The Electric State contains the most baffling call-to-arms in recent cinema. This is a story, in short, about how all those damn kids should put their phones down and go hug the nearest corporate mascot. That’s not a surprising take to see from Anthony and Joe Russo, the director duo behind the second highest-grossing film of all time, Avengers: Endgame, produced for the empire of Mickey Mouse. Still, it’s an interminable one to have to sit through.
The Russos, for Netflix and with the help of Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have stripped away the melancholy that underpinned The Electric State’s source material – a 2018 graphic novel by Simon Stalenhag that reflected on humanity’s intertwined relationship with technology. Instead, its alternative history of West Coast America in the Nineties has been mined for self-satisfied nostalgia.
The film’s teen orphan protagonist Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) directly implores the audience that life “can only happen out there, in the real world”, having just spent an entire film bonding with a CGI-rendered robot called Cosmo (Alan Tudyk) whose painted perma-grin, the film dutifully explains, can be traced back to Walt Disney himself. It’s a movie supposedly about the tactile and the material, but in which the vast majority of characters are collections of pixels, inhabiting the same flat, grey landscape of modern franchise affairs.
And, my god, does The Electric State want you to root for its robots, having rounded them up and expelled them to the “exclusion zone”, following a failed revolution in which a gigantic cat-headed one is seen defacing the Iwo Jima Memorial. We’re meant to empathise with them not because Markus and McFeely’s script shows interest in the usual ethical conundrums of android personhood, but because one is shaped like corporate mascot Mr Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson, with Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, and Hank Azaria as his compatriots) and the other looks like one of those honey bottles shaped like a bear.
Michelle and Cosmo must quest into the exclusion zone to find the brother she’s long thought dead. They’re swiftly joined by Keats (Chris Pratt), an illegal trafficker of cheap tat like Beanie Babies and Big Mouth Billy Bass, and his robot companion Herman (Anthony Mackie). Keats is Pratt stuck in roguish a**hole drive, with a third act turnaround so abrupt even the film comments on it (“When did you stop being an a**hole?” When, indeed.)
The villain, hot on their tail, is Stanley Tucci in Steve Jobs cosplay, complete with the black turtleneck, minimalist headquarters, and a line of “Neurocaster” virtual reality headsets. At one point, the Russos let the camera linger on the image of a zonked-out woman in a Neurocaster helmet, collapsed outside of a gas station. I wonder what metaphor they could be aiming for there.
The Electric State is somehow both punishingly obvious and completely incoherent. Ultimately, however, the only real point is that pop culture should be revered as humanity’s prime sustenance. Cosmo is based on a children’s cartoon that’s presented as the only real emotional bond between Michelle and her brother; the surrounding landscape is nothing but malls and fairgrounds, temples to consumerism where characters practically salivate while listing off menus items from Panda Express; and there’s a searingly earnest piano cover of “Wonderwall” at the end. The Electric State isn’t about dystopia. It’s the dystopia itself.
Dir: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo. Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci. 12, 128 minutes.
‘The Electric State’ streams on Netflix from 14 March
