The Electric State

★ | Short circuit

The Electric State is an adaptation of the experimental graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag. The original is a melancholy and evocative work that draws the viewer in through minimalist storytelling and poignant observations about humanity. In the film, Chris Pratt gets teased by a robot for being a little girl who cries.

This is the kind of tedious, unimaginative, and boring adaptation you wouldn’t wish on anyone. It takes everything that made the original work so brilliant and does the exact opposite with it. The result is an expensive sideshow of everything we’ve seen before. A carnival of yesteryear nostalgia that everyone involved has done better elsewhere.

Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle, a troubled young girl straight from an Avril Lavigne music video. She’s an angry orphan who one day encounters a robot claiming to be her supposedly dead brother. In this world, the movie flimsily explains, this kind of stuff just happens. There was a robot war at some point, but that story is told in the opening credits, even as it’s far more interesting than anything else in the film.

Michelle takes off with her brother from another motherboard, and on the road she joins forces with Chris Pratt, playing himself. He’s a scavenger who specializes in retro relics from the exclusion zone, though it’s never made clear why they’re so valuable when the rest of the world has continued just normally.

They’re chased by Giancarlo Esposito, who shows up in a cameo so underwritten and pointless that you can practically see him nodding off. That’s how most parts in the film play. There are numerous celebrity cameos who you can kind of recognize from the monitors on the robots. Why these robots need an easily broken screen to show the users face is best left unquestioned.

Somewhere in the background, there’s a story about robots yearning to be free. If you saw The Second Renaissance animated feature from The Animatrix, you’ve already seen the more interesting version of the same story. If you haven’t, go watch that instead of this. It’s shorter, but above all, it’s a better film.

The Electric State has a reported budget of 320 million dollars, and you can kind of see where some of it went. The effects are good for the most part, and plenty of things explode. But it’s all clinical and lifeless without any sense of wonder or weight that Stålenhag’s beautiful original work contained.

Instead, the film settles for the same cheap 90s throwbacks that you see everywhere. It’s nostalgia filtered through the marketing department, so detached from any lived-in experiences that it means nothing.

Worst of all, nobody seems to want to be here. Not Pratt, who doesn’t even try to bring a modicum of his Guardians of the Galaxy charm to the table. Certainly not Brown, who delivers a career-worst performance. Even the ever-reliable Stanley Tucci looks bored as his nothing-character disappears behind a wall of exposition.

At two hours, The Electric State is hopelessly long. There’s action, but it’s uneventful. For a brief moment, there’s the possibility of wonder. It, too, wastes away. This is a film that rushes from one climax to the next and never builds a foundation for it to mean anything. Why should we care if a character we don’t know dies? What does a revelation mean when it has nothing behind it? In theory, The Electric State hits every beat a screenplay should, but all it achieves is an imitation of life — never the real thing.

In its original form, The Electric State is a work of exquisite and smart alternative history. As a film, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and energy.