Netflix recently jacked the price of their top tier service with 4K up to $25/month. Considering its virtual shelves seem crammed with nothing but foreign content (mostly undubbed now) to cater to every audience by English-speakers, the bulk of the money must've gone to acquiring the WWE RAW rights and giving the Russo Brothers, Anthony and Joe, over a half billion dollars to make a pair of movies - The Gray Man (which I remembered as being so-so, but while I never wrote a review, I did score it 8/10 so I must've liked it, though the fact I can't remember that isn't a good sign) and this week's delivery of Disposable Entertainment Content Media Thing, The Electric State, with a reported budget of $320 million dollars. Let's see what all that money bought.
Set in an alternate history 1990s, we're told in an introductory exposition dump about how robots invented by Walt Disney were used as slave labor until they got fed up and rebelled against humanity in the early-1990s. After a bloody war, a peace treaty was signed between President Bill Clinton and Planter's peanuts spokesbot Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) with the robots exiled to the Exclusion Zone, an area in the Southwest desert.
Part of the key to victory over the robots was using soldier drones controlled by operators wearing a massive virtual reality headset called a Neurocaster, tech developed by Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), the CEO of SENTRE (pronounced "center"). After the war, the Neurocaster was repurposed into a wildly successful product that allows people to waste their lives online (shades of Ready Player One, from which much is borrowed here) while drones do their jobs.
In this dystopian world of 1994 is Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), an orphan whose parents and super genius brother, Chris (Woody Norman), were killed in an auto accident leaving her in the care of a slovenly foster father, Ted (Jason Alexander), who spends his days plugged in and buying contraband online. She struggles in school because she refuses to wear the headgear for virtual classes.
One night, a robot sneaks into the house looking for her. It looks like Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk), the main character of a cartoon she and Chris used to watch, and it speaks in fragments of catchphrases (hello, Bumblebee from Transformers) from the show, but it eventually convinces her that he is Chris's consciousness somehow and that she needs to come with him to find his body somewhere in the Exclusion Zone. Using a package of Ted's as a lead, they steal his car and head to the PO Box where the items from inside the "Ex" were shipped.
They stake out the box and see its owner, Keats (Chris Pratt), a former soldier introduced in the opening montage who is now a black marketeer dealing in Ex stuff with his robot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). They stow away on his semi truck and end up back at his base of operations just outside the Ex. What they don't know is that Skate has hired former Gen. Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) to hunt Cosmo down because he's crucial to SENTRE's operation.
Barely escaping into the Ex, the now-quartet head to where a Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan) is who was at the hospital when the accident happened and had told Michelle that Chris had died. Along the way they end up at a shopping mall which is populated by various colorfully designed robots led by Mr. Peanut, who reluctantly agrees to help them find the doctor. Of course, things go badly because of course.
I've never read the 2018 graphic art book by Simon Stålenhag, but have seen some panels and have heard that it's basically a moody tone piece with only minimal narrative detail meaning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who wrote six MCU movies including all the Captain America and the last two Avengers joints, had free reign to fill in a lot of the blanks and almost completely failed at the task.
While there are a handful of laughs, there are a whole lot more unanswered questions like why is Michelle wearing an ankle monitor? Does she have no other family she could've lived with after the accident? What is her aversion to the Neurocaster? She says she prefers reality, but other than a blink-and-miss-it glimpse, we don't know what this VR world that's so addicting is like. In Ready Player One, Spielberg swiftly paints the picture of people living in vertically stacked trailer parks, so why wouldn't you escape to the Oasis where you can be and do anything? (And her final monologue is totally ganked from RP1's finale.) At one point they see someone sprawled on the sidewalk with a headset on, connected to a public terminal, implying that it's an addiction, but how does this infrastructure of public terminals work?
How is Chris's brain making SENTRE work and how does he not simply die from never being able to rest? How is such a critical asset to Skate so vulnerable? Why are so many of the robots seemingly more like malfunctioning than sentient like the hairstyling robot constantly begging to cut Keats shaggy mop? I could drone on, but you get the point.
Performance wise, there's not much to write home about. Brown is still stuck in her Netflix cage where except for her forgettable turns in a couple of Godzilla movies after breaking out in Stranger Things, she has done nothing outside of Netflix for the past decade including two Enola Holmes movies (first one 7/10; didn't see the second) and last year's Damsel (6/10) and she's playing a thin character while looking too old when she was 18 when it was filmed.
Pratt just plays a variation of his Peter Quill Guardians of the Galaxy character here, a kinda dumb guy who fancies himself to be smarter than he is. It's been done before better. Tucci and Esposito are fine, but barely in it.
Which raises the most controversial aspect of The Electric State, its reported $320 million budget which is just mind-blowing considering what's actually on the screen. Sure, the VFX are extensive and impressive, but where else did all that money go? Certainly not to the cast because while Pratt may be able to demand $25M for a movie these days, Brown has no box office draw and as good as the supporting cast is generally, no one is racing out to see the new Stanley Tucci movie. Esposito's scenes could probably have been filmed in a few days, if that, as he's mostly present as a face on a drone's TV screen face. (Another "huh?" detail.)
Avengers: Endgame supposedly cost $350-$400 million, but that had a gigantic cast of stars who all headline their own solo franchises as well as the usual tons of VFX, but it went on to make almost $3 billion, and was the culmination of a decade-long shared universe series. While I wasn't as enthused for Anora and The Brutalist as many were, they earned a combined $100M worldwide on slender budgets of $16M and won 7 Oscars between them. Hollyweird could've funded FORTY movies with those budgets burned on The Electric State. Or 10 $32M or even just three $100M movies that went into theaters.
And the cost of VFX isn't an excuse because Godzilla Minus One won the Best Visual Effects Oscar and its entire budget was reported to be $15M, 1/20th of The Electric State. This year's Best Animated Feature, Flow, was made for just $4M. Hollyweird needs to stop substituting money for creativity.
While other reviews have been brutal, calling The Electric State soulless and empty, I found it to be just lackluster and marginally diverting. Some are beginning to panic for the MCU because the creative team is now making Avengers: Doomsday and while their post-MCU movies have all been disappointments, there may be enough structure at Marvel to steer things towards the old glories, not further failure. Maybe kids will like The Electric State more because robots are funny, but it's a tad grim. Another strike for not having their story together.
From an AV front, people paying for top-tier Netflix with good home theaters will get some bang for their buck with decent Dolby Vision and Atmos activity. Not demo material, but worth the upcharge.
Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on Netflix.
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