Years after a war between robots and humans left civilization in shambles, a young woman attempts to track down her deceased brother who seems to have been reincarnated as a bot in The Electric State, which is now streaming on Netflix after debuting in limited theatrical release stateside last weekend. This purported $320 million blockbuster boasts some jaw-dropping visual effects work and an appealing retro-futuristic design alongside one-dimensional characters and a narrative void that turns the experience of watching the film into an endurance test for attentive viewers.
As second-screen content that you can put on while playing a video game, doing household chores, or scrolling through social media, The Electric State is the pinnacle of Netflix’s brand of background entertainment. Any 30-second burst of the movie will dazzle your eyes and ears, and even though you missed the previous ten minutes, you’ll never be confused about what’s happening because these characters never change and the story goes nowhere.
Ironically, anyone actually watching The Electric State will be left utterly confounded. What exactly are these robots? They don’t appear to be powered by any kind of advanced artificial intelligence but are instead simple-minded mascots who desire autonomy for reasons never sufficiently explored. What will Mr. Peanut (soulfully voiced by Woody Harrelson) do with his civil rights once severed from the Planters corporation? At the beginning of the movie, there’s a Fox News style report featuring a guy arguing that his toaster should toast his bread, and the movie seems to side with the robot arguing that no, the toaster has rights, too.
You fools! “Robots are people, too!” (actual line of dialogue from the movie). Humanity wins the robot wars in 1994 after Mr. Peanut and Bill Clinton sign a peace accord, because tech mogul Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci, dressed up like Steve Jobs) has invented a special VR headset (here called a Neurocaster) that allows people to operate their own robots. Now, do these robots deserve human rights, too? Apparently not, according to the logic of the movie, because the intelligence inside of them is human.
The Neurocasters are the film’s metaphor for social media, or heroin, or whatever else plagues mankind, and all the background characters in the film—from an abusive stepdad (Jason Alexander) to high school students to junkies on the street are permanently hooked up to them. They allow users to split their minds, and simultaneously operate the human-robots with one half of their mind while relaxing at the beach with the other. Just like real-life VR games, in which we prefer to simulate a day at the beach rather than roleplay as a powerful robot.
Michelle Greene (Millie Bobby Brown), meanwhile, rejects the Neurocasters from the very beginning of the movie for reasons unexplained, a decision that both robs the character of growth and the story of intrigue. We can imagine a version of The Electric State where this character slowly becomes disillusioned by technology and learns the horrible truth over the course of the film, but that would require audiences to actually engage with the narrative: Netflix knows you’re not really watching this, so everything needs to be obvious from the get-go.
Michelle is also robo-sensitive, so when cartoon mascot Cosmo (voiced, but only in catchphrases, by Alan Tudyk) shows up in her bedroom implying that he’s the spirit of her dead brother Chris (Woody Norman), she enthusiastically joins him on a dangerous journey to the robot exclusion zone in search of a doctor with glasses (Ke Huy Quan), who can explain what we already know.
Along the way, they team up with the film’s version of Han Solo, badass trucker and nostalgia fence John D. Keats (Chris Pratt) who gets a prolonged introduction set to five bars of Danzig’s Mother. He even gets his own chance at a Greedo moment, when a human-powered robot voiced by Colman Domingo sticks a gun in his face… only he doesn’t shoot, his robo-buddy Herman (Anthony Mackie) does, and they only shoot a robot, and they only seem to temporarily disable it.
Keats, too, is robbed of characterization within minutes of being introduced. The movie presents him as such a prototypical roguish scoundrel he’s even dressed like Han Solo, but instead of only being out for the money, he immediately joins Michelle’s vague cause out of the goodness of his heart. Even after she blows his cover by leading The Marshall, a robot operated by bounty hunter Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito). Bradbury, the film’s secondary antagonist, has the only character arc in the movie, but we still sniff it out from his introduction.
All these characters are background noise for directors Anthony and Joe Russo, who frequently cut away from the performances of their human cast to focus on the film’s visual effects, which include robots played in motion capture by Terry Notary and Martin Klebba and voiced by Brian Cox and Hank Azaria. Cox’s eloquent performance here as a baseball pitching machine recalls his work on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company in King Lear.
From a technical perspective, The Electric State looks and sounds great, with sumptuous cinematography by Stephen F. Windon (The Gray Man), an old-fashioned adventure soundtrack from Alan Silvestri, and some truly spectacular visual effects. The lighting on the computer-generated characters alone sets the film apart from so many others of this ilk. But in transitioning Simon Stålenhag‘s graphic novel to the screen, the filmmakers have drained it of its unique cyberpunk tone.
The Neurocasters in The Electric State aren’t only a plot device: they’re a metaphor for how to appreciate this movie. As long as your attention is elsewhere—operating some heavy machinery, perhaps—this is the pinnacle of second-screen entertainment: a truly dazzling experience that never engages you long enough to distract from what you’re really doing.
This is great content, and sure to rack up minutes on Netflix as the kind of thing you put on in the background. But abandon all hope, ye who enter The Electric State without some other distraction at hand or activity to partake in. There’s only half a movie here, and trying to devote your full attention to it could prove hazardous to your mental health.
Footnote: There’s a lot of bizarre 1990s nostalgia bait in The Electric State, from the Planters mascot to shopping mall stalwarts like Sears and Panda Express. But the movie gets one piece of nostalgia very wrong: Big Mouth Billy Bass, who here sings Al Green’s original Take Me to the River instead of the cover created for the product, which was more akin to the Talking Heads version of the song and memorably featured in The Sopranos.
