Netflix’s robot-themed sci-fi The Electric State is attracting many eyeballs, as well as a vicious response from critics. Luke Buckmaster joins the pile-on, with one important caveat…
After monstering mainstream cinema, hack directors Anthony and Joe Russo—of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame fame—bring their brand of blockbuster goop to Netflix, zapping whatever’s left of our brains cells. We’ll never know how the massively expensive The Electric State, which cost north of $US300 million, would’ve fared in cinemas, but it comes with a distinct waft of “flop.” Netflix will claim it’s a big hit, of course, but a “hit” isn’t what it used to be; nowadays we can be justifiably suspicious that the process can be reverse-engineered. While box office receipts are pretty clear cut, the platform’s secret and thoroughly manipulatable algorithms can easily deliver a success, or “success,” pushing certain titles onto our eyeballs.
Are the critics right to have dissed on this loud, stiff-limbed, emotionally cringey sci-fi movie, awarding it a piddly score on Rotten Tomatoes? In a word: yes.
Set in an alternate 1990s, in a world where robots turned on us (yawn) but not all of them are bad (double yawn) and in fact maybe we can all just get along (zzzzz), the source material—an illustrated retro-future novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag—is a production and creature designer’s wet dream. The textures and makeup of the robots are the film’s main attraction: they really do look a treat, like pop culture creations that somehow breached the space-time continuum, falling out of time and out of place; relics from the parallel dimension childhood we never knew we had.
These sentient rust buckets are everywhere…it’s the humans that feel barely alive. They’re a collection of archetypes that resemble, in sheer lifelessness and lack of colour, chalk outlines on the ground. Not the playful kind kids draw; the ones police put around corpses.
Millie Bobby Brown’s protagonist Michelle travels across America with a bot that appears to have the consciousness of her long-lost, and presumed dead, younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman). She’s determined to find out What Really Happened To Him, and as these things inevitably go, encounters various friend and foe on her journey, including the raffish thief Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot companion Herman (voice of Anthony Mackie).
An early contextual slab, presented in the hackneyed form of a television documentary, brings us up to speed with the state of the world. The long and short of it: these sentient creations realised they were being stiffed, with barely any time off and no voting rights, thus they launched a good ol’ fashioned robot uprising. Or, as it’s simplistically called here, the “robot war,” which humans eventually win (relax: all this is just scene-setting) by using a new technology called “neurocasters.”
These are essentially clunky VR headsets that enable people to live dual lives: one using their actual physical bodies, the other as a robot that projects a blurry image of their face. Conceptually this element has potential but gets smothered by everything else going on, and ultimately subscribes to a vapid “technology is bad, mmmkay?” message reminiscent of Spielberg’s Ready Player One adaptation.
An early scene based in the past establishes the film as an uphill fight against an avalanche of cheese and mawkishness. When listening to Michelle assault her little bro with brutal, unadulterated lovey dovey-ness, telling him—time to hold your nose, folks—that it “doesn’t matter if you’re down the hall, or on the moon, we’re always connected.” This moment reminded me of the legendary comment Harrison Ford delivered to George Lucas after reading the script of Star Wards: “George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”
If you make it to the end of The Electric State you’ll be exposed to even worse dialogue; the Russo brothers give the impression that they’ve consciously decided to bookend their movie with explosions of cheese. I won’t get into details; let’s just say the dialogue includes “my particles stay with you, and yours with me.” How would Harrison Ford respond to a line like that? What can be said? Where to even begin?
There are however some fun inventions here and there, again, entirely related to the cute, rusty looking robots, which are the film’s one great feature. They really do look like tactile creations—things you can reach out and touch—despite being lathering in CGI. My favourite is Perplexo (voiced by Hank Azaria), a magician who is both the star attraction and the theatre itself, his mechanical body protruding through tied back red curtains, his face breaching the proscenium arch. For this strange fellow, who I would’ve loved to spend more time with, the whole world really is a stage.
