Joe and Anthony Russo know how to mimic. That’s what made them such effective directors on “Community,” and it added a breezy comedy to not only their TV work but their efforts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where they attempted to marry certain genre like thriller or war epic into a superhero landscape. However, after becoming box office champs thanks to the last two “Avengers” movies, the Russos now seem adrift as they attempt to carve out a style through homage. The results always play as stale imitation with “Cherry” feeling like a knockoff Scorsese riff, “The Gray Man” grasping for James Bond-like relevancy (how’s that sequel and spinoff coming?), and now trying to channel Steven Spielberg with “The Electric State.”
While filmmakers looking to capture an Amblin-like feel is nothing new, the strangest thing about “The Electric State” is how it feels like the Russos’ favorite Spielberg movie is “Ready Player One.”
The film is set in an alternate 1994 after a war arose from a robot uprising. However, these weren’t scary “Terminator” robots, but a collection of mascot bots that descended from the automatronics of Disneyland. These robots were used and mistreated as a labor force, and when they demanded rights, they went to war with the humans, and the humans won. A peace treaty sequestered the robots in an exclusionary zone in the southwest where they’re not allowed to leave, and humans aren’t allowed to enter.
Humans won thanks to headsets that look like giant whistles. Invented by tech guru Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), the headsets first allowed soldiers to fight by controlling their own robots, and post-victory, these headsets went to a consumer market that could send their robots out to be in the real world while they stayed at home and goofed off. Michelle Green (Millie Bobby Brown) has been bouncing around foster homes in this new post-war environment when she encounters a rogue robot, Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), who carries the mind of her genius younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman). Michelle previously thought Christopher died in a car accident, so with the hope that he’s still alive she and the robot set off for the exclusionary zone to find Chris’ physical body. Along the way, they manage to enlist the reluctant help of smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot body Herman (Anthony Mackie).
The film leans heavily on Amblin vibes in the first act, and that approach makes sense given the early-90s setting. Production design is the movie’s strongest asset and there’s a bit of ’90s nostalgia, especially as far as the needle-drops are concerned. You have to skip past a few leaps when it comes to the worldbuilding (the technology is advanced enough for humans to link up with robots and see vast digital worlds, and yet people are still operating on corded phones and AOL Internet), but I appreciated that rather than a grim dystopia, “The Electric State” offers an alternate reality that feels different than what typically see in this kind of movie.
Unfortunately, while the Russos are able to visually replicate the era and add a bit of Amblin flavoring, they miss the emotional connections that made Spielberg’s movies indelible. “E.T.” isn’t magical because they made a lifelike puppet or a cool spaceship. It’s magical because the bond Elliott forms with E.T. shows a young boy finding a friend in the aftermath of his parents’ divorce and his father’s resulting absence. In “The Electric State,” relationships only exist to get characters from one plot point to the next. The sibling bond between Michelle and Christopher has little texture beyond the generic older sister being encouraging and protective of her little brother. The only thing that defines Christopher is his intellect, and since that can’t come across with Cosmo, who only speaks in pre-set phrases like a less articulate version of the Transformer Bumblebee, he’s largely a MacGuffin.
Michelle and Christopher are supposed to be the emotional center of the movie, and yet their connection is so vacant I was left wondering if the filmmakers had ever encountered siblings before (a surprising disappointment when you consider how Joe and Anthony know each other).
For all of its sci-fi trappings and high price tag, “The Electric State” is largely uninterested in human connections. Keats basically seems like another Star-Lord but without any of the depth or nuance of Pratt’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” hero, and none of the relationships in the film ever feel challenged or changed. Keats softens slightly as he warms to a friendship with Michelle, but that doesn’t feel profound for either as they were already leaning on a prior bond, Michelle with Christopher and Keats with Herman.
Everything in “The Electric State” feels done for convenience, so there’s no tension in the storytelling or the emotional stakes. It glides on a smooth track from point to point without ever considering how narrative friction would deepen the characters and the story. Instead, we get a film so blithely indifferent to stakes that it accidentally stumbles into surprising commentary.
Watching “The Electric State,” I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the major players here were aware of how the film’s subtext runs contrary to the goals they’ve stated outside the movie. The 1994 of “The Electric State” is presented as a bad place to be because everyone is plugged into tiny little screens and missing the importance of in-person human connection. This movie is brought to you by Netflix, a company that would like you to watch this movie in your house, away from strangers in a communal setting. The film’s bad guy wants to use Christopher to help create immersive VR worlds where every problem can be smoothed out by your desires. The Russos are on record singing the praises of AI and how it will allow viewers to render a movie based on what the audience wants to see rather than what a storyteller wants to share. In the hands of better authors, all of this could be satire on our modern world, but both Netflix and the Russos seem to lack the self-awareness of what “The Electric State” implies.
Rather than make a movie with anything to say or even a unique identity beyond its production design, the Russos have not only aped Spielberg, but aped one of the legend’s lesser movies. “The Electric State” is a movie about the importance of going outside to play made by people who would love nothing more than if you stayed inside and fell down a tech rabbit hole. That’s because the filmmakers don’t identify with the robots as a downtrodden labor force, but bits of quip-dispersing CG (there are shades here of last year’s atrocious “IF”). At one point, we meet a robot bounty hunter (Giancarlo Esposito) who justifies his work by saying robots have no hearts. The film wants to show this as wrong, but you don’t really capture what “heart” means when you’re listening to a monologue by a computer-generated, animatronic Mr. Peanut voiced by Woody Harrelson.
I’m not surprised that Netflix and the Russos want to tell a story about how humans and machines can live together in peace, but I struggled to find much humanity in a picture so gleefully soulless.
“The Electric State” premieres on Netflix on March 14.