No two ways about it: watching “The Electric State” is like hot-wiring a flaming, decrepit car to a nuclear warhead and then your groin: even on the off-chance you get some faint mobility, the very postulation of executing such a dunderheaded task to ridiculous, ill-fated extremes will leave you fried with a 40,000 volt charge.
Slight overexaggeration maybe, but this is just pathetic.
To try and be unbiased for a little bit, I do dig some of the very old school 50’s kitsch sound design and I remember only one or two memorable dialogue exchanges. Also, boastful as that 300 million plus budget might be, the VFX had the most effort hyperfixated on it, integrating decently with the environments and blending better with the actors than it would on a sound stage so on that front, you can see some effort paying off.
Positives start and end there though: the derelict, dystopian, meditative ambience that emboldened Simon Stålenhag's graphic novel has been snipped into defunct outlets and shredded wires….and it somehow feels worse than the sanitized corporate slop Netflix usually excretes. I caught this story red-handed, nakedly rushing to go nowhere for the sake of and actively refusing to even gesture towards any aforementioned questions coming out of its prescient yet recycled ideas; nearly every single plot development either goes nowhere, doesn’t earn its payoff, wildly contradicts everything that proceeds it or is downplayed to appease for a lighter tone shift and none of that holds enough of a charge or personality to save itself. And from the barest of plot points introduced, between smugglers, revolutionaries, and the big tech tycoon, it takes no shame in flaunting every predictable step over your eyes or how flattened the stakes are from beginning to end.
When it’s not meandering about deciding not to kill your brain cells (which is rare), its own internal logic might as well be held together by scotch tape and prayers: setting the year in 1994 adds nothing to the narrative beyond superficial flairs, its video game-esque structure and presentation are immediately marred via some utterly inane contrivances and for all its Amblin adventure epic-stylings, its emotionally incoherent because what it’s saying or the lack thereof doesn’t match the morals it decides to lean towards. Even the Rebel Moon films understood the basic principles of picking a theme and trying to stick with it, regardless of how on the nose it is. This film just blabbers on, talking for days straight and never saying a damn thing that’s useful and sometimes, it rips away themes from the book guaranteed to not feel haphazard of scruffy.
It doesn’t even feel like a proper movie but that’s what happens when people are hell-bent on always taking the path of least resistance.
Joe and Anthony Russo’s speciality as directors is Marvelizing their material, reshaping the rougher complicated edges to condense into something more suitable to their tastes…..and it REALLY shows here. They might be a suitable safe choice for Netflix’s objectively low standards but when said direction is just drab, draining and is given no room to build on nuance, they’re just synthesizing all their worst traits.
Blatant disregard for the books atmosphere and settings aside, clashing between different visual aesthetics with a dull-as-hell foreground for the production design was not going to fly. The worldbuilding for such an “ambitious” undertaking is nigh-nonexistent and the retro futuristic painterly vistas of junkyard Americana are heavily superficial detritus’s, barely feeding into the resonant paranoia of tech panic and corporate malfeasance while hardly arising any fun out of these barren desolate valleys.
Cinematography and editing both cancel each other out on being visibly passable but flavorless and empty, the bland wisecracks and painful gags hardly constitute as jokes anymore, costumes are hardly worth noting and you can tell how ass-backwards the tone is regardless of whether you read the book this is based on or not. This was the first time I thought an Alan Silvestri score didn’t fit the story at all, the swirling playful dynamism of it audibly clashing with everything on screen and the action sequences, if you can call them that, are the very definition of substandard (even if the last one was the best one by default).
Maybe I’d be a monochrome more forgiving towards these factors if the entire feature didn’t creak along like Tin Man without his oil can. The pacing may technically feel like the proper running time it was advertised as but not when you’re stuck in an environment this tame and with so little momentum.
And either per laziness or a sickening sense of tradition, many of these actors are frustratingly typecasted: Millie’s the rebellious one, Chris is Star-Lord again, Stanley Tucci’s the techno wiz’s in charge and obviously the main baddie, you get the idea. Everyone’s stuck in a box and is unable to break out of it or just phones it in with their leaden performances. Millie and Giancarlo in particular are woefully checked out.
