Films and Fiction

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Netflix have taken another big step towards being taken seriously as a film studio with The Electric State, a sci-fi adventure based on the illustrated novel by Simon Stalenhag, starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, directed by the Russo Brothers of Avengers: Endgame fame, and with a huge budget of $320 million. This should be good, right?

The film is set in a fictional version of the 1990s, where humans had developed robots to perform all their menial tasks, but the bots decide they want the right to control their own lives, and rise up, leading to a war between humans and machines. A new technology is developed that allows humans to control “drones” by sharing their consciousness with the machine, and allows them to get the upper hand in the war, which ends in a peace deal. The robots are exiled to the Electric State, a huge walled-in area where they live without interference.

Enter Millie Bobby Brown. She believes her brother died in a car crash, but a bot turns up that says it’s him, or at least has his consciousness, and to save him, she needs to go into the Electric State!

It’s hard to know where to start with a movie like this, because it has a lot of problems.

With everything it had on its side, you think it would have been a lot better, and the trailers were vague enough that they managed to hide a lot of the worst parts. It reminds me of other over-budgeted, under-developed movies, like Mortal Engines, that are filled with flaws and destined to flop.

The story is really basic and floppy. Things happen “because” and there’s never a sense of stakes, that things will go wrong or the heroes won’t make it out. There are huge plot holes throughout, and the characters wander through it from one event to another, with no real input or struggle. And perhaps most importantly, the world building is weak.

The whole backstory of the war is told through the usual news report device, but there’s no real sense of just how devastating the war has been for humanity. Certain items are supposed to be scarce, or valued because they came from before the war, but I never get the sense that the world is on the edge of dystopia. People hide themselves in the fake world provided by their Neurocasters (an allegory for smartphones, perhaps), but you have to guess why, because there’s no set up to show that life is extremely hard now.

The characters are all two-dimensional, too. There’s no reason to care about them, and it wasn’t until really late in the movie when someone mentioned it that I realised I had no idea what Millie Bobby Brown’s name was (it’s Michelle), because the film didn’t make me care about her. She really needs to get away from Netflix and into better roles before it destroys her career.

Chris Pratt is a little better as an ex-soldier who once fought the bots, but only because he’s Chris Pratt and has that easy charisma that makes him likable, not for anything the script does with him.

I wonder what it cost to get so many names in the cast (Woody Harrelson, Brian Cox, Hank Azaria)? Because they are all sadly waster here. Stanley Tucci is the villain, but he’s so boring and plainly drawn, there’s no depth to him. It’s not like he’s even pantomiming it, with a twirly mustache, he’s just one of these copy/paste bad businessmen stereotypes. Likewise with Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Giancarlo Esposito.

Everything about this movie is so tropey. Maybe that’s something to do with the source material, I don’t know, but it’s very predictable. You can see every plot twist coming a mile off, and there’s never anything to surprise you. There’s a perfunctory death of a character you’re supposed to care about, though the movie hasn’t done anything to make you feel for them. There’s also humour everywhere, in the Avengers: Endgame style, even when they should lay off it, and a lot of it doesn’t work. I wonder if Al Gorithm was an uncredited writer on this, as he is on so many Netflix productions?

I have to be honest, it’s not like it’s Rebel Moon bad. If you go into this with no expectation, you can have fun. There are a few laughs, and if you’re half on your phone, it’s not like you’ll miss anything of importance. I think if this had been done for under $100 million it might have stood a chance, but for a $320 million price tag, you really should get something better. As cheap, disposable fun, maybe it would get a pass, but that kind of budget is not cheap and shouldn’t be disposable.

Still, I’m sure it will be a hit on Netflix. Right now it’s #1 in the UK, and probably will hold that spot for a few days, then vanish forever in the depths of content, to only be mentioned in whispers as Netflix’s folly. But even if it were excellent, I’m sure it would have the same fate, such is the case with “constant content”, so really is there much point in caring what it turns out like?

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