MoviesMoviesThe Russo brothers’ latest film for Netflix, ‘The Electric State’, feels like it was made for its time—which is to say it’s pretty dismal
Netflix/Ringer illustration
By Adam NaymanMarch 14, 10:30 am UTC • 8 min
A few years ago, writing about the Russo brothers’ Netflix-subsidized spy thriller The Gray Man, I suggested that the film’s desultory inventory of genre tropes suggested the existence of a sentient screenwriting program. It was not meant as a compliment. History, though, is grokked by the winners, and the Russos are playing with house money. Artificiality is their brand. They may not be especially intelligent about it, but they sure are savvy. In a moment defined by practical and existential anxieties about the use of AI at nearly every level of studio and even independent filmmaking—not to mention its strategic deployment by streaming giants determined to shorten and stunt our collective attention spans—the brothers walk unafraid.
In 2023, Joe, the one who picked an Instagram fight with Martin Scorsese and made sure everybody knew how much he loved U2, prophesied that Hollywood was on the verge of producing fully AI-generated features. Last October, in an attempt to get ahead of the curve, he and Anthony recruited ex–Apple algorithm whisperer Dominic Hughes as the chief scientific officer for their production company, AGBO, whose credits include both Extraction films, which didn’t win any Academy Awards, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, which did. Symbolically speaking, AGBO’s embrace of AI was as much of a mask-off moment for the Russos and their mandate as Robert Downey Jr. revealing himself as Dr. Doom. In a press release that sounded suspiciously reminiscent of DeepSeek—or maybe HAL 9000—the duo claimed that they felt “energized” by the possibilities of a brave new world. “At AGBO, we are relentlessly focused on a creative-led approach to technology and innovation,” they said. “Working in tandem with our writers, directors, crew members, and technologists, Dr. Hughes will help us imagine new ways to empower artists to tell their boldest and most ambitious stories.”
Maybe next time. For now, all the Russos have to show for their efforts—and more than $300 million more of Netflix’s money—is The Electric State, which is neither bold nor ambitious. It doesn’t feel particularly empowered, either, but then, it isn’t the work of artists or even “creatives.” Rather, it’s recycled, self-cannibalizing slop, a dystopian action movie for dystopian times, the cinematic equivalent of Soylent Green. Its signature images of massive, malfunctioning automatons are apt insofar as nothing in the movie works the way it’s supposed to. Even more than Deadpool & Wolverine, which was at least semi-witty about the idea of 21st-century blockbuster moviemaking as a burial ground of intellectual properties, The Electric State suggests a medium on the verge of total collapse. Or maybe it’s a guided tour, picking through the ruins.
Adapted from Swedish author Simon Stålenhag’s crowdfunded illustrated novel of the same name, The Electric State takes place in an alternate version of the 1990s where human beings and theme-park robots went to war over issues of the latter contingent’s exploitation and indentured servitude. (Ground zero for the uprising was apparently Disneyland.) We open with a montage breaking down the conflict and its prime movers, narrated through ersatz, grainy network news clips that remind us we’re watching an alternate-timeline period piece where the internet has barely been invented and Bill Clinton is still the president (just like in Longlegs). The story picks up in 1994, with the negotiation of a dubious peace treaty relegating all animatronic survivors to a self-contained exclusion zone.
The robots, whose numbers have been decimated, are safely contained behind heavily fortified walls and massed together in a disused shopping mall. Meanwhile, humanity is trapped in a different way, by the mass-marketed proliferation of ingenious and insidious “neurocaster” headsets, which transport their wearers to their own private Videodromes. It’s a scenario carried over from WALL-E, which was sweeter about imagining our collective screen-time infantilization, and also Gamer, which was considerably nastier and funnier.
Everybody we see in The Electric State is addicted to their neurocasters except for Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a moody teenager who staunchly refuses to log on. Instead, she spends her time sparring with her verbally abusive, physically atrophied guardian, Ted (Jason Alexander)—a loser who sits drooling in his armchair and fantasizing about Cindy Crawford (remember, it’s 1994) while simultaneously psychically piloting a clunky, turbo-powered drone bearing his face—and pining for her younger brother, Chris (Woody Norman), an Einstein-level math genius who died several years earlier in the same car crash that killed her parents. Or did he? One night, while Ted languishes in a stupor, Michelle sees a small, yellow, rictus-grinning robot lurking in her backyard; he’s made in the image of Chris’s favorite Saturday morning cartoon character. Michelle realizes that the little guy has been imbued with Chris’s consciousness, albeit filtered through a series of tinny, prerecorded sound bites in need of patient interpretation.
Clinging desperately to the possibility that Chris is still alive—and that she might be able to free him from his heavy-metal container—she sets off with the robot to navigate a wasteland patrolled by security drones more powerful than Ted’s consumer model. These remote-controlled storm troopers have been designed by the same sinister tech guru behind the neurocaster, the bald-pated, power-hungry Ethan Skate, who’s got unlimited resources and unresolved mommy issues. No prizes for guessing that Ethan is also connected to Chris’s disappearance or that he’s played by Stanley Tucci, who clearly enjoys working even if he doesn’t care about the quality of the work. Along the way, she joins forces with a Han Solo–ish smuggler named Keats (Chris Pratt), who’s got his own contraband robot buddy (voiced by a pitch-corrected Anthony Mackie). They eventually join up with a ragtag group of discarded and lovably eccentric automatons—including, I shit you not, a politically subversive version of Mr. Peanut played by Woody Harrelson—to launch an attack on Skate’s virtual-reality empire.
Note: The preceding plot synopsis was not written with ChatGPT. If it’s hard to tell the difference, that’s on the Russos and their in-house screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who are hell-bent on treading the path of least resistance as lead-footedly as possible. It really doesn’t take much to generate resonance in stories about people becoming prisoners of their own devices; what’s extraordinary about The Electric State is the inverse relationship between the richness and complexity of its special effects design—the genuinely uncanny way its nonhuman characters seem to occupy real space alongside their flesh-and-blood costars—and the evasiveness and banality of the storytelling. The Electric State synthesizes the worst tendencies of its makers’ work for the MCU, including laborious, grind-things-to-a-halt exposition; sitcom-thin characterizations; Pavlovian pop music cues; and shards of snark lodged like shrapnel in a thick and toxic goo of sentimentality. Imagine Five Nights at Freddy’s directed at knifepoint by Steven Spielberg—or Ready Player One directed by somebody else—and you’re close to the tone of pandering, anodyne emptiness on offer here, which is exacerbated by the feeling that nobody is really sweating basic narrative logic or continuity.
Sometimes, movies are bad enough that you end up feeling bad for the actors. The Electric State inverts the equation by almost exclusively using actors who are notorious for either seeming weirdly checked out (exhibit A being Brown, whose next convincing line reading will be her first) or being prone to coasting (i.e., Pratt, who dispenses his feeble, sub-Starlord one-liners like a contractually obligated vending machine). Say what you will about the mugging in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, but it’s in the service of a broad satirical statement. The Russos don’t do satire or subversion; instead, a faulty monolith like The Electric State is exactly the sort of thing that a good satirist would tear to shreds. It’s a fable of revolution defined by smug complacency, an ostensibly clever inventory of Gen X iconography that conflates nostalgia with product placement and calls it a day. In The Avengers, Steve Rogers’s cheerful assertion “I understood that reference” was meant as a joke. In The Electric State, the Russos treat it like a mission statement.
Of all the depressing things on display here, the most palpable is the knowledge that it doesn’t have to turn a profit or break even; it doesn’t even have to make a dent in the popular consciousness or the attention economy. Netflix sets the terms of its own success—real and perceived—and, in the process, deflates the necessary, pressurized tensions between directorial vision, studio oversight, and audience expectations that give a movie like Mickey 17 a sense that something is at stake. If anything, those surreptitious videos of audiences cheering wildly at the climax of Avengers: Endgame seem charming in comparison. That was at least a collective experience; The Electric State is a movie designed for neurocasting that then has the temerity to end with a direct address imploring everybody to unplug. How many people watching the movie at home will look up from their phones at the moment of truth?
It may be that dismal times call for dismal movies. At one point in The Electric State, a character refers to the world as a “tire fire floating in an ocean of piss,” which is apt enough and admittedly a more vivid image than most bots could manage. It’s all the more disingenuous, then, that the film ends up peddling uplift, which is where those expensive music cues come in. Imagine a movie that tries to soundtrack a call to arms with an earnest, minor-key piano cover of “Wonderwall.” There’s no maybe about it: The Russos aren’t gonna be the ones who save movies.
Back in 2019, around the release of Avengers: Endgame, the brothers tried to curry favor with the cinephile crowd by invoking Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 classic, Red Desert, for the way it used barren exterior landscapes to convey interior psychology. (It’s a valid observation, even if it didn’t earn them an invite to the Criterion Closet.) A case could be made that the barren, retro-futurist world of The Electric State, all desolate valleys and distant horizon lines dotted with I-Love-the-’90s detritus, actually positions the film as the Russos’ Red Desert—a vast, fogged-out vision of spiritual malaise. But there’s a difference between diagnosing emptiness and embodying it. The landscapes here suggest filmmakers who dream in corporate logos; they’re not mad men, but shills. The world is indeed a tire fire, and The Electric State would like to buy it a Coke (or a Dr. Pepper) and keep it company.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book ‘The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together’ is available now from Abrams.
