The Electric State

Set in an alternative version of the 1990s in which people can stand to wear gigantic, yellow VR-style headsets for longer than fifteen minutes, Anthony and Joe Russo's The Electric State takes the dour, dystopian artwork of Simon Stålenhag then batters it into an all-American, Amblin-presenting shape. The ruined and rotting bodies of towering mechs are translated here into a menagerie of walking-talking merchandise; literally Disney's AA puppets, crowding the screen and demanding respect from their blubbery masters. Our path through this robot revolution is Millie Bobby Brown's orphaned delinquent and a grinning, childlike droid that claims to be channelling the thoughts and feelings of her sadly departed brother. In this sense Electric State, all three hundred million dollars of it, feels very much like something that Steven Spielberg, toiling in the dwindling years of the twentieth century, briefly considered before passing on. 

Electric State then as a project that hasn't quite jived with Spielberg's sensibilities and is therefore not exciting enough for him to dedicate any serious amount of time to. Handed off to an underling and stamped with an Executive Producer endorsement for its trouble. The Russo brothers, very gamely in fact, contribute to this overall sense of thwarted thrills by failing to invest their film with any of the awe or wonder that might elevate this subsurface scattered Pinocchio. Similarly, the scene-setting that opens the film (in which fragile, flesh men attack automated servants of every shape and size) might dimly recall Mahiro Maeda's The Second Renaissance shorts from The Animatrix but Electric State is not nearly so delightfully bloodthirsty. The Russo's film, presumably desperate to ensure a follow-up feature, cannot resist undermining any sense of danger or consequence mere seconds after they have been suggested. Armies of puppeteered mechanoids blast holes through cutesy relics of post-war Americana and Chris Pratt strains to transplant his Guardians of the Galaxy man-child into another franchise but this film's abiding images all revolve around Giancarlo Esposito's interlaced face blaring out of a pistol-packing android that crosses George Lucas' tin-men with Lee Van Cleef.