It’s a bummer to find out you have limits. Or even worse, if you find out you peaked. The Russo Brothers could not have flown any higher than successfully landing the MCU plane with Avengers Endgame. Their post MCU work proves this, giving us gray, characterless men on streaming services. I’m pretty sure the two of them knew The Electric State was gonna be more of the same, hence why they returned back to opened arms Marvel to make their billions making more Avengers movies.
The premise of The Electric State is one of those “hear me out” premises, so here goes. In between 1991 and 1994, a Robot War happened between humanity and electronics. Humans won, banishing robots to Arizona. Post war, teenager Michelle Greene (Millie Bobby Brown), is unhappily living near the border, mourning the loss of her brother Chris (Woody Norman) in a car crash during the war. She’s awoken by a rogue robot, claiming that her “dead” brother is alive, and wants to be with her in the Arizona wasteland, so she teams up with John D. Keats (Chris Pratt) the smuggler, and works her way into the open air prison, with tech guru Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) and the butcher of Synecdoche Marshall Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito), hot on her tail for harboring a fugitive robot.
If there’s any joy to be had watching The Electric State, it’s in the weirdo technology. The complicated premise envisions a world that stopped evolving in 1991, meaning a post apocalypse filled with that sort of technology around that time. The robot contraptions are the most fun parts of this movie, giving us a demented toy menagerie with little individual quirks and traits. That mixture of old timey futuristic hit my sweet spot a few times, to the point where I was sympathizing more with the robots because they reminded me of strange toys I would have played with as a kid. I wish the movie went to this well more often than it does, but I perked up anytime the Russo’s went to this strange imaginative place.
That could also be because the rest of the movie is at best forgettable. The dialogue is written for people half paying attention, constantly repeating itself and telling the audience they don’t really have to watch until they feel like it. Chris Pratt is doing bad Peter Quill again like he did in Jurassic World, content to get his paycheck wear a stupid wig and bolt. Millie Bobby Brown needed some free time between Stranger Things seasons and getting married, and her lifetime contract with Netflix delivered this to her. Stanley Tucci and Giancarlo Esposito trade their presence for what looked to be 3-4 days of shooting, with the Russo’s hoping they can elevate Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s bleh dialogue (they couldn’t). On top of all this though, the movie makes not so subtle hints that this is an allegory for immigration, but does such a piss poor job leaving any lasting impression, those overtures make The Electric State more like a leech than an ally.
So, yeah, back to the MCU it is for Joe and Anthony Russo. This part of their wikipedia page will be a blip on their radar, but for everyone forced to sit through this hot garbage, it feels like it should get at least one particularly scathing paragraph. The only compromise boys is to help get that Community movie across the finish line, then all will be forgiven from me.