State

I will demonstrate what I mean. In the alternate 1990s depicted in The Electric State, robots were a commonplace aspect of daily life for many years. At first, we were on the brink of defeat in the war with humans that began when they gained the consciousness to fight for their own rights. The tide was turned by tech tycoon Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), whose discovery of neural connections enabled people to control mechanized bodies. The survivors were exiled to a desert exclusion zone after the robots lost.

It sounds cool, doesn't it? It is occasionally. The robots in this world gained popularity in the 1950s and brought with them a retro-futuristic aesthetic. The filmmakers also experimented with the individual machine designs. The impersonal slickness of Skate's Sentre Technologies products, which have been adapted for daily use and are now commonplace, stands in contrast to this. Adults use neurocasters to split their brains, assigning work to their drone body while part of them engages in a simulated fantasy. Teenagers attend school through neurocasters (though still in person, for some reason).

However, in practice, The Electric State's science fiction is confused and hollow, crammed together with allusions to the 1990s for no apparent reason other than to appeal to the nostalgia of a particular group of people. In a world with sentient AI and neural projection, does it make much sense for computers to still resemble boxy PCs and for AOL to still say "you've got mail"? Furthermore, I can't find any greater purpose for the robots' references to consumer culture, which is traditionally fertile ground. The movie's suggestion that it's preferable to have multiple brands displayed rather than just one company's products is the closest I can come.

These fraud films frequently have this emptiness. As you watch The Electric State, you will unavoidably think of last year's Fallout TV series, which also blended '50s-inspired futurism with a post-apocalyptic, desert-set, Western-inspired setting. There is a lot of commentary on the evil ideology behind that corporateized, sanitized vision of America in those well-executed and convincingly realized design choices. This is merely a rationale for why Chris Pratt's appearance is reminiscent of Star Lord and Millie Bobby Brown's is reminiscent of Eleven.

The narratives of the Electric State are not only flawed, but also demeaning.

The dialogue is usually another dead giveaway. Exposition of all kinds abounds in the Electric State, and you'll be able to spot it by its awkwardness. The protagonist Michelle (Brown) describes finding a package label in her car trunk without any apparent reason, which is my favorite plot-related example. But without a doubt, the most embarrassing is when Pratt's smuggler Keats yells, "Clap on!" and then claps to turn on his lights.

The storytelling comes next, and that is what I find most offensive. They know how to approximate a working narrative, so these films aren't usually hot messes with major plot holes or missing scenes. However, it's challenging to be truly interesting. The purpose of certain scenes in this movie is to ostentatiously sow a seed, with the "payoff" occurring instantly. We assume that Michelle's brother Christopher (played by Woody Norman) will soon return in robot form because a flashback depicts their private handshake. The moment it becomes dramatically relevant, Michelle remembers a figure she saw in her dream but who was hidden by the camera.

This is the most basic and indolent form of story structure. The Electric State is a train of dominoes, whereas a true film along these lines might be a puzzle, revealing a few pieces to keep us interested while awaiting the revelation of how they all fit together. Additionally, Joe and Anthony Russo shoot the opening of each domino like a moment of intrigue and the connecting of two dominoes like a clever reveal because they are experienced enough to know what an interesting movie should look like.

Even worse: an overly dramatic stage magician assembling a train of dominoes in front of you over the course of two hours. You want to choke him after the third or fourth ta-daa, but he just keeps doing it.

This is not to say that The Electric State lacks advantages. The VFX work that was done to make the overall vision a reality is frequently excellent, even if it has flaws. I thought Jenny Slate's courteously violent mail robot Penny Pal was my favorite of the robots, and I thought the joke about Keats' robot partner-in-crime near the end was hilarious. However, please raise the bar if you watch it and think it's passable. In the end, the movies will appreciate it.