Review: The Electric State
2025, Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
Simon Stalenhag’s book The Electric State is a volume of surreal landscape paintings linked by a sparse, haunting narrative about how human beings are losing their souls to mass media. It’s one of the best works of science fiction ever published: beautiful, horrific, and profoundly strange. And it is worth checking out.
No one expected Netflix to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make a cerebral movie. No one was asking for that, either. Steven Spielberg, in his heyday, could have filmed an adaptation of this book that was both faithful and accessible.
But Netflix hired the Russo Brothers (of Captain America and Avengers fame) to drain the book of all originality and magic. And it cost a reported 320 million dollars.
The film is set in an alternate version of the 1990’s where a robot uprising has been put down and people are zoning out through VR technology. Millie Bobby Brown plays a teenage girl named Michelle, who becomes convinced that a robot contains the consciousness of her brother, who she beleived was dead. As she quests with the robot, she links up with an idiotic army veteran played by Chris Pratt.
As the plot of The Electric State unfolds, it grows more and more nonsensical and derivative. I did admire the whimsical, retro designs of the various robots. But after a while, even the robots started to depress me. They belonged in a different movie, one that lived up to the fever-dream visual artistry lifted from the book.
If Netflix did not want to create something as transporting and colossally imaginative as the book—if they were intent on stringing together unfunny one-liners with cliched battles between human beings and robots—they should have created their own work of science fiction, instead of co-opting someone else’s.
Now don’t get me wrong…
Good stories are written to be retold. They evolve along with the world as people find new meanings in them. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the problem with modern Hollywood is not primarily a lack of original ideas.
It’s a lack of personality.
Yes, most modern movies are based on preexisting IP’s. The bigger problem is that those movies are so similar to each other.
There are still some good ones. Thank God for that—we all need our escapism. But Hollywood used to be an inexhaustible reservoir of dreams. And I worry about the future of a civilization whose dreamers have forgotten how to dream boldly.