The staff over at Amblin Entertainment should secure their trash bins, because someone has been rooting around in there. Or maybe multiple someones:
The staff over at Amblin Entertainment should secure their trash bins, because someone has been rooting around in there. Or maybe multiple someones: the writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, as well as directors Anthony and Joe Russo. Their up-to-date film, The Electric State (out on Netflix March 14), seems stitched together from bits of past Steven Spielberg movies—chiefly A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Ready Player One, with a few dashes of Minority Report. There’s some artistry in the needlework, but it’s nonetheless an underwhelming pastiche.
To be fair to the filmmakers, they are working off something distinct: a critically praised 2018 graphic novel by Sion Stâlenhag about an alternate world history in which a war with robots happened in the 1990s and a kind of virtual reality internet was built alongside the one we have now. The Electric State presents an intriguing backstory: Walt Disney designed robots for his theme parks. They eventually entered mass production and were useful helpers until the robots, who are at least some kind of sentient, started demanding rights. The resulting battle ended in a robot defeat at the hands of an ominous up-to-date technology that puts human consciousness into machines used to quell the robo uprising.
The Russos introduce this premise with clever, how’d-they-get-the-rights-to-that audacity. We see, and hear, Bill Clinton talking about the robot war. (I suppose there’s a touch of Spielberg’s erstwhile close collaborator Robert Zemeckis in there.) NBC and MTV logos are stamped at the bottom of imitation news footage of lurching mechanicals battling overwhelmed humans. A Mr. Peanut robot is the dignified leader of the resistance. The references are myriad but, in the beginning, not so cloying as the barrage of pop ephemera that smothered Ready Player One, or so many other geek paeans to cultural effluvia.
Soon enough, though, The Electric State arrives at the ’90s cover needle-drop saturation point and the film begins to sag, struggling to carry both a heap of arch nostalgia and an actual story. Its plot is rote and perfunctory, a quest narrative involving a teenage girl, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), searching for her long lost brother in post-war 1994. She’s got a robot pal in tow—who also sort of is her brother—and, of course, also encounters a disillusioned Han Solo type (with his own comedic sidekick, voiced by Anthony Mackie) to assist her on her journey. That fellow, former soldier Keats, is played by Chris Pratt under a wig that looks like Keats walked into a barber shop and said “give me the Amy Madigan.”
These two antiheroes are meant to have the bickering but eventually loving chemistry so common to buddy adventures, but neither character can escape the stiff confines of their archetype. It doesn’t assist that nothing terribly exhilarating happens as the two (or four, counting the robots) make their way across a wasteland in search of answers. Sure, the special effects are impressive. But with a reported budget of $320 million, the movie should probably contain more dazzling spectacle, some action sequences worthy of the Spielberg homage. Instead, The Electric State is mostly uninteresting quipping intercut with the same metal-on-metal fight over and over again.
The only real seasoning comes in the form of spirited voice performances from Brian Cox, Hank Azaria, and a winsome Jenny Slate as misfit toys—I mean robots—eking out an existence in the desert. (I’m less enamored of Woody Harrelson as a bored-sounding Mr. Peanut.) The humans don’t fare quite as well. Stanley Tucci, as a tech messiah/mad scientist, is forced to say lines like, “Our world is a tire fire floating on an ocean of piss.” He tries to give this clunky stuff the Tucci spin, but there’s only so much he can do. Holly Hunter very briefly pops up as a news correspondent and then disappears, which is just cruel. Perhaps the most effective live action performance is that of Woody Norman, who plays Michelle’s brother in flashbacks with a thoughtful mix of weariness and innocence.
For all its kiddie cuteness and kiddie creepiness, The Electric State is actually building toward a bitterly unhappy conclusion—one that is meant to teach us an essential lesson about enjoying the real world and its real human connections. The messaging is pat, and too basic to dismiss when the film has just turned into such a tragic bummer. The filmmakers are no doubt aiming for that Spielbergian mix of wonder, suspense, and melancholy, but it’s all rather synthetic. Save for a few likable robots, The Electric State is charmless and curiously blunt. It’s almost as if all the money and tech in the world are not sufficient replacements for imagination.
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