What do you get when you combine the work of an award-winning sci-fi artist, the directors of the second highest-grossing film of all time, and 320 million dollars (more than the combined budget of this year’s best picture nominees)? You get The Electric State, Netflix’s newest in-house produced feature, based on a graphic novel of the same name by Swedish artist and author, Simon Stålenhag. The film is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War, two of the most commercially successful films of the last decade. Unfortunately for the directors, as well as Netflix’s pocketbook, the film is looking to be a critical and artistic failure. At the time of writing, The Electric State is sitting at a gnarly 17 per cent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. So, how does a movie with this much financial and creative backing end up flopping so hard? Many of the film’s flaws can be boiled down to how it fails to adapt the strengths of the source material.
Stålenhag’s original book The Electric State loosely tells the story of a girl and her robot companion making their way through a post-apocalyptic America that has been ravaged by war and is now populated by humans who spend their whole lives in futuristic virtual reality (VR) technology. The girl searches for her lost brother, all while an unknown government agent follows her through the dystopian landscape. The story is intentionally vague, told by sparse paragraphs throughout the book, the main focus of which is on Stålenhag’s art. Stålenhag’s work is reminiscent of 20th century sci-fi film concept artists, such as Ralph McQuarrie (Star Wars, E.T.) and Syd Mead (Blade Runner, Tron). His pieces often feature landscapes intertwined with technology, be it ominous megastructures or decaying robots. In The Electric State, Stålenhag’s art provides a bleak look into our possible near future, which need not be elaborated upon within the text of the story. Massive towers covered in neon advertisements loom over the protagonist as she makes her way through streets under dark and oppressive skies. Torn-apart mechanical corpses of cartoon mascots litter an abandoned highway, insinuating a culture that has fallen from grace, its characters and institutions along with it. Any humans the girl encounters on her journey are plugged into disturbing headsets, disconnected from the world around them, wasting away.
The visuals of The Electric State alone make it an exciting prospect for adaptation into a feature film. Many of the featured ideas could absolutely lend themselves to a sparse, dark thriller, chronicling the epic journey of this lone traveler and her robot companion. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite route that the team at Netflix decided to take. The Russo brothers’ adaptation of The Electric State is a very by-the-book action comedy that only loosely adapts the story and designs of the source. Of course, there is no need for any adaptation to adhere closely to its source material for it to be a high-quality adaptation, however, The Electric State completely avoids any of the messaging or tone of the original book, in favor of questionable story beats and commercial appeal. Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown plays the protagonist, Michelle, who searches across a technologically enhanced 1994 America for her brother with the help of a dude-bro scavenger played by Marvel alum Chris Pratt. Along the way, they meet an array of zany robot characters, including an animatronic Mr. Peanut played by Woody Harrellson, for some reason.
In place of Stålenhag’s darkly ominous reflection of our tech-obsessed society, the film sloppily posits the monumental idea that connecting with other people is actually a good thing and maybe, just maybe, we should all put our phones down and join in a group hug to solve our problems. Instead of commenting on rampant consumerism or how harmful tech practices are affecting the world around us, The Electric State is chock full of product placement, from the aforementioned Mr. Peanut character to an overly drawn-out scene where Chris Pratt’s character drools about their love for Panda Express. Combining this with a script full of zingy one-liners and drawn-out computer-generated imagery (CGI) fight scenes, it is clear that this adaptation is made for a very different audience than that of Stålenhag’s original vision.
