Up front, the only reason to watch a Russo Brothers movie anymore is to clown on it. However, I don’t know if I’d encourage even that for The Electric State, their 320 million dollar Producers scheme of a Netflix movie, the most expensive film ever produced for the platform and likely one of the worst. Further confirmation of their mediocre limitations as filmmakers as they once again attempt to graft the MCU aesthetics that are now all they know onto a source that little demands them -in this case an acclaimed 2018 dystopian novel by Simon Stålenhag. They’ve even reunited with Marvel stalwart writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who rise to the occasion of maintaining a consistent level of hackiness to the script as it follows strict generic blockbuster formulas and dilutes any semblance of cogency from the film’s concept.
It is a convoluted premise to say the least, set in an alternate reality where the development of robots occurred over the twentieth century, coinciding with real history until a war occurred and they were rendered illegal in its aftermath -though humanity has still become largely addicted to other forms of artificial intelligence, including human-controlled robot apparatuses. In the midst of this, an orphan girl Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, finds evidence in a robot based on a childhood cartoon that her long thought deceased brother is still alive, and sets out to find him while being tailed by the forces of the sinister corporate tycoon, played by Stanley Tucci, who spearheaded the anti-robot movement.
Along the way, Michelle is joined rather arbitrarily by a scavenger played by Chris Pratt and his own plucky robot sidekick voiced by Anthony Mackie, partly to give Michelle characters to bounce off of, though mostly to stress the Russo's movie star pull. Their standing has enabled them to attract several big names, including Giancarlo Esposito as a secondary antagonist with a deep prejudice against robots, Ke Huy Quan as a compromised doctor, and the voices of Woody Harrelson and Brian Cox as exiled robots (the former being a Mr. Peanut animatronic, functioning doubly as product placement). However all the casting does is present an illusion of glamour and significance that is absolutely not palpable anywhere in the substance of the movie's plot or characters. Pratt's Keats feels especially hollow as he recycles bland Star-Lord dialogue while tepidly anchoring the most meagre semblance of a backstory and character arc to fruitlessly justify his presence.
Granted, the entire movie is comprised of formula emotional arcs and thinly-defined characters. Even the contours of its worldbuilding are extraordinarily dull -barely distinguishable from any base-level robot apocalypse narrative. The middling and incoherent script gives rise to Brown's worst performance yet, and one of Pratt's most phoned-in. Better performers like Tucci, Jason Alexander, and even Woody Norman as the deus ex little brother give it some effort but their grasping invariably falls short and the movie is ultimately incapable of any real emotional resonance. So much of the character of the piece and the general tone is inauthentic -it doesn’t help that Markus and McFeely resort to tropes like countering a character’s definitive statement against an action by following up with that action being taken ironically (“I would never ever do blank…”) and the laziest dialogue structure they’ve gotten away with yet (a lot of “you got a better idea?”, or “I got a bad feeling”). And of course none of the efforts at humour stick at all either -the attitude of Mackie’s Herman is condescendingly unfunny, as Markus and McFeely try their damnedest to replicate James Gunn’s charisma of Rocket Racoon.
That comparison point of course speaks to the problem of none of these creatives knowing how to make a movie outside of the Marvel framework and so are trying to import that framework in. In structure, in tone, in the tenor of the villains (poor Esposito has been put through this twice in one year now), and in every bland filmmaking choice. That trademark desaturated look of the MCU, it shows up here and is especially prominent in the big battle of the last act -which is as grey as The Gray Man at times, as the incongruous, homogeneous effects make mush before your eyes. And the choices in pop music needle-drops over montages are embarrassingly basic and hardly conducive to their scene's energy -this is a movie that actually uses "Don't Stop Believing" (without lyrics, but still) and ends on a melancholy slow-tempo drone of "Wonderwall", hilarious in its stupidity.
The reason for Michelle's brother's disappearance and what ultimately comes from that is very incoherent -demanding more investment in the ins and outs of this world than any audience would be inclined to give. But it strangely ties into a message that seems to be modestly anti-technological dependence. Glimpses of this world reveal a humanity that, while anti-robot, is subsumed by a reliance on VR-like technological devices, all under the control of one greedy corporation. And the kind of pseudo-humanist note that the movie pushes in relation to this feels very rich coming from the Russo Brothers, known cogs of such corporations like Disney and Netflix, who have championed AI and the abandonment of the communal theatrical release model (it makes a little too much sense that Joe Russo's cameo is as a loudmouth pundit parroting the system). They can't really hide that virtue in the make-up of the movie -its construction and theme are completely at odds; which alongside the very lukewarm invocation of those principles makes it nigh impossible to accept on its face.
It feels particularly reminiscent of the attitude taken in Ready Player One, a movie that also feels evoked by this film's climax -only without the same authenticity of sentiment. And it really is saying something that The Electric State can't rise to the integrity of the worst Steven Spielberg movie. It is a film that at every turn fails to justify its own existence. I don't know much of the source material, beyond that it has a strong fan-base, but it really feels like this team of ex-Marvel stooges merely took from it a broad premise they felt could be shaped to their mundane equivalent of blockbuster instincts. And Netflix essentially handed them a blank cheque to do just that, which is why I suspect they'll claim it is so much more popular and successful than anyone would rationally believe (while refusing to back that up with stats) to save face. Whatever they or the Russos may say -with their penchant for deriding anyone not liking their movies as elitists- it won't change how dim, vacant, derivative, and pointless The Electric State is. But it does make me consider if the Russos have a point in their pivot to streaming -if this is the only slop they are capable of, perhaps it is better not to waste a big screen for it.
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