The Electric State (2025)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the book by Simon Stålenhag
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw The Russos’ The Electric State is one of those movies where every other line is punctuated by an exhausted wisecrack from a passerby, a member of the faceless chorus, or the sassy, Black-coded sidekick. A mess, in other words; a loud one. What makes it an interesting skidmark along the road to our national humiliation, though, is how it feels like the first salvo in the kind of corporate warfare predicted by The Crimson Permanent Assurance and Demolition Man‘s triumphant, Michelin-starred Taco Bell. See, The Electric State is set in a post-robopocalyptic wasteland where the robot slave class are the invention of Walt Disney–adorable agents of meat-genocide led by a sentient, Hugs-a-lot-sounding Mr. Peanut™ (Woody Harrelson™), who, during the film’s extended prologue, solemnly signs a peace treaty with deepfake Bill Clinton after his Elon Musk, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), invents humanoid robot drones. The “good guys,” then, defeat Disney! Does that make Netflix, the never-been-profitable streaming service bankrolling this Hindenburg and currently at open-platform warfare with the Mouse, the “good guys?” What of the newsreel aside that Kid Rock gave a celebratory concert upon the vanquishing of When You Wish Upon a Skynet? Is Kid Rock the anti-corporate, humanist good guy now? Or was that an unfunny insert mandated in Chris Pratt’s rider? What the actual fuck is going on?

Millie Bobbie Brown is Michelle, a Wild One who tells her parole officer/house-arrest jailor that if he took her ankle monitor off, she’d show him how fast she could run! Of the many ways Carrie Fisher’s death has impacted us as a society, the loss of her script-doctoring services in Hollywood may ultimately be the most painful. Turns out Michelle broke bad because her genius little brother Christopher (Woody Norman, cast I think because he looks like a different one of the “Stranger Things” kids) died in a car accident that also claimed their mother. “Our car hit a deer…” she tells an unfeeling authority figure who just won’t listen, “…in the road.” In the road? Really, Michelle? You hit a deer in the road? I thought maybe you hit the deer as you were driving through the forest at 50 miles an hour. In the road. Why did you pause dramatically before saying that? It occurs to me that this film would be a full hour shorter if you cut out the 60 pages of shit like this. “We were eating dinner…it was food.” Soon, Michelle finds a robot in her garden shed in a sequence that is very probably shot-for-shot the one where Elliott discovers E.T. in his backyard. But it’s not E.T. See what I did there? I wasted your time. No, it’s a cute robot (which is illegal in human territory) who is maybe Michelle’s kid brother, who is not dead or has uploaded his consciousness in order to “Journey of the Hero” Call to Adventure Michelle on a quest for who gives a shit?

Jason Alexander puts in a surprise appearance as Michelle’s wife-beater-wearing, VR-addicted dad, chewing up at least a hundred bucks of the $300m+ budget in the process. I mention this because all of the jokes in this thing are ancient. Someone says they don’t want to die to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, which is a funny directed at forty-somethings. Are they watching The Electric State? Why? Who is this movie for? It’s like WALL·E for the coma ward. I would speculate it’s the Russo Bros. scoring a subversive point about Disney hiring soulless robots to propagate their intellectual properties, except that one of the top-grossing director duos in history is set to make their triumphant return to the MCU any day now. I should also mention the part where the sidekick, Herm (Anthony “Captain America” Mackie), talks wistfully about how the government just couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a human and a robot get along and hang out together: how this is clearly intended as a comment on race along the lines of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s anthemic “Ebony and Ivory.” Wait, before I forget, Pratt plays…John Keats. Not the poet, but named after the poet for no reason I could discern–and I fucking tried. Keats is dressed like Han Solo, and there’s a bit where he can’t get a mine cart going and Michelle sardonics, “Should we just run at this point?” like Leia saying, “Would it help if I pushed?” when Han can’t get the Falcon to start. That’s two where-have-you-gone-Carrie-Fisher? references in a film so obviously ghost-written by Max Landis they might as well own up to it. If you’ve been itching for a Danzig needledrop, incidentally, your wait is over. There goes another $19.99 of the budget.

I like how Michelle’s peroxide bottle-blonde wig sprouts tons of brown roots as soon as she starts being “good” again, opening up another can of worms. I like when Keats taunts someone by saying if they were there in person rather than acting through a robotic avatar, they wouldn’t have the “stones” to point a gun at him. That’s not the good part–the good part is the riposte: “Yes I would! And don’t talk about my stones, okay?” HAHA, oh my God, Tom Stoppard, eat thine heart out. Michelle and Keats are going to the Wasteland, the Forbidden Zone, the Outland, the Exclusion Zone, to locate Michelle’s brother. Did I already tell you that? I’m all turned around. Once there, they encounter a colony of misfit robots. Say, have any of you seen A.I.? The Brave Little Toaster? Toy Story 3? Have you played Bioshock 3? You know, good science-fiction with new ideas that offers new perspectives into what it means to be human in an increasingly technocratic nightmarescape? There’s a scene here where a bad guy determined to kill the good robot announces that it is “The Robot Deactivation Task Force.” Michelle, who allegedly lives in this world, asks incredulously, “What?” Then Keats says, “The RDTF! Bad news for robots!” If you own firearms, you should lock them up before pressing ‘play’ on The Electric State.

What I’m saying is The Electric State is a demonstration piece for showing alien civilizations why it’s not such a tragedy we amused ourselves to death. We don’t have free healthcare, a universal basic income, a functioning government, hope for a retirement, or social security, but we do have a third-of-a-billion-dollar debacle created for a machine built to destroy traditional broadcast models and replace them with those same models once they’re the last game in town. Netflix isn’t in the business of creating something of quality–they’re in the business of creating a background hum for laundry-folding. After the Marky Mark joke? A mail-bot voiced by Jenny Slate snarks, “I actually like this song!” HAHA! Ke Huy Quan is in this, by the way, giving Cuba Gooding Jr. a run for worst, most desperate post-Oscar choices of all time. Agents have their own agendas; you don’t actually have to listen to them. Oh, and the whole thing is a gloss on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” with a finale that riffs on “Cowboy Bebop”‘s “Pierrot Le Fou” episode, which, you know, whatever you want to make of that, go right ahead. An expensive, sadistic, derivative, puerile boondoggle that’s ugly to look at and uniquely dull besides, The Electric State is, as Ozymandian monuments to the Empire of America go, dead-on. Just think, this is what they’re feeding us even before generative AI begins pumping out soulless Chuck-E-Cheezbusters. It’s all downhill from here, folks.