There’s a scene in The Electric State where Chris Pratt’s character, Keats, walks into a diner run by a robot. The robotic cook offers Keats a cheeseburger, but when it’s time to prepare the order, it turns out the diner has been out of cheese—and beef—for years. In this world, a burger is an empty promise, a mere reference to keep customers on the hook long enough for hunger to push them into settling for less.
Keats is crushed but asks what else on the menu is good, to which the robot replies, “Everything that was good has gone bad.” So he offers him what’s left: canned beans on a Twinkie. Keats accepts—and since this is technically a comedy, he enjoys it. Herman, Keats’ wisecracking robot sidekick, catches him scooping beans onto his Twinkie and starts roasting him, making sure everyone knows this is a new low, even for Keats.
The scene perfectly encapsulates The Electric State. Its producers know what you like and how to sell it, but delivering something satisfying was never their intention. In the age of streaming, we are all Keats to them. With The Electric State, the directors, the Russo brothers, fill our trough with beans and Twinkies—a mélange of empty calories that’s more disappointing than a nothing burger.
“With The Electric State, the directors, the Russo brothers, fill our trough with beans and Twinkies—a mélange of empty calories that’s more disappointing than a nothing burger.”
I called this a film, but that isn’t entirely true. A film is a lovingly crafted work; it has a point, a perspective or, at the very least, it tries to entertain. The Electric State is algorithmically produced, low-vibrational content, intended to tell a story that an audience can follow while paying attention to something else. It’s a collection of nostalgic visual cues and verbal references, rearranged so nonsensically that calling it derivative would be a compliment.
It’s not the first piece of film-like content optimized for our collective waning attention spans, but it is the most brazenly lazy. We haven’t hit the cinematic wall just yet, but you no longer have to squint to see the pattern of the bricks. If The Electric State ever gets a sequel, it’s likely that half of the screen will be footage of someone playing Subway Surfers.
The story is loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel of the same name. However, it’s so loosely based that the entire plot fell out, taking all the world-building and cultural critique with it. All that remains is the title and some aesthetics.
The graphic novel follows a young woman traveling across an alternate-history, near-apocalyptic California to find her estranged brother. It’s a melancholic tale of loss, addiction, identity, connection and the dangers of exploitative technologies. Her journey carries an underlying sense of dread that, in a breath, could unravel into unbridled horror. It’s an astonishing piece of art.
The Electric State movie, on the other hand, is a buddy comedy. It follows a young woman and her puckish smuggler friend as they set out to rescue her brother from an evil technocrat. There’s also a B-plot that takes up most of the runtime, where our heroes team up with a gang of zany robots for a wasteland adventure. Together, they hunt down a lead on the missing brother. In exchange for their help, the heroes must save the robot city from a genocidal invasion of government drones led by Giancarlo Esposito—a genocide that our heroes are partially responsible for.
Tonally, the story is a mess. For the plot to work, you need to feel sorry for the robots and take their plight seriously, but their constant quipping makes that impossible. The robots believe humans want to wipe them out because we fear them—but I suspect the corporate dictatorship was just tired of enduring their endless streams of humourless one-liners. I know I was.
“Fever dreams and disappointment aside, the most baffling thing about The Electric State is that it should have worked—it had so many good ingredients and $320 million to cook with.”
The only exception is the robots’ spiritual leader—a wise, old, humourless stoic. Unfortunately, for the emotional weight of the plot, that leader is an animatronic Mr. Peanut with a cane sword, voiced by Woody Harrelson. My jaw dropped with bemusement each time he started making a speech about civil rights—it was unintentionally hilarious. It’s also worth noting that he’s one of the only branded mascots in the movie; most of the rest are fictitious.
The movie tries to draw on ’90s nostalgia for its charm, but it didn’t spring for the licensing fees to use anything substantial from the era. Many of the songs were from the ’80s and, even then, most were electric organ covers played diegetically by an animatronic taco. The more I write about what happened on screen, the more I question whether I actually went to a movie or just had a blazing fever.
The Electric State could have been great. The graphic novel was a blueprint for a moody, cinematic sci-fi classic. It paid homage to the era without relying on superficial reverence. But we didn’t get that movie. The Russo brothers’ Electric State all but ignores its ’90s setting, leaning heavily into the idea of ’90s nostalgia—but without actually including it. The story is unfocused, incredibly dull and always rushing from one weak plot point to the next.
Fever dreams and disappointment aside, the most baffling thing about The Electric State is that it should have worked—it had so many good ingredients and $320 million to cook with. The performances were serviceable; Chris Pratt did his usual Chris Pratt thing, which, I have to admit, is still charming. Millie Bobby Brown did the best she could with what she was given, and every time Stanley Tucci was on screen, things almost felt like a real movie.
Production-wise, the film looks fantastic. The VFX are some of the best I’ve seen in years and might make the movie worth watching purely as a mind-numbing spectacle. There’s a level of care and craftsmanship in the production that’s tough to reconcile with the story it’s used to tell. But hey, it’s 2025—nothing makes sense anymore. Take the good where you can get it.
To close, I’d like to return to the diner. The Electric State had all the ingredients to be a real cheeseburger, but the Russo brothers seem to have gone out of their way to process it into flavourless, digestible slop. Despite what the robot cook said, not everything that was good has gone bad, and you don’t have to settle for what’s left.
If you’re looking for a movie that’s more than spectacle, check out Mickey 17, Novocaine or take a chance on something different like Better Man. Nothing is perfect, but don’t settle for slop. The Electric State isn’t without merit—it looks spectacular—but I suspect that won’t be enough to keep anyone talking about it by Monday.
