By Seth Lukas Hynes
The Electric State
Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt and Giancarlo Esposito
M
3.5/5
Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, The Electric State is a lacklustre adaptation of the 2018 graphic novel by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag.
In an alternate 1994, following a war between humans and sentient robots that ended with the latter’s segregation inside a vast Exclusion Zone, an unruly teenager named Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) must venture into the EZ to rescue her brother Christopher (Woody Norman).
The Electric State has fun action and some quirky and poignant moments, and recreates the book’s retrofuturistic visual style juxtaposing advanced technology with rusty decay, but converts the book’s sombre road-trip narrative into a slow, meandering adventure story with awkward humour and bland characters.
Brown and Norman deliver solid performances but their characters are too thinly-written to connect with, and Chris Pratt is a generic moral scoundrel as the scrap merchant Keats.
As with Pratt playing yet another Star Lord type, Giancarlo Esposito plays yet another cold, soft-spoken antagonist as the robot hunter Colonel Bradley.
As many others have pointed out, even with the advertising imagery in Stålenhag’s books, it feels crass for the film to feature corporate mascot Mr Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) as a major character.
The Electric State offers scant insight on reality versus illusion, racism and corporate greed, with Stanley Tucci giving it his all for a barely-there character as the CEO villain Skate, and save for the aesthetics, the film has almost none of the book’s quiet melancholy and fascinating existential unease.
The Electric State is also somehow one of the most expensive films ever made; it looks good, but not $320 million good.
The Electric State is streaming on Netflix, but for a better and smarter retrofuturistic robot-themed film (at quarter the budget), watch Gareth Edwards’ The Creator instead.
