The Electric State Review: A Sorry State Of A Sci-Fi Blockbuster

In a 2023 interview with Variety, "Avengers: Endgame" director Joe Russo made the bold prediction that the first feature-length film made entirely by AI would be released by the end of 2025. If you didn't know any better prior to watching "The Electric State," the latest blockbuster from Joe and his brother Anthony, you'd assume this was the movie he predicted the algorithm would generate: a retro futurist adventure with a story built from the bones of better movies, as well as frequent nods to the most mainstream 1980s and 1990s nostalgia artifacts.

Saying a movie is indistinguishable from AI slop is a criticism I typically avoid, as even on a bad production, it's an insult to the many artists whose time and hard work was invested into the project. But in this half-assed dystopia, it's hard to detect any human creativity — everything from the character designs to the story beats feel like the results of ChatGPT prompts the siblings hastily made on the way to set each day.

This will be especially disheartening to fans of the source material, Simon Stålenhag's 2018 graphic novel, which leaned into the far bleaker implications of a society destroyed by technology, guiding us through the American wastelands with a protagonist he likened to Kurt Cobain. This despairing tone is not the one adopted by the Russo Brothers or their regular screenwriting collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who are so hellbent on making this a four-quadrant family event movie that they've removed any trace of edge from their characters.

Here, we've got a bland teen hero named Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) leading the chase, with the Cobain-styled sidekick now a Kurt Russell knock-off played by a sleepwalking Chris Pratt — whose lack of onscreen charisma justifies his "worst Chris" billing in a way no other project has. The movie opens in 1990, jumping through a robo-apocalypse where the world's animatronic mascots rise up to conquer humanity faster than you can say "Five Nights At Freddy's." This is brought to a halt by tech billionaire Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), whose manufactured, "Pacific Rim"-reminiscent creations are connected to human fighters and win the war.

Flash forward after the battle, and mankind has maintained its love affair with tech, one that Michelle — still reeling after the loss of her brother in the war — doesn't share. She's often the only person daring to go out by herself, not just staying at home and connecting to a robot avatar to send in her place. However, one day, a bot shows up in her garden that appears to be piloted by the sibling she assumed was dead, inspiring her to drop everything and head off on a road trip to the forbidden "Exclusion Zone" where the animatronic mascots still rule. She bumps into smuggler Keats (Pratt) along the way, who begrudgingly agrees to help alongside his own techno companion Herman (Anthony Mackie).

Don't be fooled by the alternate reality version of the decade in which the movie is set though, as the Russos mostly remain inspired by its preceding decade, an era for which nostalgia in contemporary pop culture has long grown stale. Everything from the music cues to the various items Keats smuggles — largely action figures, era-specific junk food, and lunchboxes — are hallmarks of the 1980s, with multiple suggestions that just a few years into the next decade, nostalgia for the one that came before has already begun. The effect is like if a movie set in dystopian 2025 had characters acting nostalgic for Wordle Print Outs and novelty Hawk Tuah merchandise. I understand there would be an impulse to return to a simpler time before the robots took over, but I doubt it would manifest in a yearning for such immediately outdated memorabilia.

The few reminders that the movie is set in the 1990s, as opposed to a prolonged, never-ending '80s, could also do with some fact checking. Viewers who weren't even alive at the time (and even ones who, like me, are not American) know Bill Clinton wasn't inaugurated until 1993 — right out of the gate, in the opening montage, we see him presiding over a war that took place at some point in 1991. It's a small detail, but one that summates all the movie's flaws by minute five; it's a film that cares more about triggering nostalgic flashbacks in audiences than about accurately building out a sci-fi world worth emotionally investing in. If a movie this far-fetched can't make you suspend disbelief before the narrative has even been established, it's dead on arrival.

As for the mascots themselves, you will likely find yourself frantically Googling to find out why such hideous monstrosities of design can be found in a movie with a $320 million price tag, and why such garish CGI was used instead of practical effects (I refuse to believe that would have inflated the budget, if brought to life with the thrifty inventiveness of, say, a vintage Tim Burton). Maybe the only redeeming factor is that some of the voice actors — especially a delightfully hammy Brian Cox as baseball mascot Popfly — sound like they're having fun in the booth, and I can only hope some of that budget went toward something positive, like them getting a new kitchen fitted.

But there's no imagination to how any of the ensemble is utilized, with both physical and vocal presences cast to type, unable to elevate the material due to how little of interest is on the page. It's not just the archetypal heroes on their generic quest, but also their nemeses, with both Stanley Tucci and Giancarlo Esposito asleep at the wheel in unimaginative villain roles they've both played to far better effect before. In the case of Esposito, I feel casting directors need to enforce a decade-long ban on him being hired in bad guy roles; his recent turn as a charismatic, sleazy Hollywood agent in "MaXXXine" was a reminder of just how versatile an actor he can be when not being asked to retread his "Breaking Bad" performance under a different character name.

I've always maintained that the worst kind of bad movies aren't the likes of "Madame Web" or "Megalopolis" (to name two recent examples) — as those at least are entertaining, even if they don't function in the ways their respective creators intended. No, "The Electric State" is a soulless exercise in the same vein as a "Borderlands" or an "Argylle," a joyless affair that feels cobbled together by studio executives who are trying so desperately hard to manufacture a crowd-pleasing success by replicating formulaic genre beats and characterizations, that they never once stop to ask why anybody would care about the story they're trying to tell. Joe and Anthony Russo have made charming blockbusters before, but here, they're both thinking with that executive mindset, following an algorithmic, overfamiliar storytelling formula to the point of feeling like ChatGPT should demand the DGA should revoke their credits.

"The Electric State" enters limited theatrical release on March 7, and hits Netflix on March 14.