The Electric State - Blog Posts

In despair at seeing tumblrites glaze the shit out of this disrespectful film.

At least the book still exists. And I got it before Netlfix slapped their fucking logo onto it.

They ruined everything

Electric State what have they done to you

"difficult for them to understand the story" FUCKING EXCUSE ME??? It is not hard to understand a story about a traumatized teenage girl reminiscing her life as she travels across post-war USA! Is it really so hard to understand issues like war, trauma, addictions, societal abuse, and bigotry??? It is not a hard book to read! Piss poor excuse!

The reviews are out and... Fucking hell.

I expected it would be like this. What a damn disappointment.

At least the reviews are rightfully ripping into this travesty of a film.

It's what it deserves for butchering one of my favorite books with a $320M budget.

And it still looks like shit.

Managing to be more VFX intensive than an Avengers movie is insane to me. How in the hell is that possible.

Now imagine how us fans of the book feel :'(

The Electric State: Review

Anything but electric

The Russo Brothers have made a career out of injecting rare smarts and soul into big studio films. While perhaps best known for master-minding the high point of the MCU in Infinity War, they also produced the weird and wonderful Everything Everywhere All at Once. That means that their latest film, based on Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel, arrives with a fair bit of expectation.

For the most part, The Electric State fails to meet them. Set in a technologically dependant version of 1990s America, we open with a rushed news montage that breezes through a multitude of key information in about 5 minutes. After a war that pit humans against their friendly robot aides, a fragile peace treaty has separated the illegal ‘bots’ into an ‘X’ zone behind a massive wall (If that feels like an on-the-nose reference to current political events, just wait till you’ve seen the rest of the film).

At the heart of this story is Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a teenage orphan whose brother (Woody Harmon) died in mysterious circumstances. But when a robot based on their favourite cartoon - Kid Cosmo - appears to share his living consciousness, Michelle joins him on a quest to find answers.

On the surface, this journey has all the elements of an engaging sci-fi adventure. As Michelle joins her new companion to the robot-infested desert, there’s plenty of WALL.E level cuteness at play (the leader of the robots is a stately Peanut voiced by Woody Harrelson). There’s also a thoughtful plot about our attachment to technology, and an emotional story of brother-sister reconciliation to tie it all in together. Stanley Tucci even stars as a soft-spoken tech billionaire with questionable intentions - think Elon Musk but more (italics) evil.

In reality, it doesn’t quite come together. For a film about a shady conspiracy, what stands out most is the lack of surprises. Everything in this film feels obvious and over-polished, from the predictable one liners - ‘not in my house!’, quips a robot sidekick - to the rather staid action sequences. Fittingly for a film about sentient robots, it feels like the script - adapted by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely -has been engineered by AI.

This also comes down to the casting. Chris Pratt, while occasionally funny as a loveable rogue that Michelle meets on her journey, is essentially just playing another version of Starlord - complete with a small, fast-talking sidekick. Giancarlo Esposito plays another ruthless villain, this time a robot hunter nicknamed ‘The Butcher’, who gets a laughably formulaic story arc in the final act. Ke Huy Quan makes a charming cameo as a doctor but essentially exists to spout exposition. And while Bobby Brown does get some emotional flash back scenes with her brother, she’s underserved by an otherwise bland teenage rebel role.

It’s a shame, because there are some good ideas here. The Russo Brothers have crafted a beautifully realised world, and there’s some striking character design amid the human on robot carnage. However, it all ends up feeling a bit derivative, with ideas that were seen before in Ready Player One, and recently The Creator. Unlike those films, this does little to inspire the imagination.

Despite a star-studded cast and the best of intentions, this robotic sci-fi adventure ends up on the scrap heap of sci-fi cinema.

★★

What Netflix stole from us

Simon Stalenhag - The Electric State (2017)

Me but with the Electric State too. Fuck the Russo brothers, they're just another blight upon the industry now.

can we like, have adaptations made by people who care about the thing they're adapting

after seeing the godawful trailer, I did a reread of the Electric State and i cannot physically understand how the russo brothers did not "see potential" in the story

i'll admit, i underappreciated the writing on my first read! going over it again there is so much richness to the character building and the dread of the atmosphere. There's a vibe that I can only describe as desiccated americana and i love it. The world is rotten and dying, and there is really nothing left to do but go on for going on's sake.

anyway i'm doing a very large essay on Stålenhag's whole body of work, but the Electric State holds a special place in my heart as the first of his books I discovered and the most resonant to me, so i just had to share my thoughts right after the reread.

This is less about the artwork, which i could talk about for ages, and more just a general overview of the story themes specifically!

(Moderate general spoilers? i don't go into much detail, and it's not a story overly reliant on its plot twists anyway)

The hopelessness of The Electric State is rather unique among Simon Stålenhag's works - his other books, set in Sweden, are much more fondly nostalgic, though they of course offer strange horrors of their own - but of a much more physical, immediate level.

The Electric State is different. It takes place in an alternate 90s US even more drowned in consumerism and blind greed than our own. A civilization that is crumbling, not from nuclear war or global crises or meteors, but by its own hand, by capitalism driving itself into the ground. The perfect pleasure machine, the neurocaster headset, leaves people twitching, comatose creatures whose minds lie in vast Silicon Valley servers as their bodies are left to starve.

Michelle does not have the privilege of escapism. She is one of the few left to wander a silent world, an apocalypse without people to see it. She is privy to the horror of watching the inevitable trajectory of a world falling to its death, and feels only recognition that it's probably better this way.

Michelle is never sad about the end of America. She doesn't ever reminisce about how good things used to be, or how we should have "appreciated it while we had it." But she certainly does reminisce.

She has the memory of her foster parents, who derided the government "coddling neurine addicts" like Michelle's mother. She has the memory of her grandfather coughing himself to death in their tiny apartment, irradiated from his lifetime of underpaid work assembling gigantic war drones. She has the memory of her mother overdosing on a drug the government hooked her on during her service in the military. She has the memory of her first and only love, a love which the world hated, how it kept her alive in her foster home of Soest City, and how it was ripped from her by the pastor.

Unlike Stalenhag's other stories, there is no element of nostalgia or quiet undertone of hope. Only disgust for what came before, and quiet fear for what comes next.

The horror of the Convergence, the eldritch machine god hivemind, is not even very relevant to the story - if anything, it's a side plot. When Michelle faces actual danger, it's never from giant robot gods in the mist; it's from cops and hotel clerks, from doomsdayers hoarding guns and a FBI agent hunting her down. She lives in fear of other people, of people who say they want to protect her.

But when she sees the gigantic silent machines wandering through the mists of Oregon, she isn't afraid. It's almost peaceful. The Convergence is beyond understanding. It grew out of the servers where millions of minds seeking oblivion from the world went to escape, and they converged into something unknowably vast who wanders the world in a hundred million thoughtless bodies. It's otherworldly. It does not fear, it does not dream, it does not hope, it does not hate. Maybe that's better.

I was scared. But I also felt something else when that thing stepped out of the mist in front of our car. I can't think of a better word than awe. Like when you suddenly become aware that you've walked into the wrong part of the woods and come face-to-face with a gigantic wild animal. Beyond the grotesque, there was also something else - something majestic.

And in its wake, the citizens of Point Linden, hundreds of people linked together, their neurocasters connected to the oily god in the mist, floated across the ground in front of the car, and they looked almost happy. Calm and peaceful, they moved past the car and formed a single group again behind us, and soon disappeared into the mist again.

i saw someone talk about this new movie trailer the electric state, comparing it negatively to the book. i watched the trailer n then read the book, n yeah wtf. the book is this quiet introspective story about a lonely girl travelling thru this half-collapsed society, where u have to figure out from context cues what happened to make the world like this. the movie trailer is a grey-brown cgi slopfest with robot fights, marvel quips and fucking chris pratt as a character not in the book at all. who wants this. they took actual art n turned it into garbage

learned about the electric state movie. is this how Minecraft fans felt when that trailer released

Crisp Rat infesting another mid looking film, no big surprise there.

Chris Pratt's inclusion in the Electric State movie isn't the sole reason I don't think it looks very good, but it certainly isn't helping either.