The Electric State is For No One, But This Zero-Star Is For Everyone

If I didn't make this available to everyone, how will anyone know that The Electric State is a bad movie?

I remember reading the description for The Electric State on Wikipedia five or six months ago and being gobsmacked by how insane it looked. The movie didn’t just look kooky by blockbuster standards: it looked Neil Breen-level bonkers.

In an act of astonishingly poor judgment, Netflix ponied up 320 million dollars for an adaptation of an illustrated novel by Swedish author Simon Stålenhag that takes place in an alternate 1990s where robots finally got tired of putting up with our shit and rose up against their human oppressors.

An apocalyptic war ensues between robo-Americans, lazily representing every underdog underclass in human and robot history, which results in mass devastation.

Mad scientist Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) created technology that turned the tide and empowered humans to lead virtual existences inside robot drones. Robots, led by a steampunk, robotic Southern gentleman Mr. Peanut, are forced to live in an exclusion zone.

The Electric State does not want us to laugh at a steampunk, robotic Southern gentleman Mr. Peanut (voiced by a bizarrely restrained Woody Harrelson). Instead, it wants to move us with, again, the tragicomic but mostly just tragic existence of a steampunk, robotic Southern gentleman Mr. Peanut, voiced by a bizarrely restrained Woody Harrelson. It wants us to see the humanity within this dystopian robo-incarnation of the mascot for a popular line of legumes.

Mr. Peanut already moved us to tears when, in an astonishingly terrible bit of judgment on par with giving the Russos 320 million dollars to make The Electric State, Hormel decided to kill off Mr. Peanut when he plummeted to his death after a vehicular accident alongside Matt Walsh and Wesley Snipes. Why Walsh and Snipes? I have no idea, but it would be hard to imagine a more random pair of celebrities to watch Mr. Peanut breathe his final breaths.

The campaign was briefly suspended when Kobe Bryant and his daughter perished in a helicopter accident that served as a painful reminder that violent death isn’t the automatic laugh-getter that the ad wizards behind Mr. Peanut’s demise thought it was.

This was followed by a Super Bowl commercial about Mr. Peanut’s funeral, in which the Kool-Aid Man’s manly tears rained down upon Mr. Peanut’s grave, resulting in the birth of Baby Nut.

Baby Nut sounds like a 14-year-old gangsta rapper, but within the surreally, unnecessarily complicated mythology of Mr. Peanut, he’s the reborn old Mr. Peanut in baby form.

Then somehow Baby Nut went from being an irritatingly adorable baby in the Grogu/Baby Groot mold to a 21-year-old known as Peanut Jr. in a pair of poorly received ads where the increasingly unpopular snack mascot cops to having, died, been reborn as a baby, then became twenty-one overnight for no discernible reason.

It’s fascinating to me that MULTIPLE convoluted mythologies involving death, grief, mourning, and rebirth have been created for a talking peanut with a monocle, top hat, and an aristocratic air.

One of the several thousand things that bothered me about The Electric State is that MR. PEANUT IS NOT A ROBOT! He’s never been a robot. As we’ve just established, he’s been an old man, dead, a baby, and a twenty-one, but he’s never been a robot.

I would have much preferred if The Electric State had focussed on real corporate robots like Chuck E. Cheese, the Rock-a-Fire Explosion, and the animatronic presidents in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.

I’d love to see Disney’s Warren Harding and Benjamin Harrison animatronics in action, but The Electric State cheats by featuring characters who have never been robots or even particularly robotic.

When I saw the dire reviews The Electric State received, I thought there was no way that a movie with such a crazy premise could be as boring and bad as everyone says.

I was wrong! Oh, sweet blessed lord, was I ever wrong! This is fucking dire, three hundred and twenty million dollars worth of nothing.

Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle Greene, a teenager with an unusually intense relationship with Christopher (Woody Norman), who is not explicitly established as autistic but who fills many of the characteristics of the Autistic Scientific Supergenius archetype.

Like Neo and Luke Skywalker before him, Christopher is the chosen one. Even though Christopher appears to die in a car accident, just like Mr. Peanut in its official corporate canon, he is instead reborn (also just like Mr. Peanut) as Cosmo, a sentient robot from a popular cartoon.

Cosmo engages in what neurodivergence calls “scripting.” Everything he says is something Cosmo uttered on television, but he’s able to communicate with her enough to convince the grief-stricken young woman that Christopher is controlling him from a distance.

Michelle and Cosmo set out on a quest to find Christopher’s human body. They’re aided by soldier turned black market pirate John D. Keats (Christopher Pratt) and his wisecracking robot sidekick Herman (Pratt’s Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame co-star Anthony Mackie).

The Russos attempt to give Pratt the iconic introduction Clint Eastwood received in Sergio Leone’s Westerns. Before we see a face that wore out its welcome a good half-decade ago, the movie focuses on John D. Keats’ feet as he walks out of his truck and to a locker.

Glenn Danzig’s “Mother” accomplanies this failed, unsuccessful attempt at badassery.

In The Electric State, Pratt plays a stock character in pop culture: the charming rogue who lives outside the law. He’s a wisecracking smartass who pretends to be a cynical nihilist who cares about nothing beyond his selfish needs. Behind his brusque exterior, however, he’s furtively an idealist who cares about people and noble causes.

It’s an archetype that pop icons like Casablanca’s Rick Blaine and Han Solo exemplify.

Unfortunately for The Electric State, the film’s thankless lead role resembles Pratt’s star-making performance as Peter Quill/Star-Lord in the Guardian of the Galaxies trilogy enough to suffer by comparison.

The directors and co-stars of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame have played with this sturdy pop staple many times before, with infinitely superior results. John is a rerun, a rehashed, a warmed-over antihero whose journey to sincerity, emotion, and heroism hits all the expected beats.

Herman’s character design is generic and forgettable. The comic relief has no weight or substance because, like every other robot in the film, Herman is realized entirely through CGI.

According to the directors, it would have been prohibitively expensive for the robots here to be practical effects when they could make everything computer-animated for a mere three hundred and twenty million dollars.

In the exclusion zone, our heroes meet Mr. Peanut. In his original incarnation, Mr. Peanut was created to sell consumer products. Here, Mr. Peanut’s purpose is to remind us of life’s fragility and the true meaning of humanity.

We’re not supposed to laugh at Mr. Peanut. Instead, we’re supposed to be moved by his plight and his innate dignity in the face of oppression. Mr. Peanut is supposed to make us weep by embodying everything good about humankind despite being a robotic peanut man.

Our heroes meet scientist Dr. Clark Amherst (Ke Huy Quan) and learn, in true Magical Autistic Supergenius form, that Christopher is so unbelievably brilliant that his brain somehow controls everything for Sentre, an evil corporation run by CEO Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci).

Tucci delivers a strangely, counter-intuitively sleepy performance. Tucci’s sole affecting moment finds the sinister corporate executive reflecting on how he uses his company’s technology to create an idealized version of a mother who was drunken and abusive in real life.

It’s the only time the character expresses vulnerability or behaves with anything other than cold, cynical calculation.

The Electric State lays the sentiment on thick. It tugs relentlessly and fruitlessly at our heartstrings. The Russos seem oddly oblivious to the comic possibilities of an alternate past in which a steampunk robot Mr. Peanut helps lead a war to make the world safe for robotkind.

The Russos’ epic folly is twenty times as expensive as Kyle Mooney’s simpatico retro horror comedy Y2K, which also took place in an alternate 1990s/VERY early aughts in which robots rebel against their human oppressors. I’m tempted to write that it’s one-twentieth as entertaining, but that would imply that The Electric State is entertaining on any level. It’s not. It’s ugly and dreary and strangely dour.

The film similarly reminded me of the tacky time-warp kookiness of The Minecraft Movie and the pop-culture-warped dystopian pandering of Ready Player One, which is easily the worst movie in Steven Spielberg’s filmography.

The only upside to watching The Electric State rather than The Amateur, which finished second to Drop in my weekly poll to determine which new movie I write about, was that I didn’t have to pay for a Lyft or Uber to get to the theater. I, similarly, did not have to leave my home. Also, the film’s run time is a shapeless, endless, one hundred and twenty-eight minutes, but the last eight are credits.

Before I suffered through The Electric State, I thought there was no way it could be as bad and boring as its reputation suggests. I was wrong. It’s somehow even worse.

Zero Stars out of Five