Netflix’s ‘The Electric State’ Is No ‘Rebel Moon’

Netflix has reportedly made The Electric State into one of the most expensive movies ever made at a $320 million budget, and after seeing the film, it’s hard to know where most of that money went, even in a story filled with CG robots and apocalyptic landscapes. It certainly did not go into making a good movie.

Directed by Marvel veterans the Russo Brothers, The Electric State is an adaptation of a much moodier graphic novel, where here it has instead been transformed into a family-friendly blockbuster about a girl, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) trying to locate her brother in a Robot Exclusion Zone, aided by smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt). They both have little robot friends aiding them, with Michelle’s being an avatar for her brother as she attempts to find his actual physical body.

The Electric State is a stunningly bad film. Acting, editing, writing, directing. Even the hundreds of millions poured into visual effects look far worse than similar movies coming in at half the price.

It’s hard to get past how poor these performances are. Netflix believes Millie Bobby Brown, now 21, is a leading lady, given her prominent role in five seasons of the stellar Stranger Things, but her delivery here is stilted and feels phony, certainly not aided by the script. Pratt, meanwhile, obviously has comedic and occasionally dramatic chops, but he is purely channeling Star Lord more than a little bit here, a retro-era smuggler with specific musical taste aided by a sassy, small but dangerous friend. And he just…acts the same.

The film is poorly edited and directed from its simple dialogue scenes to its sprawling robo-battles. The climactic fight near the end takes place in most just an empty field with the background and robots painted in, which reminds me of the infamous Thor: Love and Thunder battle that took place in what felt like 100 square feet of parking lot.

The film feels like it pulls aspects from Bumblebee and Ready Player One but does not do anything better than either of them. And when I say this is worse than Netflix’s other big-budget disaster Rebel Moon (though not this big a budget even for two films and two R-rated variants), I’m not joking.

Rebel Moon had at least a distinct visual style to it and whatever it cost, you could see that money onscreen. And for all its faults (mainly script-based, or the desire to do an initial, choppy-edited PG-13 cut), it had a better cast despite being devoid of true A-listers. Snyder at least had a vision, and clearly had some amount of passion for that, however poorly it went. Here, there’s no vision, no passion, The Electric State feels wholly soulless.

It’s a bad movie, but I would not be surprised to find general audiences say it’s at the very least, okay. That said, for a movie with this much apparent ambition at that absurd price, it’s clear something, many things, went very wrong here. I do not recommend tuning in to see that for yourself.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.