TL;DR – What if you smashed The Creator into Ready Player One and then made something mostly soulless with the components?

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film.

The Electric State Review –

These days, it is hard to find big-budget films based on an original story or at least an unadapted work. Let alone a movie with a budget that is reportedly one of the biggest in cinematic history. But if you are going to spend that much on something, the question is: have you made something of real substance? And I am not sure that happened here.    

So, to set the scene, 1990 was a simpler time. It was before the war. Where Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) can watch her brother Christopher (Woody Norman) destroy math tests that take college professors days to complete. But there is a growing anti-robot sentiment growing across the nation. That is because robots decided they didn’t want to do all the menial labour we were making them do and rebelled. It was war, a war humanity was losing, which was when Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) arrived as a saviour. Now, everyone is hooked into his SENTRE tech, and all the remaining robots are sent to an exclusion zone. In 1994, Michelle, who lives as a ward of the state, arrives at her house when a Cosmo (Alan Tudyk) bot changes everything.

While most of my experience with this film was frustrating, that does not mean that there were not areas that worked well. I absolutely liked all the designs of all the robots. There was an old-timey feel to everything that was very distinct from Fallout, which might be the closest pop-culture analogue. All the visual work that went into their cartoonish creation absolutely paid off. All the cast were fine in the film. Keats (Chris Pratt) and Herman (Anthony Mackie) get some great banter at times. The location/plate work in the Moab helped give it some grounding. Also, while I did have several issues with the film, I will say that at its worst, it was still watchable. Well, not if you are a wigmaker.   

Unfortunately, for a film with a budget that is frankly astronomical, what we ended up with was a very bland outcome. Indeed, as someone who lived through the 1990s, it never felt like they got the time period right like they read about it third hand. From a narrative perspective, the movie had to do a lot of front-loading to both set up the world and set up the redefined history of the 1990s that we are working with. They didn’t nail that opening lore dump, which meant that narratively, everything that followed was built on a foundation that probably would not hold up to inspection. You see this throughout, with a story that is trying to reach for the heavens but ends up being a paint-by-numbers affair.

Part of that comes from the fact that most of the dialogue falls flat. I mean that you must work hard to make Stanley Tucci feel lifeless, but they managed that feat. This was the same for many of the robot characters, which begs the question of why you would hire people and then pull back their performances. None of the villains feel like they have any weight to them; you can call someone the ‘Butcher of Schenectady’, but I honestly didn’t feel it. Indeed, most characters had a lack of any real substance. This lack of substance also can be found in the themes the film is exploring. Exploitation, othering, apartheid, addiction, digitization, capitalism, and the notions of humanity. All of these felt at best amateur explorations at best, and it felt like such a wasted opportunity, especially given how much time nothing really happened in this film.           

In the end, do we recommend The Electric State? Look, is it watchable? Yes. Is it more than that? Unfortunately, not. Have you watched The Electric State? Let us know what you thought in the comments below. If you liked The Electric State, we would recommend to you Dredd.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of The Electric State
Directed by – Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
Screenplay by – Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Based on – The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
Music by – Alan Silvestri
Cinematography by – Stephen F. Windon
Edited by – Jeffrey Ford
Production/Distribution Companies – AGBO, Double Dream, Skybound Entertainment & Netflix
Starring – Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Norman, Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, Colman Domingo & Alan Tudyk with Camrus Johnson, Roshni Edwards, Holly Hunter, Tuc Watkins, Joe Avena, Necar Zadegan, Antoinette LaVecchia, Rahul Kohli, Michael Trucco, Gozie Agbo, Rob Gronkowski, Susan Leslie, Jordan Black, Patti Harrison, Terry Notary, Adam Croasdell, Christopher Silvestri, Devyn Dalton, Phoenix Notary, Gabrielle Maiden & Martin Klebba
Rating – Australia: M;