Karla Carrillo
The Russo brothers have done it again, folks! They got their hands on another big-budget film and made audiences question what all the money went toward.
“The Electric State” had everything going for it, such as a creative sci-fi premise, a star-studded cast, and one of the largest film budgets to date. Instead, we got an emotionally hollow narrative with an exhausting runtime.
Despite its heavy use of CGI, the film still cannot hide the fact that it looks like a quick cash grab and is pumped full of useless characters. What could have been an emotional adventure through a dystopian America turned into another forgettable straight-to-Netflix film.
Released on March 14, the film follows teenage Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) and a robot (voiced by Alan Tudyk) who claims to be her deceased brother. Together, they join a smuggler named Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot sidekick (voiced by Anthony Mackie) in the search for her apparently still-alive brother, Christopher (Woody Norman).
Set in an alternate sci-fi history, robots first took on jobs that humans did not want before becoming sentient enough to rebel for their independence. In response, humanity fought back, and Sentre, a tech company led by CEO Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), developed the Neurocaster, which allowed humans to upload their minds to drones. These drones eliminated most robots while banishing the rest to a desert wasteland known as the Exclusion Zone.
After the war, everyone continued to use the Neurocasters, allowing them to avoid reality and be in two places at once. One side of their brain went to work in the form of the drone they mentally possessed, while the other side of their brain was free to get on Roblox or whatever other mind-numbing distraction to life they could think of. It was the ultimate virtual reality experience that post-war America needed.
Somewhere in between there, Michelle’s parents die in a car crash sponsored by Bambi, and she ends up with a deadbeat foster dad named Ted (Jason Alexander). Ted is your typical dystopian foster dad who is just using Michelle for a stipend at the end of each month to fund his shopping addiction for 90s memorabilia from the Exclusion Zone.
Then, one night, Michelle’s foster home gets infiltrated by a carbon copy of the robot from her late brother’s favorite TV show, Kid Cosmo, claiming to be her deceased brother through the power of Sentre technology. Michelle decides that this makes sense, and she will trek across the country to get her brother back.
Along the way, they encounter Keats, a former soldier turned smuggler, and his loyal sidekick, Herman, as they help them enter the Exclusion Zone to search for the last of the robots that might know the whereabouts of a mysterious doctor (Ke Huy Quan), who has information about the physical location of Christopher’s body.
Chris Pratt’s performance as the wise-cracking Keats is what would happen if Star Lord never went to space and instead got a balayage. Predictable and missing the tone(r). The film wanted us to feel that Keats and Michelle’s relationship is like the found family trope, but their relationship never has the emotional depth the movie thinks it is developing between the characters.
In fact, Keats reluctantly helps Michelle and her robot brother through the Exclusion Zone because he has no other choice. They are also getting chased down by Ethan Skate’s hired bounty hunter (Giancarlo Esposito), whose job is to destroy robots that escape the Exclusion Zone. While trying to evade him, they accidentally get themselves trapped there.
Therefore, they are forced to evade killer robots and end up getting captured by the robots trying to live peacefully in the Exclusion Zone away from humans. Turns out Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) is running the show. You know, the mascot of Planters? Yes, him. Do not ask too many questions. It makes perfect sense for an anthropomorphic peanut to be running the robot rebellion. Reluctantly he helps them find the doctor they are looking for, which goes against the peace treaty he signed with President Clinton when the war ended. Yes, that was an actual scene they portrayed with complete seriousness at the film’s beginning.
Our heroes eventually find the doctor in what appears to be an abandoned Six Flags, where he shares all his knowledge about Sentre and Christopher’s whereabouts. It turns out he was so smart that when Michelle’s family had that car crash, the doctor saved him so Sentre could use his brain to power the entire mainframe of its network. Insane work, truly.
Luckily, the doctor had some morals and created a “backdoor” that allowed his consciousness to escape, which is how we got a Kid Cosmo robot. This explains why Skate hired the bounty hunter and wants the robot back. Without his brain, Sentre’s mainframe is beginning to fail.
While they are fighting about the ethics of the situation, the bounty hunter returns with more Sentre drones to capture Michelle’s robot brother and reunite his consciousness with his body. As expected, the doctor was just there to dump exposition before dying, and Kid Cosmo gets captured.
Kid Cosmo is taken back to Sentre headquarters and forced to reconnect to his physical body. During this, the bounty hunter realizes the boy is being held hostage and has a moral dilemma about the work he has been doing throughout this entire film.
Stanley Tucci gives his villain monologue on why the world is terrible and how he is justified in using a boy’s brain to create an escapist virtual reality for the world. It tries very hard to be a commentary on society and technology use but completely misses the mark. The movie spends so much time fighting between being a comedy and taking itself seriously that whatever message it is trying to send here falls flat.
In the final act, the robot rebellion led by Mr. Peanut decides to fight for their freedom one last time and help Michelle save her brother. Michelle eventually makes it into Sentre headquarters and uses a Neurocaster to enter her brother’s consciousness, where they meet up in the most unemotional sibling reunion I have ever seen on screen.
Christopher then regretfully informs Michelle that all her efforts are pointless because he will not survive being separated from Sentre’s mainframe. She tearfully pulls the plug on him and successfully destroys Sentre technology. We then cut to sometime in the future, and Michelle monologues to a camera the message the film was trying to relay: excessive technology use, bad; fresh air and contact with the outside world, good.
The entire movie begs the audience to touch some grass in the most fake-deep way possible. The overall message is not terrible; it is just the way it poorly spoon-feeds its audience.
If you are expecting a film that touches on how technology affects our society in a meaningful way, this is not that film. It is clear their big budget went towards cameos and licensing deals so they could make as many 90s pop-culture references as possible. If you are looking for another mind-numbing Netflix film to play in the background like a Friends rerun, I would say this is a solid choice.