Released: 14th March
Seen: 16th March
In the last few decades, filmmaking has gotten more expensive. It was not that long ago that the idea of spending even $50 million on a single film sounded insane, now you’re lucky to find a film that costs under $100 million that isn’t an indie film. According to Wikipedia, there are 89 films that (adjusted for inflation) cost over $200 million and only six of those films are pre-2000. This is a crisis state that’s setting up films to fail and put hardworking filmmakers out of jobs and it doesn’t help when a film that costs $320 million to produce is as meaningless and forgettable and undoubtedly financially devastating as The Electric State.
The Electric State is set in an alternate universe where robots had an uprising back in the 90s to claim their freedom back from the humans that enslaved them, resulting in a world where there’s always tension between humans and bots. One human, Michelle Greene (Millie Bobby Brown), is trying to cope with the loss of her family in a horrific car accident. Things take a turn when a mysterious robot shaped like a classic cartoon mascot turns up at her foster home, seemingly possessed by the soul of her dead brother. This sets Michelle on a quest that will have her team up with a bunch of other robots and a former solder, John Keats (Chris Pratt), who will help her try to find her brother and maybe overthrow a techno-fascist billionaire who thinks using a small child to power an army of robots is a good thing… it will somehow be very dull, but they’ll do it.
To get the nice stuff out of the way, the visuals of The Electric State are fantastic as you would want them to be for a film that cost the GDP of Palau to make. You expect this film to look incredible and on a technical level, it does. The robots are all well-designed, the big action scenes are done in a way that makes sense from the guys who made Endgame, and there’s a lot of good work on display by the people who designed the sets and the CGI effects that feel well blended into the surrounding movie… of course, The Electric State suffers from the recent trend of films that seem scared of anything to make the colours pop more (seriously, there was a time where they literally made movies just to show off bright colours and now the industry seems scared to actually embrace colour) but it’s hard to deny that they put the money on screen.
It’s also hard to deny that The Electric State has some good ideas, the idea of robots being a stand-in for a minority that it’s deemed socially acceptable to vilify and attack is fascinating, and the impact of war is a great topic to touch on. Hell, the idea of a billionaire tech bro using his obscene power over the government to attack a minority group who has done nothing to harm him in any way is the kind of topic that films should be using right now but the problem is that while the film has these good ideas it does nothing with them! It might look in their general direction but it’s so focused on putting the big expensive CGI robots on the screen that it forgets to give us a meaningful story to accompany those robots.
That’s where a lot of the big problems with The Electric State can be found, the script is bland, overstuffed full of outdated pop culture references instead of just being a good story. Some moments feel like they were made for the trailer without being of any use to the story, like the scene when Chris Pratt’s character proclaims he will not die while listening to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. It’s a moment that comes out of nowhere with no purpose to the character or narrative and cost them a bunch of money they didn’t need to spend to license 15 seconds of Good Vibrations. It’s like the film is trying to copy the wacky soundtrack ideas of Guardians of the Galaxy but without the deft hand that James Gunn had to weave those song choices into the story, tone and structure of the film.
If The Electric State took the time to think about the heavy topics it was playing with it might be able to do something interesting with them, at best it points to them while screaming “LOOK! WAR IS BAD!” without actually doing anything. No one’s going to touch on how it’s fucked up that the robots put their actual lives on the line while the humans can sit in their comfy chairs hundreds of miles away? No one’s going to look at the thing that has been set up and do anything interesting? No, no we’re just going to make a joke about how someone isn’t showing their 8 inches and move on. Cool… cool, cool, cool.
With all this, The Electric State would be a bland film that doesn’t use the ideas presented in a memorable way but at least you could maybe say there was some passion here… except it never feels like it. Everyone, except for the people responsible for the technical aspects like the CGI or set design, is sleepwalking through this. Why should they care? They had a blank check, it’s not like the film was going anywhere other than the depths of the Netflix library so why should they treat it as anything other than content to be put in the background?
It is an indictment of the film that it works better if you’re not paying attention to it. If you sit and try to engage with the material, you’re going to end up being confused by just about everything because none of it is well explained or well edited (there were times I had to rewind because I thought I had drifted off but no, the film forgot to show basic shit). If you play it in the background while you’re doing anything else you’ll hear some half-decent tracks on the soundtrack and maybe see some fun imagery, they paid for a lot of bells and whistles but didn’t spend a cent on anything worth your attention.
Here’s a fun fact for you, the budget for this movie is equal to 8 of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. For the price it cost to make The Electric State you could make Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, The Nickel Boys, The Substance, The Brutalist, Emilia Perez (though why would you?) and Wicked! It’s common knowledge that cinema is doing it tough since the pandemic, I wonder if that has anything to do with studios spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on a film that will, at best, be a space filler on a digital shelf. At least in the 80s when they needed films just to fill space on video shelves they made cheap shlock with a bunch of ass, tits and gore so you could at least get a stupid laugh out of the trash you were watching and make a decent profit. There is no valid reason on either a creative or financial level to do things the way The Electric State did them.
Even with everything that I just said, I don’t hate The Electric State… hate requires some kind of passion and passion requires the ability to give a fuck. There are no fucks to give here. The Electric State is the standard dull misfire you only see when films can throw money at ideas until they’re considered passable. It does nothing with the material it has and does nothing for the audience who stumble upon it while scrolling around the badly organised digital shelves of Netflix. This bland boring robot uprising can bite my shiny metal ass!
Movie Meister Reviews 