The Electric State Is the Kind of Nonsense Destined to be Number One on Netflix

Number One on Netflix is a weekly spotlight on whatever is currently the most popular thing on the world’s most popular streaming service. Sometimes it’ll be a movie. Sometimes it’ll be a TV show. Whatever it is, a lot of people are clearly watching, and we’ll try to understand why with a quick review. Today, we’re looking at The Electric State, even though it’s not on the charts… yet.

“Mr. Peanut signed the Treaty of Surrender with President Clinton and Sentre CEO Ethan Skate on the White House lawn today. In Detroit, Kid Rock threw a party celebrating the defeat of the Robot Equality Coalition.”

That’s a quote from about five minutes into The Electric State, the newest big Netflix original movie. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, with a cast led by Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, it is certainly one of the strangest movies to ever be produced on this scale. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on this muddled sci-fi adventure, filled with a lot of big ideas and ending with a message that virtual reality is bad and connecting with other people is good. (Bold and brave, to be sure.)

The Electric State is based on the book by Simon Stålenhag — and if you look at images from the book, you can see where the movie’s visual aesthetic and most exciting ideas come from. In this movie’s alternate universe 1994, past decades of robot exploitation led to an uprising that was only quashed by humanity after humanity gave itself an upgrade with remotely-controlled drone warriors. Now, robots are quarantined inside the “Exclusion Zone” and most of humanity chooses to plug into their own virtual reality worlds, something young Michelle (Brown) isn’t a fan of, snarking at a classmate that “I have a condition where I can only live in reality.”

Michelle is an orphan, thanks to a car crash that allegedly killed her parents and her genius younger brother — however, when a robot potentially carrying the soul of her aforementioned brother manages to find her, she sets out on a quest to see if he’s actually still alive somewhere. Along the way, she enlists Keats (Pratt) to help her on said quest, which brings them to the Exclusion Zone, populated by numerous robots with very famous voices. (Mr. Peanut, for example, is played by Woody Harrelson. Why not.)

A note about the character of Keats: Thanks to Han Solo, there’s this perception of smugglers in science fiction as being roguish bad boys. (Which is to say, hella hot.) Keats, at least, defies that trope by probably more accurately hewing to the reality of what a guy like this would be like: Out of shape, likely smelly, and not great at social cues.

While it’s nice that The Electric State avoids too many obvious narrative cliches, there are so many impossible-to-answer questions generated by this movie. For example…

• Why cast Anthony Mackie as the voice of Keats’ robot BFF, but modulate his voice beyond the point of being able to even tell that it’s Mackie speaking? (You can maybe hear a little of Mackie’s inflections in there… Maybe.)
• What does being set in the year 1994 add to the story, beyond some visual flair, Cindy Crawford references, and Millie Bobby Brown in denim overalls? (One strap unbuckled, of course.)
• How did Kid Rock become a rap-rock star of note several years earlier in this timeline than he did in our reality? (Truly the darkest timeline.)

To The Electric State‘s credit, it is more original and more coherent than Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon films, but if you’ve seen those movies you know what a weak compliment that is. Perhaps its greatest crime against cinema is that it fails to do anything interesting with Stanley Tucci playing an evil mastermind; the majority of its famous cast also feels wasted. At least most of them are in voice-only roles; it’s sad to think about talent like Colman Domingo having to spend any significant time on a project like this.

As of writing, The Electric State is not yet on the top on Netflix’s charts, but the movie’s only been out for a few hours. The real reason we’re jumping the gun a bit here is that it’s exactly the kind of movie made to be discussed as part of the Number One on Netflix series. This isn’t to say that things which are popular on Netflix are inherently bad; the current number one TV show is Adolescence, a grim yet brilliantly-made British series that will very likely be a major Emmys contender this year. But there’s a certain chaos to what’s popular on the world’s most popular streamer, a chaos that enables the creation of movies like this.

Several years ago, I heard there was an A-list movie star who was excited about the idea of making movies for the data-less void of streaming platforms — because of that lack of data. To them, being able to make a movie without having to worry about its potential to fail at the box office had immense appeal. Avoiding the stigma of being a flop was preferable to the chance of theatrical success.

Netflix has become a safe space for these kinds of big messy swings, because even a box office flop like Kraven the Hunter can still become the current Number One on Netflix. So The Electric State is premiering in exactly the right place, with the only question being if it’ll fulfill its destiny as a chart-topper… Or lose out this weekend to the final gasp of Sony’s Marvel Universe series.

Should the latter happen… Mr. Peanut wept.

The Electric State is streaming now on Netflix.