Avengers: Endgame directors the Russo brothers are back with Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt for a Netflix sci-fi movie with lots of missed potential.
Director brothers Joe and Anthony Russo love to dream big, on screen and off. After delivering the grandest season finale of all time, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the duo set off in a million different directions, including franchise-building at Netflix, partnering with Epic on Fortnite, and pontificating on the future of AI in movies. They do seem to love cinema (especially Heat), but in interviews, the filmmakers often sound more like engineers than storytellers — fascinated by parts and eager to experiment with tools that will let them go as big as possible.
So maybe it’s no surprise that the Russos would jump at the chance to adapt Simon Stålenhag’s retrofuture robot-forward dystopian sci-fi tale The Electric State, or that, with a reported $300 million-plus budget to throw around, their new Netflix movie is all nuts and bolts and no soul. Despite the Russos’ clear appreciation for the Swedish artist behind Tales from the Loop (and its various incarnations as a TTRPG, board game, and TV show), and his haunting art in The Electric State, their Netflix adaptation opens by pouring out metric tons of exposition like concrete. Then it nudges its characters across the resulting smooth-brained surface like a couple of giraffes in roller skates. The finished product is a mess, and a sign that the Russos’ taste for “going big” might be unfit for the medium of film.
Written by the Russos’ MCU cohorts Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, The Electric State stars Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a rebellious teenager living in an alternate 1990s that’s mellowing out after a robot uprising. As we learn in a dizzying data dump, humans were nearly outnumbered by worker bots until Muskian douchenozzle Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) invented the “Neurocaster,” a helmet interface that allowed fleshbags to inhabit the bodies of cyborgs and go toe to toe against the robotic rebels.
Michelle finds society’s postwar dependency on Neurocasters like, totally wack, but her technological worldviews are upended when she meets Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), a cartoonish bot possibly possessed by her believed-to-be-dead genius brother, but suffering from Bumblebee syndrome, in that it can only speak through canned catchphrases.
