The Electric State Movie Review

Millie Bobby Brown teams up with Chris Pratt for a fun family action run through a retro futuristic wasteland, surrounded by great voice actors and an enjoyable artistic direction.

Based loosely on the graphic novel of the same name (we won't pretend to have read it), The Electric State spends its time in the 1990's and gives an accurate though not exact feel to the technology of the time. The film happily lets grain linger in shadows during the first hour, while we spend some time in 'Civilised' society seeing what could have been George Costanza if he tried his hand at fostering children. This slight but appreciated move away from Netflix's typical high gloss overly sharp films really does help make this feel like a real movie, with actual thought applied to its creation. We are shown a few glimpses of techno addiction echoing phones and VR headsets of today with a grungy 90's Blade Runner'esq aesthetic, while being drawn into the main question of the film; are robots alive? again this echos thoughts of Ai today and the confusion of large language models displaying eerily accurate levels of humanity. Though don't hold on too tight for a satisfying answer to that question as the film pushes the only response as being 'yes' and only the villains show otherwise, surprising given the film is set following a robot uprising which offers a huge breadth for varying opinions from people that would have theoretically suffered during this war.

So the film doesn't want to spend time on these questions that it sets up, I suspect that the bulk of its negative reviews online come from this fact, and an apparent dislike of Millie Bobby Brown from some netizens. What the film does give us is fun, adventure and silliness; much like Millie's previous action adventure 'Damsel' which again is light on saying much but also gives us a fun action heroine to follow though a place as new to us as it is to her.

The brief synopsis without spoilers is that Michelle is accosted by a robot (Cosmo) at her home claiming to be her deceased brother, after a slight slapping to George Costanza they head off on their adventure into an exclusion zone where the remaining robots of the war are forced to stay. Along the way they team up with Herman and Keats to aid the audience in learning about the exclusion zone and giving our characters plenty of comical dialog between each other. As our little team moves through the zone learning and teaming up with an assortment of other robots, they uncover the real villains of the movie to figure out their ultimate objective. Its a simple story but a great deal of fun for a family movie night with great performances by the actors and voice actors alike.

A great sense of joy came from the almost cameo like list of voice actors and appearances we get through the film so I will share some of them here. Obviously to start we have Millie Bobby Brown playing Michelle in what feels like a similar character to what she played in Damsel; Chris Pratt plays himself (Keats) as is often the case, not a bad thing but he feels very type cast by this point though it does work for this film; Jason Alexander plays George Costanza but renamed to Ted for a tax write off I'm sure, he's angry and lonely character fits great here in the foster dad role that made me feel like John Conner didn't have it too bad with his foster home; Anthony Mackie gives us a refreshing character of Herman that has tiny Transformers attitude; Alan Tudyk who is just amazing at everything he does voices Cosmo while motion capture is provided by Devyn Dalton, combined they give a lot of depth to this stunted robot with limited speech and no facial movements; Giancarlo Esposito plays our initial antagonist of Marshal aka Butcher, oh is he perfect for every role he touches; woody Harrelson gives life to a human sized robotic peanut who is best friends with a robot magician brought to hilarious life by Hank Azaria; Ke Huy Quan returns to the screen following 'Everything Everywhere All At Once' as a delightful Dr/Kidnapper and also voices a cowardly computer; and lastly Stanley Tucci plays Elon Musk / Steve Jobs, named Ethan Skate, and if I don't have to tell you about this character and you still know what role he plays in the story then that's on you!

So overall I had a blast watching this and will be watching it again this weekend with my 11 year old because I know he will love it, grab some popcorn or have a pizza night and watch a dumb family action movie for some nostalgic fun.