Netflix’s ‘The Electric State’: What are we doing here, folks?

On its own, The Electric State is a meandering, joyless, tensionless adventure cobbled together from better movies by Steven Spielberg (namely, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Ready Player One). However, as an adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel of the same name—titled Passagen in Swedish—it’s a ghastly work of re-imagining thoughtful, haunting cyberpunk as quippy, conveyor-belt product from the directors and writers (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) responsible for some of the biggest Marvel entries, from Captain America: Civil War to Avengers: Endgame.

It’s filmmaking on autopilot, with a human cast largely sleepwalking through their roles. Ironically, the most life it seems to have is thanks to its robot characters, voiced by a litany of fun performers (like Jenny Slate as a USPS mascot, Brian Cox as a warrior with a baseball head, and Woody Harrelson as a Teddy Roosevelt-like Mr. Peanut). This discrepancy would’ve bordered on subversive in a film whose central inquiry was about whether or not these automatons were truly alive—something like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Spielberg’s A.I.—but The Electric State isn’t concerned with the most basic questions of its premise. Its robot characters speak and behave in familiar ways, and are digitally rendered with tangible physical presence, but both they and the human characters keep reminding us that they aren’t actually living things, muddying the waters of why one might want to even tell this story in the first place.

In a 1990-set prologue, we briefly meet Michelle and her math-genius younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman), who drops a hint about consciousness existing as electrical currents. Shortly thereafter, the film provides an effective montage conveying the history of this world—in which Walt Disney’s theme park automatons became worker drones, and then rebels—leading to a war and uneasy treaty between robots and humans. Its setups are hardly untoward. In fact, for its first half hour, the movie has loads of dramatic potential. Four years later, a now-orphaned Michelle, who believes her brother dead, is living in a foster home when a robot from their favorite cartoon—Kid Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), a yellow smiley face with coiffed hair—shows up at her doorstep, claiming to be the long-dead Christopher. However, what ought to be a world-changing revelation for Michelle is met with the most casual acceptance so the duo can escape toward the next set piece.

In a world where humans have largely buried their heads in the sand of virtual reality headsets (à la Ready Player One), it’s stunningly easy for Michelle and Cosmo to escape towards a secret tech facility on foot, where they hope to find answers about Christopher’s predicament from a mysterious doctor played by Ke Huy Quan (whose human role is short-lived, but he also voices a pleasant, retro-futuristic Windows P.C. bot). Granted, the plot isn’t entirely dead on arrival: the characters are chased on occasion by remote, CHAPPiE-like drone robots controlled by soldiers—one in particular played by Giancarlo Esposito, whose stoic face is plastered on his bot’s display screen—but they rarely pose a physical or emotional threat, given how the Russos tend to pull back and obscure any moments of action or chaos.

Along the way, Michelle seeks the help of roguish former soldier and current junk-dealer Keats—played by Chris Pratt, in the umpteenth unsuccessful attempt to turn him into a Harrison Ford type—which is where the movie really starts to fall apart. Although Keats is accompanied by a lively robot pal with a light-up display face, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), Keats’ dynamic with every other character immediately sucks the energy out of the room. Where the cutesy Cosmo can only speak in cartoon catchphrases, Keats similarly talks in one-liners that never land. He’s both the subject and purveyor of irreverent snark that saps each scene of what little sincerity they contain, ensuring that The Electric State is difficult (if not impossible) to emotionally invest in. A Steve Jobs-esque tech villain played by Stanley Tucci looms over the proceedings, but he’s mostly removed from them—he’s present on screen, but absent from the heroes’ actual stories.

The scenes in which robot characters interact with humans can be amusing at times—certainly more than those between the human characters; Brown and Pratt feel in competition to see who can appear more checked out—but as soon it comes time to widen the movie’s scope, or provide it with a sense of scale, things go immediately awry. A common complaint against CGI is it can feel weightless when improperly deployed. In The Electric State, the robots are all immaculately detailed and fully formed, but it’s the filmmaking that robs them of all physical and emotional heft. Cuts between scenes, and between characters, are filled with dead air. The bots jump and fight and land with no impact, especially in a climactic battle that copies beats and entire sequences from the Russos’ Endgame, but without that film’s sense of camaraderie or immediate objective.

After the Russos’ first post-Marvel movie Cherry—which had some intriguing visual flourishes, even if it didn’t entirely work—their next foray, spy thriller The Grey Man, proved to be a complete dud. The Electric State marks a small step back towards the large-scale action fantasy territory where they feel most at home, albeit without the IP and existing universe they usually build upon. So, it’s perhaps for the best that they’re retreating to the comforts of the MCU with Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars next, whatever that might spell for Marvel giving us more of the same.

At the very least, it saves us the headache of seeing inspirations like Stålenhag and Spielberg ground into slop. The former’s eldritch horror, and the latter’s thoughtful wonder, seem too much of an ask for the Russos, whose work here is more concerned with borrowing the shape of these influences, rather than their heart and soul. It’s an especially ironic outcome for a film where human beings and their relationships are said to separate us from machines. With how mechanically The Electric State unfolds, you’d think it were a facile attempt by robots to ape something human.