Currently, The Electric State has a score of 16% on Shill Central Rotten Tomatoes. That’s the critic’s score, the audience score is 75%. From the sounds of it, it’s pretty bad, so guess who has to review it?
I have to admit, I was kind of looking forward to seeing it. I liked the visuals from the trailer and it was something new, that made a change. The Russo Brothers have created some of the best movies from the MCU. However, outside of that, they have been very lacklustre.
You already know the details about The Electric State, it’s got a big cast, and the two main protagonists are Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt.
The Story
I’m not going into details about the story, but there will be mild spoilers. I just said this is something new… but ultimately, it isn’t new, it’s just a rehash of a story we’ve seen a hundred times.
It’s 1990, and before the ‘war’, Michelle (Bobby Brown) is watching her brother take a test. It turns out he’s a genius. It was nice to see a brother and sister who hated each other’s guts, you know, like siblings in real life.
We then learn about the war with the machines. Robots were originally made to serve us, but they got fed up with that and wanted lives of their own. Skip to the end of this bit, they are put in a walled city away from the rest of America.
It’s now 1994, and we catch up with Michelle. She’s in the foster system due to her family being dead. One night, a robot turns up who can’t talk and just explain the situation obviously. Michelle and the robot end up on the run.
It turns out the robot, Cosmo, is being controlled by her brother who she thought was dead. He’s alive and she needs to find a doctor who can find him, as he doesn’t know where his body is being kept.
In the meantime, people are all using Neurocasters. These are devices where they can enter a VR world. Some people use them to control robots to do the work they normally do. One of the users is The Marshall (Esposito) who’s a bounty hunter for rogue robots.
Michelle and Cosmo meet Keats (Pratt), who is a smuggler, he can get into the robot-restricted zone, or the Electric State, and find the doctor to find her brother.
Mr Peanut
They end up in the robot zone with the Marshall chasing them, and they meet Mr Peanut (Woody Harrelson) and the rest of the exiled robots. They are all cute and funny, which is something that pays off later.
The doctor (Ke Huy Quan) was there but moved out, so they have to go to another waypoint to collect more information. They find the doctor and he explains the plot of The Electric State to them. I won’t spoil it, because it’s as cliched as they come. If you can’t see it coming then you’ve obviously never seen a movie in your life before.
It was weird that Mr Peanut was the leader of the robots, but then goes on a dangerous mission to find the doctor. He doesn’t seem to like humans, but I guess they paid for Harrelson so they were damn well going to use him.
The third act has every cliché in the book; a battle of impossible odds, a death that’s not really a death and a tough decision for the main protagonist. You can literally sit there with an ‘action movie bingo card’ and tick them off, one by one.
The Cast
This was the main issue. The Electric State is a good idea, but badly executed, like so many movies these days. The worst of the issues are Bobby Brown and Pratt.
I actually don’t mind either of them. Just to be a little controversial, but I think Bobby Brown in Stranger Things is a great young actress. Her portrait of Eleven is really good and, when given the chance, she can really act.
However, when she’s not acting well it really shows. At one point in The Electric State, I thought to myself about her acting:
“She’s not even phoning this in, she’s texting it in!”
Her character goes from lovable older sister to annoying ‘rebellious foster kid’, to giving a stirring speech about how good it would be to be nice to each other. Ultimately though, Michelle just isn’t that likable, she’s pretty annoying as a character.
I like putting on Parks and Rec in the background at work, and I find Pratt is funny as Andy. He was good in the first of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies (they got tired quickly after that), but Starlord was a likeable guy.
In The Electric State he’s playing Starlord with a porno moustache. His character is just there for the ride to help Michelle and Cosmo get to the next waypoint in their adventure. He’s a sidekick to Michelle because we all know that women are the ones who make all the decisions and are the best. Men are comic relief.
The Rest Of The Cast
The only thing about the rest of the cast was the voices to be honest. It took me a while to figure out who was playing who. I had to look them up in the end, but it was OK, as I picked up my phone a fair amount
Esposito is playing pretty much every character he’s been playing of late. A shame really, his first big role (to me) was Gus Fring in Breaking Bad. Since then, he’s been cast in a lot of stuff, but mostly as a mild variation of Gus. A shame really, because the guy is a good actor.
Being controversial yet again, but I’m finding Huy Quan to be a little boring now as well. I loved him as Shortround playing against Indy, and it was interesting to see him in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
I watched him in Love Hurts the other day, and he now seems to be playing ‘That kid from Indiana Jones as an adult… he’s Asian and does Kung Fu’. There, he was pretty much playing a grown-up Shortround.
In The Electric State he’s a clever doctor and into tech, so basically a grown-up Data from Goonies. I just don’t find him all that interesting to watch, outside of Indiana Jones and Goonies.
The Electric ‘State’
This movie is a state. It’s a great idea, but it just doesn’t work. It felt like watching the movie was more like watching someone playing a video game on YouTube. It’s on, but there’s no vested interest.
Both Michelle and Keats are pretty boring, so I wasn’t that invested in them. When you’re not invested, you just don’t care how good the rest of the movie looks.
Speaking of which, the visuals are stunning! I know this movie cost $320 million and, honestly, you can see every penny of it on the screen. Annoyingly, this would have been a great movie to see in IMAX.
Honestly, I couldn’t spot any issues with the visuals at all, they are as close to perfect as you can make them. The Electric State is a very beautiful movie, but there’s just nothing new about the story.
Let’s check the cliché list:
- A strong female protagonist
- A man sidekick for comic relief
- A journey that the main protagonist isn’t willing to go on, but then does
- Someone who help, but is reluctant at first
- A bad guy who has a change of heart and takes the moral high ground
- A good guy that ends up being the bad guy
- A battle against impossible odds
- Another battle, where plucky underdogs take out an elite killing unit
- The death of someone important, but they aren’t really dead (this happens twice)
- A stirring speech about how nice it would be to be nice to each other
- The dangers of tech and how we shouldn’t become reliant on it
- The main quest of the characters can end up saving the world
Honestly, I could go on, but this review has wasted enough of my time and yours.
Overall
The Electric State could have been an awesome movie, but the story and cast are the letdowns. You might be able to put up with Bobby Brown and Pratt for 2 hours in these roles just because of the visuals, but I was barely able to get through it. It’s a movie I would never return too.
It’s also the little things, like the robot that Esposito uses. It’s got a screen for the face and, at one point, is shot at point-blank range. Does it break? No, because it’s Esposito’s robot. Other robots are hit with a baseball and the screen breaks instantly.
Then there is the tone, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a comedy or a serious action movie. I mentioned the funny robots we meet with Mr Peanut, mild spoiler, but they are all slaughtered.
One minute they are cute and making jokes about cutting Keat’s hair, then 10 minutes later it looks like a scene from a holocaust movie. There are jokes one minute, then robots being killed the next.
I got to thinking about some of the other Russo Brother movies, say The Winter Solider. There are mild jokes in there, to keep a bit of humour. They are usually well-placed and subtle. The Electric State’s tone is all over the place. Badly timed jokes where things should be very serious.
The Electric State is a mess, it should have been a lot better, especially from the directors of The Winter Soldier. It passed a couple of hours, but that is about all I can say about it.
