We’re told the budget for the bloviating and boring Netflix movie “The Electric State” was some $320 million, which would place it in the Top 15 of the most expensive films ever made. While budget has never been a true measuring stick for quality (“Anora” just won five Oscars with a production budget of $6 million and a marketing campaign triple that figure), I couldn’t help but think that for $320 million, you could give 10 talented filmmakers a $32 million budget and let them have at it. Heck, it might even be worth it to roll the dice and give 100 promising young directors $3.2 million apiece to see what they could come up with.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who helmed four of the best films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe including “Avengers: Endgame,” along with veteran MCU screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have turned the acclaimed 2018 illustrated novel of the same name by Simon Stålenhag into a visually impressive but corny and irritatingly preachy fable set in an alternate universe 1990s America. It’s as if they spliced together elements of Spielberg’s “E.T.,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” “Ready Player One” and “Minority Report” with the “Terminator” movies, the Tom Hanks-starring “Finch,” “Short Circuit” and “Wall-E,” with some “Star Wars” ingredients as well — hoo boy, that’s a lot! — and the result was much less than the sum of its parts.
“The Electric State” kicks off in a retro-futuristic 1990, where the teenage Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) dotes on her younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman), who has Einstein-level intelligence and loves a Saturday morning cartoon show called “Kid Cosmo.” When that series is abruptly canceled, however, it’s another indication of the anti-robot bigotry sweeping the world, as humans are becoming increasingly distrustful of a robot population that for generations has been tasked with doing manual labor, is becoming sentient and resentful, because that’s what all the robots wind up doing in all these movies.
We flash forward to 1994, after a war has ended, due in large part to the tech billionaire Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci, hamming it up), who developed a virtual reality helmet called the Neurocaster that enabled humans to operate drone versions of themselves who pretty much wiped out the robots. Something like that. In the post-war world, wearing the Neurocaster enables one to enjoy a hedonistic virtual reality life while their mechanical drones go to work.
Something like that.
Michelle’s parents were killed in a car accident during the war and she was led to believe her brother died as well — but when a robotic version of Kid Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk) shows up at Michelle’s house (where she lives under the tyrannical rule of a foster father played by Jason Alexander), programmed to “speak” lines from the cartoon show, Michelle comes to believe this is Christopher’s drone, which means he’s alive out there, somewhere.
Enter Chris Pratt’s Keats, a Han Solo knockoff who sports a mustache out of a 1970s magazine cigarette ad, a hairdo that looks like a modified version of the David St. Hubbins look from “Spinal Tap,” and has a robot sidekick named Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie, who sounds auto-tuned) and operates a kind of illegal eBay, where he sells collectibles such as Cabbage Patch Kids, Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Clapper device, and games of Twister and Battleship, not to mention cans of Spam. Michelle and Keats and their robot companions set off on a dangerous mission to find Christopher, defeat the megalomaniacal Skate and perhaps hit the Reset button on the war and give another chance to the robots who might be more like humans than was previously thought.
“The Electric State” short-circuits from a severe case of Character Overload, with great actors mired in hopelessly silly and underwritten parts. Giancarlo Esposito is the robot-hating Col. Bradbury, aka “The Butcher of Schenectady.” Ke Huy Quan is the scientist Dr. Amherst, who is beginning to have moral qualms about his role in Skate’s plan for world domination. Woody Harrelson voices a mechanical Mr. Peanut, I kid you not, who leads the robot rebellion, while Brian Cox is the robot Popfly, who looks like Mr. Met and spouts baseball clichés to express himself. We’re also inundated with uninspired needle drops, including such obvious selections as “I Fought the Law” and “Breaking the Law” because Keats and Michelle are, you know, breaking the law and fighting the law, and “Ride of the Valkyries” during the obligatory, Marvel-scale climactic battle.
Millie Bobby Brown does what she can with a bland character, while Pratt seems to be going through the motions in playing his usual cynical and wisecracking but goodhearted anti-hero. “The Electric State” wants us to believe it has something important to say about technology taking over the world and the pitfalls of prejudice, but it’s a giant serving of empty calories.