The Electric State | 2025
Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, and Ke Huy Quan in THE ELECTRIC STATE. Courtesy of Netflix.
I've seen a lot of bad movies. Call it an occupational hazard, but I couldn't even guess how much bloated, bland, pretentious, and downright incompetent slop I've seen on screen. Yet, I can't remember the last time I saw a film so soulless and dispiriting as The Electric State - the latest "this can't possibly be real" Netflix mockbuster from Joe and Anthony Russo (Avengers: Endgame).
Watching The Electric State is akin to sifting through a dumpster filled with discarded, decaying scraps of better films. It's as though the Russos spent their purported $350 million budget (a mind-boggling figure all its own) on pilfering the work of better filmmakers. You'll see pieces of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, WALL-E, Bumblebee, The Creator, Ready Player One, and so many others cobbled together like a Frankenstein's monster of blockbusters' past, all in service of a narrative that feels like someone trying to summarize the plots of these films from memory while blindfolded.
The film is set in a contemporary world decimated by a war between humans and robots. Millie Bobby Brown stars as a girl who discovers that her dead brother may actually be alive - his consciousness projected into a robot body. Guided by Han Solo-like smuggler (Chris Pratt), her search will lead her deep into the exclusion zone where robots were corralled at the end of the war, and reveal dark secrets about the source of humanity's dependence on the artificial world of virtual reality they created for themselves in its wake.
For a production of this size, and budget, The Electric State feels surprisingly small and flat. There's simply no spark here - no sense of scale or scope - rarely has $350 million felt so spectacularly wasted. One wonders how much of the budget was blown on its tremendous supporting cast, which includes the likes of Stanley Tucci, Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson, Brian Cox, Colman Domingo, Ke Huy Quan, Giancarlo Esposito, Anthony Mackie, Jenny Slate, Jason Alexander, and Alan Tudyk. It's such a good cast that it seems like a fatal mistake for the film to surround its two charisma-free leads with such talent, but they're wasted in such throwaway roles that it hardly matters.
It's odd to see how the Russo Brothers have struggled to produce a single interesting film in the wake of Avengers: Endgame, which became the highest-grossing film ever made worldwide (before quickly being overtaken by a re-release of Avatar). Their stint at Netflix, churning out anonymous blockbusters with massive budgets and non-existent personalities, is the very epitome of Netflix's content machine. The Electric State feels like such a waste, a film designed to be played in the background, unlikely to engender any passion from audiences or the culture at large. Each image feels more blandly composed than the last. They may as well have taken that $350 million and flushed it down the toilet for all the good it did here. This isn't a film. It isn't cinema. It's a multi-million dollar placeholder and an endless barrage of ideas repurposed from a scrap heap that may as well have been written by the very AI it seems to decry. It's bold indeed for a film like this to suggest that the best hope for humanity is to step away from the screen because the best way to approach The Electric State is just to turn it off completely.
