The Electric State

In 2018, Simon Stålenhag released The Electric State, a “narrative art” sci-fi book which depicted, with darkly understated beauty, a retro-futurist sci-fi vision of America, a strange land traversed by a teenage girl and a cute, yellow-headed robot pal. Unlike another Stålenhag adaptation, Tales From The Loop, made into a similarly understated TV series in 2020, this feature-length take on The Electric State borrows the aesthetics but not the tone of its original text, evolving from a haunting dystopia to quippy action adventure.

Quippy action adventures, of course, are the modus operandi of the Russo brothers, the filmmaking siblings currently in their inter-Marvel era (they return to assembling Avengers imminently). They direct this with the confidence born of the second-biggest film of all time (Avengers: Endgame, to be clear, not You, Me And Dupree), even if the script from their regular scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely needed a bit of a polish.

A breathless opening montage brings us up to speed. Robots, we are told, were originally developed for Disney theme parks before becoming part of the global workforce. In the ’90s, the now-sentient machines began demanding “robot rights”, and a deadly war emerged — like if Skynet developed a social conscience. As part of the peace agreement, all bots now live in a giant exclusion zone in the desert.

The Russos make the most of their enormous budget.

Into this alternate ’90s arrives Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), the aforementioned teenage girl, and her droid pal, who may offer answers about her long-lost brother. Soon enough, they team up with war-veteran-turned-smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt) and take on charismatic tech billionaire Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) and bot-bounty-hunter Colonel Marshall Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito).

The Russos make the most of their enormous budget, with a boatload of impressive visual effects, faithful recreations of Stålenhag’s epic vistas, and some nicely analogue art direction. Its eccentricity won’t be for all (the actual line of dialogue “Mr Peanut signed a treaty of surrender with President Clinton today” is a stand-out), and not every swing for the fences lands. But at least swings are being made.

Less successful, perhaps, are the human characters: both Brown and Pratt enjoy better chemistry with the CG characters than they do with each other, and the dialogue is not as witty as it thinks it is (though the script does at least manage a couple of solid one-liners). With occasionally repetitive action, the film never quite strikes the aspirational Spielbergian tone it’s reaching for, but as blockbusters go, at least it’s a singular experience with ambition in spades.