Robotic ‘Electric State’ ain’t nothing but a cy-bore
If there’s one thing the Spielbergian “The Electric State” teaches us, it’s that $320 million doesn’t buy you much anymore. It’s a harsh lesson sending a chill through the corporate offices of Netflix, aka the saps who forked over that sizable fortune for 128 minutes of clanking robots interrupted occasionally by clunky dialogue, much of it spouted by alleged humans.
That works out to roughly $2.5 million per minute. And for what? Mostly seamless special effects, I’d guess. It certainly didn’t go to finance a script capable of doing justice to Simon Stålenhag’s acclaimed 2018 graphic novel about an alternate universe where an uprising of sentient androids in the early 1990s yielded a dystopian landscape littered with shiny, metal corpses.
I could say the hugely successful team ofChristopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (“Captain America,” “Avengers”) are working outside their Marvel Cinematic Universe comfort zone, but that’s no excuse for this spectacular failure. Ditto for their regular MCU collaborators, the directing team of Anthony and Joe Russo. They’ve proven themselves competent in mass-producing FX-packed blockbusters. Here, though, they think much too small. It’s not laziness I detect; it’s more like their hearts weren’t in it.
They simply didn’t do their homework, forcing them to copy off someone else’s work. And that “someone” would be Spielberg. They crib his creations liberally, from “E.T.” to “Ready Player One” to “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” There’s even a trace of “Lincoln” when Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) pops up sporting his signature high top hat pleading for the human aggressors to appeal to their better angels. Or something to that effect.
Him, I like. As for the rest of his droid brethren exiled to a New Mexican desert outpost declared the Exclusion Zone, they’re a total yawn. Well, OK, Jenny Slate’s voicing of a postal worker is kinda adorable, as is Brian Cox’s baseball old-timer, Pop Fly. But that’s it. The rest are Snoresville. That includes the two robots masquerading as actors: Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt. Wait. I’m told they actually are humans. I guess they had me fooled.
It does make you wonder what the Russos were thinking when they opted to engage an actress as charismatically challenged as Brown to carry their action-comedy. But here she is, and we’re stuck with her blah portrayal of Michelle, the orphaned teenager desperately attempting to find her younger brother (Woody Norman) and pry him from the clutches of the evil industrialist, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci). Why is Ethan – another pinch from Spielberg – holding the now comatose genius, Chris, hostage in a “Minority Report”-like pod? Not sure, but it has something to do with Chris’s brain controlling the actions of a vast network of evildoers. Huh?
Abetting Michelle is Pratt’s Keats, a Han Solo-type junk dealer who’s a doppelganger of Pratt’s Peter in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” a franchise the filmmakers also seem to have shamelessly scavenged as evidenced by a soundtrack rich with catchy pop songs. In addition to a bad perm, Keats comes equipped with a nuts-and-bolts sidekick in Herman (voiced by “Captain America” vet Anthony Mackie), a nesting-doll bot with the ability to make himself as tall as a skyscraper and as short as a yardstick. Think of him as Keats’s Wookie. And as if this bloated mashup didn’t have enough characters already, Brown’s Michelle has been outfitted with a sidekick of her own in Cosmo (voice of Alan Tudyk), a former kids TV star partially inhabited by Chris. Again, huh?
For sustenance, the movie banks on the bickering banter between Keats and Michelle as they hit the road, but there’s not nearly enough chemistry to go the distance. And Tucci seems to exist in an entirely different realm, having little or no contact with our heroes. The only time the movie strikes a semblance of a spark is when Michelle and Keats happen upon an abandoned shopping mall the refugee droids have repurposed as a sprawling art colony in the desert.
Two Oscar winners, Holly Hunter and Ke Huy Quan, also embed themselves in this 21st-century “Howard the Duck,” playing a journalist and an unethical medical doctor, respectively. Neither earns much screen time, with the latter’s Dr. Amherst reduced to a robot avatar for much of the duration, courtesy of the wildly popular neurocaster, an Ethan Skate invention that enables the wearer to transport to far-off places to engage in conversations, even wage war. To me, the gadget looked like a massive whistle, blocking my view of the actors’ faces.
For many members of this largely wasted cast, including “Breaking Bad’s” Giancarlo Esposito as the robot-slaying “Butcher of Schenectady,” being hidden beneath a neurocaster might be a good thing, ensuring anonymity while still collecting a large check. But will there be any royalties for Walt Disney, credited in the film with coining the idea of worker droids, or Bill Clinton, whose presidency has been rocked by the fictional robot uprising? I doubt it. Public figures, you know.
For a more satisfying cybernetic experience, try switching over from Netflix to Peacock for the vastly superior “The Wild Robot.” If nothing else, it will deliver more clink for your buck than “The Electric State,” which, antithetical to its title, can’t come close to lighting up the screen.
Movie review
The Electric State
Rated: PG-13 for sci-fi violence/action, language and some thematic material
Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Woody Norman, Jason Alexander, Stanley Tucci, Holly Hunter and the voices of Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Brian Cox, Alan Tudyk and Anthony Mackie
Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo
Writers: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Runtime: 128 minutes
Where: Streaming on Netflix starting March 14
Grade: C-
