The Electric State falls under historical fiction, a category of works where the past is reimagined due to a key event having a different outcome.  This results in an alternate timeline where things are both familiar and different at the same time.  In The Watchmen, America became an authoritarian state after Richard Nixon refused to leave office and won a third term as president.  The Man in the High Castle reimagined a post-WWII America where the Germans and the Japanese won and invaded the east and west coasts.  For The Electric State, problems ensue when the automatons originally developed by Walt Disney for his theme parks evolve into autonomous service workers and start taking people’s jobs.  We all knew that the “It’s a Small World” ride was evil, but this is ridiculous.

Of course, automation has been replacing the need for human labor ever since the Industrial Revolution.  But taking one’s frustrations out on the loom, the cotton gin or an assembly line wasn’t practical.  In this movie, the robot interlopers look friendly and sound human, making them easy targets.  At some point, the self-aware robots fight back and overwhelm human armies.  This is where another critical development alters the course of human history.  A company named Sentre (pronounced as “center”) created virtual-reality helmets (neurocasters) that soldiers used to remote control their own robots.  This turns the tide and the automatons seek a truce, resulting in all robots being relegated to the Exclusion Zone (or EZ), basically an abandoned mall in the desert.

As has happened with other government inventions (Tang, the microwave oven, teflon, the internet), Sentre adapts the neurocaster for the general public.  Soon, everyone is plugging into Sentre’s network day and night, to the point where their bodies wither away from disuse.  At this point, you probably would think that The Electric State is a somber tale about humanity being enslaved by the technology it created.  You would be right, because the book (by Simon Stålenhag) this movie was adapted from is exactly that.  However, aside from borrowing the premise and few other elements of the novel, the movie is a very different animal altogether.

The Electric State (the movie) is the story of Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), who is contacted by a robot who claims to be her dead brother.  Years earlier, Michelle lost her mother and brother when their car collided with a deer.  Michelle was told that her mother and brother were dead, and she was forced to live with a mean foster parent (Jason Alexander in a thankless role).  The robot is in the form of Kid Kosmo, a hero from a cartoon Michelle and her brother Christopher (Woody Norman) watched as kids.  (The cartoons oddly look better than the movie itself.)

After fleeing from her neurocaster-enslaved foster dad, Michelle and Christopher (in robot form) head for the Exclusion Zone, where former Sentre scientist Dr. Amherst (a greasy-haired Ke Huy Quan) has information on where Christopher is being held.  Michelle and Christopher first pay a visit to Keats (Christopher Pratt), a former soldier who sells merchandise he’s taken from the EZ on the black market.  (The going rate for Cabbage Patch Dolls is big, I hear.)  He lives with a robot pal named Herm (voiced by Anthony Mackie), and they initially refuse to help Michelle.

A battle-bot controlled by Colonel Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) arrives at Keats’ compound with orders from Sentre CEO Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) to apprehend Christopher’s robot.  Keats’ base of operation is destroyed in the ensuing melee, leaving Keats and Herm no choice but to help Michelle into the EZ.

From here on out, the movie is extremely predictable.  The robots Michelle and Keats meet don’t want to help, but change their minds when they see that the human interlopers are “good people”.  The plan is to help Michelle extract her brother from Sentre’s network, which will cause it to collapse.  This will in turn free humanity from the Sentre’s technology, and the goodwill from the robot’s actions will convince the humans to grant them their freedom.  Will robot lives be lost in the process?  Certainly.  Will humanity be saved?  Certainly.  Will Chris Pratt ever eclipse his role as Star-Lord in the MCU?  Highly doubtful.  Aside from one minor twist, you’ve seen this movie before.

Recommendation

The Electric State is a fascinating movie, not because of anything it does, but because of what it represents.  The movie itself is resoundingly unspectacular, or as George Carlin would have described it, “minimally exceptional”.  The story is a nondescript amalgamation of ideas from better films like Wall-e and a.i.  The acting is passable, with the actors doing what they can with incredibly bland dialog.  (The only memorable line references the Holy Trinity.)

The leading actors give loose variations of performances they’ve done better in far better movies.  Chris Pratt plays the goofball hero.  Millie Bobby Brown is plucky and determined.  Stanly Tucci is articulate and coldly menacing.  Ke Huy Quan is skittish and overwhelmed.  Nobody is particularly bad here, but they’re uniformly unmemorable.  (I’ll give Pratt some credit for tearfully emoting over a fallen robot.)  The movie has a cast that has been funny elsewhere, but the script doesn’t have one funny line in it.

Other actors in supporting and cameo roles come and go, leaving little impact beyond, “Hey, that’s so-and-so!”  It felt odd when Jason Alexander, Colman Domingo, Holly Hunter and Giancarlo Esposito appear and disappear and leave without a trace.  The voice cast for the robots is a who’s-who, but their voices are distorted to such a degree that I had no idea Woody Harrelson or Anthony Mackie were in this.

From a technical standpoint, the movie’s visual effects are good.  I liked the distinct, retro designs of the robots, and the visual effects team effectively blending them with the real life actors.  The movie is adequately directed by Marvel veterans Joe and Anthony Russo.  The sets looked good.  There are Eighties needle-drops galore.  Overall, this movie wasn’t made on the cheap.

If you’ve read Simon Stålenhag’s book upon which this adaptation was based, you will be sorely disappointed.  Nearly all of the book’s edgy material has been sanded away.  The book and the movie only share the premise and some visual aesthetics.  (It actually faithfully recreates several images from the book.)  Tonally, however, the two couldn’t be more far apart.  If you’re a fan of the book and are thinking of watching this movie, you’ve been warned.

Finally, there’s the context within which this movie arrived, which to me is more interesting than the movie itself.  Intentionally or not, the movie feels like a reaction to negative social media attacks leveled at Pratt, Brown and the Russos over the last several years.  Although the book was optioned in 2017, it can’t be a coincidence that these actors and these directors have all come together in a movie where the heroes save humanity from a (social) network that is slowly killing them.

In regards to co-director Joe Russo, the movie epitomizes a variety of controversial stances that he’s expressed to the media.  It’s pro-technology in how it advocates for a world where humans and robots save each other.  It was released exclusively on Netflix, circumventing theatrical experience and the box office reporting that films are often judged by.  The movie’s loose narrative structure seems geared towards the TikTok crowd, whom Russo sees as guiding the future of the entertainment experience.  If you dislike Joe Russo, you’ll probably hate this movie on principle.

The Electric State is passable family entertainment that is also conspicuously inert.  Watching it is like watching someone describe an awesome film they watched in the most boring way possible.  The film is vaporous despite talented people both in front of and behind the camera.  It may hold the title as the most a film adaptation has ever departed from its source material in cinematic history.  Then there’s the uncanny way the film serves as meta commentary on itself and the filmmakers.  Regardless, The Electric State is a strangely compelling viewing experience, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.  Toss-up.

Analysis

When I learned that a movie version of The Electric State was coming to Netflix, I decided to read the book before seeing the film.  I was intrigued by how the Russos, the filmmakers behind several of the best Marvel movies, would adapt what sounded like challenging material.  While the Russos have proven they can make funny superhero spectacles, serious-minded science fiction is outside their wheelhouse.  Tonally, The Electric State couldn’t be further from the action-comedy nature of the Captain America and Avengers films, but I was willing to give the Russos the benefit of a doubt before condemning their adaptation.  (I may have felt differently if I’d seen Cherry or The Gray Man.)

The Electric State was a challenging but ultimately rewarding read.  The story is told by a first-person narrator, a teenage girl named Michelle, who is guarded and evasive.  In the present, Michelle and her mysterious accomplice travel to the west coast, avoiding detection by the police while an environmental catastrophe overtakes the landscape.  Along the way, Michelle recounts key episodes from her tragic past, specifically those involving the impact of Sentre’s neural network upon her family and the rest of humanity.  The result is a story that proceeds both linearly and non-linearly, where opaque elements in the present become clearer through Michelle’s backstory.

Further complicating is that Michelle doesn’t reveal the goal of her journey until almost the end of the story.  (Road narratives like this one typically explain this at the outset.)  Although Michelle successfully rescues her brother, their long-term future together looks grim because the world and human society are collapsing around them.  The story concludes with a darkly poetic but ambiguous ending, which made sense to me given everything that led up to that moment.  I immediately reread the book and appreciated the story more, because I understood most of it fit together.  (There are several parts that I’m still not clear on.)  The way the story reveals itself reminds me of a Mobius strip, where the beginning and the end connect and illuminate each other.

As I mentioned above, The Electric State is nothing like what the films Russos have made before.  The book is a somber and discomforting account of the disintegration of human society and the environment.  There’s also an ominous thread about how technology is slowly killing off humanity and attempting to replace them and by women to breed a race of human-robot hybrids.  Obviously, this is not material anyone would associate with filmmakers who made a name for themselves through television ensemble comedies (Arrested Development, Community) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Before I offer my explanation as to why the Russos chose to adapt The Electric State, I’ll compare the book and the film and highlight their similarities and differences.  If you’re a fan of the book, the following may be helpful in deciding whether you want to see the movie or not.

The Similarities

In an alternative timeline that bridges the 1980s and 1990s, a war is waged over a seven year period.  Soldiers remotely control robots using a device called a neurocaster manufactured by a company known as Sentre.  After the war is over, Sentre adapts its neurocaster technology and its integrated network for public consumption.  People spend most of their waking hours wearing headsets to connect with each other through the network, and their bodies atrophy from disuse.

Michelle, a young teenage girl, is contacted by her brother through a Kid Kosmo robot he controls remotely.  (Michelle and Skip watched Kid Kosmo cartoons together when they were younger.)  The two travel across the country to unplug him from Sentre’s network, encountering other robots along the way.

The Differences

The movie and the film diverge in so many ways.  The following table describes several of the notable differences.

The Book	The Movie
The world is being ravaged by an environmental catastrophe.  Clouds of sand cover the ground.  Animals are dying.	Does not mention an environmental catastrophe.
A war fought by soldier-piloted drones took place over a seven-year period.  This was done to lessen human casualties that a traditional war would incur.	Soldier-piloted drones fought back a robot insurgence.
Michelle’s mother is in the military.  They eventually succumb to brain injuries resulting from their use of neurocasters during the war.	Michelle’s mother dies when the car she’s driving with Michelle and Skip runs into a deer.
After her mother’s death, Michelle lives with her grandfather.  After he dies from old age, she lives with her father and stepmother.  Those two eventually die from neurocaster abuse, leaving Michelle to fend for herself.	Michelle lives with a foster parent and runs away when the Kid Kosmo robot shows up.
While living with her father and stepmother, Michelle becomes romantically involved with Amanda.  Amanda’s father is a priest who physically abuses her.  After spending a summer together, Amanda moves away.	No mention of Amanda is made.  Michelle’s sexual orientation isn’t mentioned, either.
Michelle drives herself and her brother (in robot form) across the country.	After a short drive in her foster father’s car, Michelle encounters a former soldier named Keats and his robot pal Herm.  Keats and Herm take Michelle to where her brother is imprisoned.
Michelle encounters robots along the journey.  The friendly-looking ones are inert except for one hiding in a barn.  Other menacing robots patrol the landscape and control legions of neurocaster-wearing humans.	Michelle and Keats befriend a group of friendly-looking robots in a mall in the Exclusion Zone.  Together, they take on Sentre in an effort to win freedom for the robots and to free the humans from Sentre’s influence.
Michelle finds her brother in a broken-down house, emaciated and alone.	Michelle’s brother is held captive in Sentre’s main facility.  The company runs all network traffic through his mind.
Michelle removes her brother’s neurocaster and takes him on a kayak out to sea.  Their fate is unknown.	Michelle powers-off the chamber keeping her brother alive.  The Sentre network crashes.  Humanity is saved.

The 325 Million Dollar Question

(This is a reference to the purported budget of The Electric State.  Netflix has never confirmed or denied this.)

As you can tell, the Russos sanded off almost every edgy, disturbing and challenging aspect of the source material.  They turned a very downbeat science fiction story into a light, kid-friendly sci-fi adventure.  This begs the question as to why.

The simplest explanation I have for the Russos approach is that they liked the premise of the story and saw it as a launching pad for a story they wanted to tell.  Young girls undertaking a dangerous quest in a strange world have been the source of popular stories many times, including the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.  The book is also set in a period of time in American culture that the Russos seem to like.  Finally, there’s the element of humans interacting with colorful and self-aware robots.  The Russos then handed over those pieces of the novel to writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and asked them to create a rousing, family-friendly adventure out of them.

Taking into consideration the movies that made the Russos famous, the way they adapted The Electric State is not surprising.  The Russos are good at making action-comedy vehicles with serious elements.  They intentionally left out nearly all of the disturbing aspects of the original story in favor of a story that is upbeat, optimistic and ends on a positive note.  Although Michelle does pull the plug on her brother, she does it for the greater good in the same way that Black Widow and Iron Man heroically sacrificed themselves to defeat Thanos.

As to why the Russos transformed The Electric State so radically, I would chalk it up to hubris and arrogance.  They believed that they could take the source novel and turn it into something it was never intended to be and that the resulting film would still work.  The funny thing is, they could have pulled it off if they had invested in a suitable screenplay.  Even though the credits state that the screenplay was written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, I have my doubts.  The dialog in this movie is so perfunctory and lifeless I can’t believe that it was written by the same two guys who wrote the Marvel movies the Russos directed.  In fact, I would have an easier time believing that Markus and McFeely submitted an outline for a screenplay to chatGPT and delivered whatever it spat out.

Baggage

The Electric State isn’t the first movie that arrived with significant baggage.  Many movies have had troubled movie productions since the beginning of Hollywood.  Stories of directors losing control of the set, difficult actors, cost overruns, meddling producers and studio heads are all  unfortunate aspects of show business.  For the most part, these tales have no noticeable impact on the movie itself.  For example, Apocalypse Now was an infamously troubled production but is regarded as a masterpiece.  In the end, it didn’t matter that Marlon Brando showed up on location overweight and having not read Joseph Conrad’s novel, or that Martin Sheen had a heart attack during filming that shut the set down until he recovered.

I don’t recall any reports of the production for The Electric State being troubled.  However, the social media reactions I see regularly for the Russos and stars Pratt and Brown do provide the movie with an usual context.

For a period of time, Chris Pratt was attacked for his membership in a church that is hostile to people who identify as LBGTQ.  One of his primary attackers was Elliot Page.  Pratt disavowed holding any such views and was very conciliatory in his responses to Page’s comments.  None of this controversy appears to have affected the box office success of The Garfield Movie or The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Millie Bobby Brown stated in an interview that she doesn’t watch movies and prefers to spend her time outdoors.  This has earned the ire of movie buffs who accuse her of not understanding or appreciating her profession or cinema.  This hasn’t affected Brown’s career that I can tell.  After gaining prominence with her role as Eleven in Stranger Things, she regularly stars in other  Netflix films, including two Enola Holmes movies and Damsel.  (She also appeared in two Warner Brothers Godzilla movies that were successful at the box office.)

As for the directors, Joe Russo has gone out of their way to antagonize film connoisseurs and theater-goers.  Among his more controversial comments, he’s characterized his take on a remake of Disney’s Hercules as a “TikTok musical”, that watching movies in a theater is “elitist”, that filmmakers will be using AI significantly in their work and that AI is the future of filmmaking.

I don’t know Joe Russo personally, but his comments are remarkably similar to those who led companies categorized as being disruptors in their respective areas.  The CEOs of AirB&B, WeWork, Uber, Netflix and others routinely described what they were doing as disrupting the status quo, bringing change to sections of the economy (hotels, office space, taxis, broadcast television) that had not fundamentally changed in decades.  

I think that Joe Russo fashions himself as a disruptor for entertainment, a successful filmmaker who can use his clout to bring significant changes to the way filmed entertainment is made.  While it is true that the film industry has witnessed significant change over its hundred year history, that Joe Russo believes he and his brother are the ones who will bring about the next evolution in filmmaking remains to be seen.  In fact, the Russos haven’t proven they can make a satisfying film outside of the Marvel apparatus.

This is why each Anthony and Joe Russo film has been met with increasing hostility and ridicule.  People who appreciate good movies and the theatrical experience view the Russos as the antithesis of the things they enjoy.  If the Russos had proven themselves to be successful filmmakers beyond superhero fare, I think Joe’s opinions might be taken a bit more seriously.  Instead, Joe Russo strikes movie fans as someone whose success has largely been because of the structure they worked in, and should keep his opinions to himself.  The Electric State isn’t a terrible film, just bland and innocuous.  In the past, it would have been a direct-to-video release and quickly forgotten.  Instead, Joe Russo’s comments have helped the movie achieve a level of notoriety that it never would have otherwise.  Only time will tell us whether Joe Russo is a genuine pioneer, or just a guy with arrows in his back.