In the U.S. of A., a cool $300M can not only buy you the presidency, but give you untold access to every federal agency, government servers, and private records.
Another $300M (plus) can buy you the rights to The Electric State, Simon Stålenhag’s popular, 2018 illustrated novel; mid-level, name-brand stars (Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci); not one, but two Oscar winners (Holly Hunter, Ke Huy Quan); and a dual Tony and Emmy award winner (Jason Alexander). It can also buy you top-shelf visual effects, production/art design, and behind-the-camera talent.
Apparently, though, what $300M can’t buy you includes a serviceable screenplay, multi-dimensional characters, or even barely functional, expositional dialogue.
Set in an alternate timeline where service robots gained sentience, rebelled, and lost a devastating war, leaving huge swaths of 1990s America littered with the debris and detritus of human vs. robot conflict, The Electric State centers on Michelle (Brown), a rebel without a clue, pause, or access to halfway decent hair-coloring products. She favors the familiar grunge-wear of the period, lives with a deadbeat foster dad, Ted (Alexander), and otherwise reacts to the disappointing world around her with a curled lip and a surly attitude.
Michelle has a tragic backstory, of course. It’s “tragic” with a capital “T,” involving the loss of her parents in an offscreen accident, the presumed demise of her younger, genius-level brother, Christopher (Woody Norman), and becoming the unfortunate ward of a failed state. At school, she refuses to use a so-called Neurocaster, a clunky virtual reality helmet that allows the wearer to multitask, dreaming or hallucinating their best lives inside a virtual reality and using ambulatory, bipedal drones to complete ordinary household tasks and non-ordinary work-related ones.
As Michelle seethes at the unfairness of her life, she’s thrust head-first into a Spielberg-inspired, Amblin-influenced 'girl and her robot pal' story. A diminutive robot modeled after a kids’s animated series, Kid Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk), literally stumbles into her backyard, delivering the obligatory “call to adventure:” Christopher’s still alive somehow, somewhere out there, likely in the robots-only reservation.
The Kid Cosmo robot appears to contain digital bits and bobs of her brother’s personality, spurring an initially reluctant Michelle to trust said robot and follow him wherever the undercooked screenplay, credited to Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the Russo Brothers’s favorite, go-to scripters for both the Captain America and The Avengers series, takes them.
Thanks to a clumsily contrived clue, Michelle and Kid Cosmo find themselves in the underground lair of Keats (Chris Pratt), a smuggler of rare and unusual pop culture-related items, and his sidekick robot, Herm (Anthony Mackie). Part Han Solo, Keats initially refuses to help Michelle and Kid Cosmo, choosing selfishness and self-preservation over compassion and altruism. As with most template-driven plot developments in The Electric State, Keats’s transformation from friendly foe to enthusiastic ally occurs with next to no effort.
The remainder of the frantic, surface-deep story involves a BEB (Big Evil Billionaire), Ethan Skate (Tucci), the inventor of the Neurocaster and the man behind the defeat of the robots and their segregation (insert theme alert here) to a reservation in the middle of the New Mexico/Southwest desert. On the flip side, Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson), robotic iteration of onetime legume pitchman, brand/logo, and all-around representation of distilled Boomer nostalgia, leads what’s left of the robot rebellion inside the government-sanctioned reservation.
Unsurprisingly, “life” within the reservation has descended into lawlessness, violence, and auto-cannibalism. Other robots have gone positively feral, devolving into so-called Scavs (unimaginatively short for Scavengers).
Mr. Peanut also unknowingly holds the clue to Christopher’s whereabouts: the physician, Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan, sadly underused in a throwaway role), who treated Michelle’s brother years back. Only Scavs and Skate’s high-tech, military-style drones stand in the way of Michelle and Christopher’s reunion. (Insert multiple chase/battle scenes, culminating, as expected, in the Battle to End All Battles to Save the World as Michelle and her newfound human and robotic friends know it, the easily predictable revelation about Skate and the Neurocaster, and an injection of unearned optimism into an otherwise believable dystopia.)
Departing so heavily from Stålenhag’s illustrated book that the result barely resembles the source material (the occasional wide-shot of devastated landscapes filled with broken, deactivated robots of all shapes and sizes excepted), The Electric State barely qualifies as multi-screen, background fodder, let alone one worthy of a reported $300M budget typical of Hollywood blockbuster fare. The story jumps haphazardly from one plot point to another, character motivation driven by plot exigencies and not interior logic, and the dialogue between the characters rarely sounds like it was written by carbon-based lifeforms (i.e., humans) and not an AI-powered algorithm.
The Electric State is now streaming worldwide on Netflix.
