Quite a while ago, I sat down for a leisurely lunch with a writer-performer of considerable prominence, who, within the next couple of months, would leave New York to develop a highly controversial, genre-bending cable series. At some point during the meal, he candidly mentioned, “One thing I like about your reviews is that you seem not to ever go into a picture with a ‘what it’s going to be like’ or ‘how good or bad it will be’ approach to it. You seem to always have an openness to what you are looking at.” I share this anecdote not to show off how cool my friends are, but to explain why I am being a little too gentle on “The Electric State,” the new movie by Joe and Anthony Russo that is currently being savaged by other film critics in the country and maybe the world.
It won’t take long to critique a film such as this one. Based on Stalenhag’s illustrated novel of the same name (which is mistakenly referred to as a graphic novel, while a graphic novel has speech bubbles and text integrated into the artwork, Stalenhag purposely separates his prose with large illustrations), this film is at times self-indulgent and overly sweet. In the case of the alternate history of the 1990s, which comes complete with a war starring robots, the film is clever beyond its more distasteful edges.
Which is that bots are now heavily outlawed, which creates an issue for Millie Bobby Brown’s Michelle, who learns that her much-loved and long-lost brother, Chris, has his consciousness stored in a rusty robot fashioned after a popular 90s cartoon character, Cosmo. It’s a remote location called ‘The Exclusion Zone’ and based on a bunch of clues, Michelle seems to think that is where the answer lies. Trying to escape her abusive father, played by Jason Alexander, who is, like most of the world these days, is glued to a VR headset that turns users into vegetative states similar to “Infinite Jest” gives her no choice but to, along with Cosmo, go on a journey to find her brother and enlist the help from a reluctant scavenger outlaw, played by Chris Pratt, who becomes her guide.
Skate’s Private Army is run by human-powered legal ‘drones’ disguised as robots, but I bet you will not believe what is powering the headsets. The protagonist of the story is Ethan Skate, played by Stanley Tucci, who is an evil tycoon, which, in reality, is the only type of businessman existing today. The case presented in the piece is incredibly hard to believe, so just bear with me. And ‘go along with it’ is the only option available to you due to the Russo’s storytelling style which borders on controlling.
As Lou Reed said in Wim Wenders’ “Faraway So Close!”, what’s good? Well, it is less successful than this movie by… well, a lot. For instance, Brown has a ton of integrity and charisma in her portrayal of Michelle. In my opinion, Pratt’s portrayal could have easily been created using “Guardians of the Galaxy” outtakes, and to be honest, I am not sure it wasn’t. You might enjoy trying to identify the all-star voices of the robots like Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Cox. In the end, this is one of those movies that seems not too bad for the first ninety minutes. But after that, it becomes a little too much, even if you like this sort of thing.
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