The Electric State

In a retro-futuristic past, an orphaned teenager must travel across the American West with an eccentric drifter and a pair of robots in the search for her younger brother, someone she has long believed to be dead.

The Electric State is based on a 2018 dystopian science fiction “illustrated novel” by Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag.

Set in an alternate, technologically ravaged world of the 1990s, it follows a teenage girl and her robot on a journey across a nearly collapsed America to its West Coast in search of her long-lost brother.

The story is told through a series of paintings of various rundown American locations that are usually dominated by the broken-down hulks of old robots, and a few quick paragraphs printed over the artwork. The main story follows Michelle, a teenager traveling with Skip, her robot companion, as they look for her long-lost brother, all while a secondary story follows a federal agent who is following them, because they are also trying to track down her brother.

I loved the book.

It really scratched my dystopian itch.

But when I heard they were adapting it, I was wary. I get it, these paintings are cool and compelling. Who wouldn’t be drawn to them? Who wouldn’t be inspired by them? But if we’re being honest here, The Electric State was an art book, and the story was just a paper-thin pretense linking the pictures together. The whole thing was obviously more about the vibes, than it was any cohesive narrative.

I was especially wary once I heard that the film was being done by the Russo Brothers. Yes, I absolutely truly love their Marvel work, but it’s not because of them. They have an anonymous work-horse action film style that fits perfectly with the MCU, but outside of that realm? Well, they’ve been… less than impressive. So, given their track record, as well as the bare bones story of the source material, how exactly were they planning to adapt The Electric State into a feature film?

Turns out, the answer was by sticking to the usual failure-formula that was pioneered by such forgettable half-baked pieces of candy-coated plastic garbage like Tomorrowland, or Kingsman, or RIPD, or I Robot, or Ready Player One, or any of those forgotten turds mimicking the tone and style of Men in Black that have been foisted upon us over the years.

So… in an alternate 1950s, Walt Disney leaned hard into animatronics, leading to robots becoming a part of everyday life. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the sentient robots were tired of a life of forced servitude and casual disregard by the humans, and a war between humans and robots breaks out.

Despite heavy initial losses where it appeared that the robots might win, the creation of human-piloted-by-way-of-the-internet metal drone warriors, by a bald white guy Tech Billionaire in a black turtleneck, turns the tide and humanity wins the day. This leads to a treaty between humanity and the robots that sees the still-operating sentient robots being moved to a walled-off robot reservation, where it is legal for them to exist, called the “Exclusion Zone,” which is basically the entirety of the American Southwest. It also leads to the creation of an affordable version of the high-speed VR and Bot-driving internet helmet for home use, and as a result, most of the world is now plugged into it nearly 24/7.

During all this, a devastating car accident claims the lives of the parents, as well as the genius younger brother, Christopher, of a young woman named Michelle.

A few years later, Michelle is an orphan bouncing around the system, which has turned her into an edgy and truculent Hot Topic teen who wears Doc Martins and long-sleeved thermal undershirts under her t-shirts (it’s the 90s, after all). She is mad at the world, understandably, and also hates the internet, for reasons that are less clear, but convenient to the story.

But then, a robot that looks like her brother’s favorite cartoon character shows up at her shitty foster parent’s house, and Michelle learns that Christopher might still be alive, and that his mind is contained within the robot, while his body is kept in a facility somewhere. Cutting off her ankle monitor, she and the robot set out across a dystopian America to find her brother. The robot tells her that the answers they seek lie within the Exclusion Zone.

Needing to find a way into the Exclusion Zone, Michelle meets a man named Keats, who doesn’t use a drone, and Herm, his illegal sentient robot buddy. The pair bicker like an old married couple, and have a business where they illegally enter and loot the Exclusion Zone and then sell the abandoned luxury items they find there. Chased by an agent of the Robot De-Activation Force into the Exclusion Zone, they find a community of old robots—who aren’t big fans of humans—living quietly in an old mall, led by the Robot Resistance leader, Mr. Peanut.

Together, the robots and humans learn a little bit about themselves… and each other. Their journey eventually leads them to discover that the billionaire guy is the real bad guy. GASP! Also, the billionaire kidnapped Christopher after the car accident, because without the sheer processing power of Christopher’s genius brain, their entire VR/Drone internet can’t run.

After that, it’s time for some heavy metal fisticuffs.

Robots and humans band together, setting their differences aside, and attack the evil billionaire’s headquarters. There’s punches and quips galore, truly, no quarter is given to the audience. During the big brouhaha, Michelle sneaks in and finds her comatose brother. Trying to figure out how to free him, she puts aside her disgust for the internet, dons a VR helmet and connects to his consciousness, only for him to explain that he can not exist without the system anymore, but also, the system can not continue to exist either.

There’s some crying.

The pathos is intercut with slo-mo scenes of the battle outside slowly turning against our plucky band of disparate heroes. But finally, at the very last moment, when all hope seems lost, respecting his wishes, Michelle unplugs Christopher, resulting in his death.

Christopher dying shut downs everything, basically bricking all the technology in the world, most likely killing untold millions, between hospital patients and planes in the sky alone, but the film doesn’t really focus on that.

Instead, the film ends with a frankly unbelievable fiction where the billionaire is punished and humanity’s better nature asserts itself, vowing to sacrifice their own comfort in order to rebuild from the ashes of the old world, now free of the horrors of the robot war and corporate greed.

As I said at the start of this thing, I was wary about this film, both for dubious ability for a good adaptation of the source material to even happen, as well as the Russo Brothers involvement, but also, if I’m being honest here, I’ve really grown to dislike lovable action doofus Chris Pratt over the years. As the internet says: He is easily The Worst Chris. Ever since he abandoned Anna Faris and revealed himself to be yet another typical white American small town douchbag steeped in the usual knee-jerk Christian patriarchy bullshit, it’s hard to like any character he plays on screen, which is really too bad, because as I’m sure is no surprise to anyone, I love the Guardians of the Galaxy series.

And as for Millie Bobby Brown, I don’t want to be mean to her, as it seems like it’s not her fault, and is more the fault of her parents for making her be a child star, but… she’s just not very likable, right? Maybe it’s just me.

So yeah, I’ll admit it, this film had like… two and half strikes against it for me before it even got up to bat. On top of that—and I don’t know if this is necessarily a “bad” thing, but still—god damn, is this mediocre film just packed to the gills with celebrities. Star-fucking-studded. Basically, every single character in this film, big or small, is played by someone you will immediately recognize. It’s like a Muppet movie, but without any of the good muppet-centric parts or hilarious running gags. It feels like the film should pause for the audience to applaud every time a new star comes Kramer-sliding in through the film’s apartment door. It’s weird, and it makes everything else in this clearly fictional story somehow seem all the more false. And yeah, I know it’s a big soulless Hollywood studio attempt at a tentpole blockbuster film, but god damn, it’s just relentless.

Plus, it felt really strange watching the film’s History of the Robot War newsreel and to see that it is clearly using AI, a strange choice in post-Strike Hollywood. I feel like that’s a very unintentional bit of commentary by the film on itself, as well as the priority of the studios, that just makes me want to heave a big sigh.

We truly stand on the precipice of a dark and terrible world, my friends…

But that aside, I love the retro-futuristic design. Love it. I‘m a sucker for the railings and catwalks and whatnot, the cockpits within the big robots, especially with Herm’s multiple bodiies. I also love the dystopian look to everything. I love all that kind of shit, that’s what I loved about the book, and that source material is all over this film. And while, sure, it doesn’t look as great as it does in the book, it still looks pretty great.

The film is not without its charm too, or a few moments of humor, not to mention a bunch of cool imagery (mostly from the book), as well as some good action, and the robots, while ugly, rusted, and cobbled together, look much much better than anything in any of Michael Bay’s Transformer films.

So there’s that, at least.

I did really appreciate the way the film uses the enemies of freedom as the bad guys here, and makes no attempt to hide this… billionaires, the border wall, Kid Rock, not to mention the opportunistic scumbag that is Michelle’s white foster parent, a man who happily spends all his time benefiting from the suffering and loss of others, just to make his own life more comfortable, a clear stand-in for an entire demographic in America.

I also very much appreciated The Electric State’s admittedly very thin metaphor for both racism and anti-trans hatred. Between the history of robot oppression, as well as the robots’ desire to be something other than the task they were designated, as well as their simple desire to be seem as a person, the robots are clearly meant to be a stand-in for POC and GLBTQIA+ and disabled communities, which means, naturally, that the humans, as they wield all of the systemic power, are a stand-in for white America.

This makes the moment where the robot Mr. Peanut says (very appropriately) to the worst Chris, “I don’t guess you’d know what it’s like to have your very right to exist depend on a piece of paper,” to be about as straightforward and skewering a piece of social commentary as you can get from a Studio blockbuster like this.

It’s true, the film doesn’t make that much of this idea (and when it tries, it’s very heavy-handed), but it’s still an impressively vicious line aimed straight at the evil that is currently festering within the rotten hearts of the overwhelming majority of cis-gendered, straight White Christian America. As is the line that comes soon after, when the big peanut also says, “All humans are the same. Selfish and lazy. Once you figure that out, little girl, you’ll live a much simpler life.”

That’s brutal. I love that.

Will most of the targets of these specific lines completely miss the message, most likely while scrolling their phones? Sure, but it’s still there, and that’s laudable, at least a little bit.

But like I said, there isn’t much blood drawn by this tiny glimpse of sharpened steel, and a big part of that is due to the fact that the film seems otherwise pretty confused about its message. It bounces between at odds ideas like, when it pushes the idea that giving everything you possibly can, your mind and body, to the state—the electric state, as it were—even if it’s against your will, even if it’s without your consent, even if it ultimately ends up hurting a whole bunch of people, can still be for the Greater Good actually, as long as it somehow benefits the world (read: you), kind of like voting to help Trump, just ask that quisling bag of wrinkled old fuck Chuck Schumer. But then, the film will turn around and feature a meaningless moment for no other reason then to declare some hashtag bullshit like: “No Kings here. Our people are free.” Pause for applause. And then, when the evil Brownshirt dog finally does their long telegraphed Heel-Face Turn, they just symbolically unplug from their drone and remove their VR/Drone helmet, rather than get into the fight and get their hands dirty, rather than take an actual stand. Back and forth. Back and forth. It’s a constant ping-ponging lack of commitment. Cinematic Centrism.

It’s the cowardice of cross-demographic appeal.

So yeah, The Electric State is aggressively mediocre. It’s bland. It’s long. It’s everything you’d expect it to be from the trailer. It’s ultimately just the plot of Wall-E, but uglier and much more belabored. And much like its cobbled-together robots, the script is clearly cobbled together out of so many recognizable references and obvious needle-drops.

But also, it’s not terrible.

It’s just… fine.

Anyone who tells you that this film is the worst movie ever is being deliberately and performatively hyperbolic because they’re boring pick-me hipster assholes, or they just plain old do not watch that many movies. It’s fine. Its biggest crime is that it’s basic and silly, and is too baldy manipulative in how it tries way too hard to squeeze tragedy from its premise that these broken old robots are people too.

So sad, you guys. F‘reals.

But overall… The Electric State is fine. That’s it. It’s fine and forgettable. There’s certainly no rush to see this, but if you do, it’s better to save it for a dozing Sunday on the couch.