The Russo’s rusted sci-fi fails to electrify.
A girl, a robot, and a smuggler walk through the ruins of post-apocalyptic America. No punchline follows – just The Electric State, a melancholic road movie draped in digital decay and teen rebellion. Adapted from Simon Stålenhag’s art book and filtered through the Russo brothers’ post-Endgame creative hangover, the film swings for pathos, connection, and tech-noir allegory – only to find itself gently stalling somewhere on the hard shoulder of emotional resonance.
Netflix’s current actress-in-residence Millie Bobby Brown anchors the story as Michelle, a runaway searching for her lost brother in a crumbling world where a crushing of a robot uprising opened up an opportunity for Stanley Tucci’s tech bro Ethan Skate’s Neurocaster technology to hijack society as his VR headsets became the new opiate of the masses. She’s joined by Cosmo, a potbellied robot with the personality of a Bumblebee-esque restricted vocabulary and the design language of a Fisher-Price air fryer who has some kind of connection to her brother. She links up with Keats, a low-rent smuggler played by Chris Pratt, who dials down his usual Prattisms into something quieter and more haunted, along with his wisecracking robot sidekick, Herman. Together they form an odd surrogate family unit limping through the ruins of a world quite unlike our own. If that sounds like Spielbergian sentiment with a cyberpunk aftertaste, you’re not wrong – but the brew never quite steeps long enough to develop any real flavour.
The Russos, working from a script by Markus and McFeely (yes, those ones), borrow heavily from more emotionally articulate road trips: The Road, E.T., A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Her – and maybe a dash of WALL-E, if WALL-E had been programmed to sigh and stare into the middle distance. But for all the visual spectacle and wistful framing, there’s a persistent flatness to the journey. The emotional beats arrive on schedule but feel pre-cushioned, like narrative airbags – soft, safe, and completely resistant to impact. Brown brings sincerity and resolve, and Pratt finds a surprisingly grounded register, but they’re often left orbiting stakes that look profound from a distance and dissolve on contact.
To its credit, the film’s world-building is meticulous, immersive, and utterly wasted on the story it’s trapped inside. Drones drift through rusted skylines. Billboards glitch across dead cities. Mechanical leviathans loom like the bones of a long-dead god of commerce. It’s an art book come to life – sometimes too literally. What works as a haunting still image doesn’t always translate into compelling narrative, and here, the visual design does the heavy lifting while the plot takes an extended smoke break.
The wider supporting cast deliver some of the better performances – especially Woody Harrelson’s Mr Peanut and Anthony Mackie’s Herman but other star names drift in and out with all the narrative weight of seasoning. Giancarlo Esposito, at least, has the decency to look as bored by him playing yet another sinister, stoically ruthless antagonist as I am seeing him play to typecast yet again. It’s almost a nice metatextual nod that the majority of his scenes are “phoned in” via a VR avatar, but I doubt that’s deliberate. The real heart of the story, though, is the bond between Michelle and Skip, even if it only ever lands somewhere between “kind of sweet” and “emotional placeholder”. The beats are there. You’ve seen them before. You’ll see them again. They’re perfectly adequate, but utterly ephemeral.
There is, undeniably, a noble sadness at the heart of The Electric State – a lament for a world swallowed by its own inventions and a faint hope that connection might still flicker under all the digital dust. But it’s hard to connect when the film keeps buffering its own emotions, as if someone forgot to switch the entire production out of airplane mode. Every beautiful frame is begging for a soul the story never quite supplies.
You leave The Electric State feeling the way the characters look: vaguely disillusioned, mildly exhausted, and not entirely sure what just happened except that the Russo Brothers continue to gift film students with ongoing examples of why Producers are every bit as important to a film’s success as Directors are.
