Latest news with #ElectricState
Forbes
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
SNTIENT: A Sci-Fi Storytelling Platform For Future Curious Brands
From bifurcated brains for a neater work-life balance to mass robot rebellion, film & TV is once again beside itself with the thrills and spills of horizon scanning, specifically where the human-technology interlace is the premier tension. Record-breaking Severance just confirmed season 3, while last month Netflix' Electric State – one of the most expensive movies ever made – became the latest in a long cinematic lineage toying with our attraction-repulsion to sentient machines (just don't read the critics' reviews). Leaning hard into a cultural obsession that will exponentially snowball alongside the rise of agentic AI and human-augmenting tech is SNTIENT: a new cross-media storytelling initiative created by a London-based collective of creative technologists from the Fashion Innovation Agency and immersive digital specialists Dandelion & Burdock. Launching today, it presents an intriguing mix of embedded marketing, custom-made spin-off activations, and alternative futures-scoping for brands keen to probe mega-topics including climate crisis, ultra-urbanisation, resource scarcity and – presumably – even the dangers of a society inexorably addicted to tech. SNTIENT is a futuristic animated digital story based on 'meticulously crafted environments, assets, and droids' into whose master narrative brands can slide and, should they wish, help shape. It's been designed with cutting-edge motion capture and Epic Games Unreal Engine to marry pre-rendered visuals and dynamic new virtual sequences, enabling the collective to switch the tale up at speed: 'it will evolve iteratively over time to reflect real shifts in the world around us,' says Dandelion & Burdock cofounder, Niall Thompson. As yet, in the original film there is no capacity for brands to interact with fans, nor transactional brand experiences; this isn't a metaverse or digital marketplace. It's an existing filmic world in which to add content – explorative storytelling onto which brands can imprint their ethos, direction, messaging and products. However – and this is where things get juicy – if desired, they can then transfer those stories into other brand experiences from printed media to mixed reality (XR) and/or AI-enhanced activations. Film, television, gaming, virtual production and spatial computing are all promised as part of the highly-detailed mix (for more on this jump to Make Your Own Spin-Off: Transmedia Possibilities). It's applicable to any all brands but those already showing interest come from industries including fashion, sports, automotive, audio and consumer tech. Chapter one begins in MegaDistrict 4 several decades into the future – far away enough to embody the enigmatic buzz of speculative innovation but not so futuristic that it feels like somebody else's distant preoccupation (or problem). Vertical living and floating farms abound with governance despatched by two key tech corporations. One controls physical life while the other handles virtual existence – the metaverses (also an allusion to social media) into which the populus descends for pleasure/distraction. Some citizens are opt-in compliant; others exist on the fringes. The robots' awakening is the common thread: machine sentience is this project's MacGuffin. According to the FIA's Moin Roberts-Islam, who also wrote the story: 'It's a society where humans live symbiotically alongside robots, doing the menial tasks; the dull, dirty, dangerous and repetitive stuff. But then there's an inflection point, this moment where the robots in society gain sentience, and that's what the story hinges on. The most important bit is that it's set in a world with numerous parallels with today's society.' Some robots seek revenge for their relegation to menial labour while others are curious about humanity, their surroundings and self-expression – which is where brands insert their presence. That could be on billboards; by dressing the droids ('fashion is always important because it's a reflection of society and the way we experience fashion through technology is already swiftly evolving' says the FIA's Matthew Drinkwater); shown in apartments; or vehicles, offering up fresh visions of the future of mobility. Digital replicas of people, products and garments can all be instilled via virtual production shoots. The core narrative is created by the SNTIENT collective but participating brands can shape its trajectory. 'It is, as a starting point, effectively embedded marketing that allows them [brands] One of the core tenets of the project, made possible by a team with fingers deep in numerous technological pies, is the capacity for brands to take 'their chapter' and create spin-off content – stretching, progressing and personalising the project. According to Roberts-Islam: 'We can tie in a whole bunch of different strands – re-tell it as a short movie, a book, a location-based AR or VR activation, or make 3D printed art representing the characters and styling. In future it may become interactive – we could potentially produce a virtual spin-off space including cutting edge AI-power based non-Player Characters (NPCs) to converse with. You can have all these different modes of communication and storytelling.' He equates it to the vastly powerful world of fan-made content: 'It's a similar to how people watch a film or animated series then write fan fiction. The narrative lives on.' That easily digestible leap into low-level futures R&D is arguably one of the big benefits of the concept. It's a safe space for brands to turn their teams minds onto a reshaped future beyond data points and statistics; to personally feel their way through alternative scenarios where seeing (and storytelling supported by constantly advancing new tech) is the key to believing and designing. 'We start in a dystopian place which then becomes a place of expression . Can we start again? Can we reset?' says Dandelion & Burdock's cofounder Dickon Knowles. Roberts-Islam adds: 'How can we make this new world creative, hopeful and positive? SNTIENT is not moralistic in any way – there's no judgement – but it is a call to action: to brands and also artists and digital creatives to come and collaborate with us and help build this world.'
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Millie Bobby Brown's candyfloss hair transformation is radical af
We've been more than a little obsessed with Millie Bobby Brown lately. The actress has been busy promoting her new film Electric State: a sci-fi adventure movie that's currently showing on Netflix and boasts a stacked cast that includes Millie (duh!), Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci, Ke Huy Quan and Brian Cox. In the spirit of method dressing, Millie has been using her style choices to pay homage to the 1990s, the decade in which Electric State is set. Our fave among these? Her stuuuning Brit Awards look, consisting of a chainmail, hooded gown that wasn't giving ~classic~ 90s but certainly wouldn't have been out of place in a 90s sci-fi classic like The Fifth Element. For beauty fanatics, good news: Millie's method dressing isn't just method dressing, it's method hairdressing, too. When it comes to her locks, she's been keeping up the retro theme. Not only has she recently bleached her hair blonde but she's worn it in all manner of throwback styles, including a Pamela Anderson-style bouffant updo with graduated fringe. Her hair transformation didn't end there, with her recently unveiling a short blonde bob for spring — one which we're pretty sure will inspire plenty of others to take the chop. However, another social media post has recently shown her do a major hair U-turn. Rather than sporting a blonde bob, in a video for her makeup brand Florence by Mills she can be seen with long, bubblegum pink hair! In the video, she appears to also be wearing a pink, wetlook top by DiPetsa as well as pink blush, lip colour and eye shadow: a serious pink theme is going on. Seemingly, the various shades of pink are a reference to her latests Florence by Mills launch: the Soft Girl Sheer Vanilla Hair & Body Mist which is giving all kinds of ~girly pop~. Loving the pink on Millie! You Might Also Like A ranking of the very best hair straighteners - according to our Beauty Editors Best party dresses to shop in the UK right now 11 products you'd be mad to miss from the Net A Porter beauty sale
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Despite being one of the most expensive movies of all time, The Electric State isn't set to break any viewership records for Netflix
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Electric State may be one of the most expensive movies ever made, but the Russo brothers' new sci-fi flick doesn't look like it's going to break any viewership records for Netflix. The movie cost a reported $320 million to make, which puts it at number 13 on the list of movies with the highest budget. However, it only accumulated 25.2 million views in its first three days on the streamer, per What's on Netflix, after debuting on the platform on March 14. That means it's unlikely to be on track to break into Netflix's top 10 movies of all time. Current record holder Red Notice hit 75.6 million views in its first week, while other big hitters Carry-On and Don't Look Up accumulated 42 million and 46.6 million views in their respective first weeks. Of course, there are still a few days to go before The Electric State has officially been out for a week, but it's got some catching up to do before it reaches those numbers. The Electric State stars Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a teenager living in a dystopian version of the US where a war between humans and robots has changed life as we know it forever. Michelle crosses paths with a sentient robot who claims to be controlled by her younger brother Christopher, who she previously believed to be dead, and the pair set out on a journey to try to find him. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo and based on the graphic novel of the same name by Simon Stålenhag, the cast also includes Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci, and Ke Huy Quan. The Electric State is streaming now on Netflix. For more, fill out your watchlist with our guides to the best Netflix movies and the best Netflix shows.
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Why are the most expensive Netflix movies also the worst?
The full effect of Netflix on the film industry, positive or (more likely) negative, will be reverberating for years to come. But in the short term, they've made some undeniably great movies, mostly through the strategy of giving money to great directors and appearing to let them do whatever they want (and supplementing those by acquiring already-great movies from film festivals). That's how you wind up with The Irishman, Marriage Story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Hit Man, Roma, The Power of the Dog, Da 5 Bloods, Rebel Ridge and The Killer, among others. It's a lineup that smokes most of the major studios, which was presumably the idea: undercut the competition by stealing the film-makers they established and giving them the world. That particular era of risk-taking may be over for the growth-obsessed company, but they've still got plenty of capital to spend, which means more big Netflix movies like The Electric State, a $300m sci-fi adventure starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown that just dropped on the service. Netflix wants to engineer blockbuster spectacles to compete with the biggest movies Hollywood has to offer, and in a feat perhaps even more amazing than securing Noah Baumbach a big budget for White Noise, or improving Adam Sandler's later-period batting average, they have yet to make one that's actually good. Of course, by traditional terms, they haven't made a blockbuster at all; the word refers to lines around the block, and Netflix only respects the virtual queue. Even then, they seem to prefer an impulse pressing of play to any kind of real organizational structure. But in more contemporary accounting – that is, whatever Netflix itself sees fit to provide – Netflix originals like Red Notice, The Adam Project and The Gray Man (from the Electric State directors Joe and Anthony Russo) have successfully attracted a large number of eyeballs, ranking among their all-time top 10. (The metrics are still apples-to-oranges with normal box office numbers, but it's fair to say the most-watched movies on a globally popular streaming service were pretty well-circulated, even if not every viewer finished watching them.) So Netflix can woo terrific film-makers, and they can draw big audiences. How is it, then, that they have yet to make a truly excellent blockbuster-style entertainment that does both at once? Some of these 'big' Netflix movies may have their fans, but could anyone argue with a straight face that something like Bright, Atlas or Red Notice is playing on the same level as Jurassic Park, The Avengers, Avatar, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or even the average James Bond adventure? Hell, is 6 Underground anyone's favorite Michael Bay movie? Maybe it is; that Bay project at least felt like an accurate distillation of the film-maker's sensibilities, no matter how poisonous. It's also the exception that proves the rule: in general, marquee film-makers aren't coming to Netflix for carte blanche to make rollercoaster entertainment that any studio would greenlight. (That's part of what made 6 Underground so hilariously galling: the idea that it was a reaction to anyone ever having told Bay 'no.') Directors like Scorsese, Spike Lee, David Fincher, and Jane Campion are (or were) attracted by the freedom from exactly that sort of dumb-fun mandate. Still, that doesn't exactly explain a movie like The Electric State, given that it was made by the Russos, the guys behind Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, two of the biggest blockbusters of all time. Even if the true authorship of those movies should be ascribed to Marvel Studios in general, rather than the film-makers in particular, the Russos should have exactly the right experience navigating a corporate environment to produce a crowd-pleasing spectacle with some semblance of human interest. Yet that's precisely what The Electric State, in all of its pseudo-Spielbergian team-ups between adorable robots and broken-family humans blathering about human connection, absolutely lacks: a sense that it was made with anything resembling a genuine point of view beyond 'this'll play with the rubes'. A devoted auteurist might be able to excavate some deeper thematic connection between Russo Netflix projects like The Gray Man and The Electric State, but to do so, they would have to get past their more obvious commonalties, like grayish-haze low-contrast visuals and career-worst performances from well-liked stars. Truly, even the house-style Marvel movies have more going on. Sometimes, the disposability of Netflix mockbusters might seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy: how can movies that are unceremoniously dropped on to home menus at 3am, attracting living-room indifference that fails to even sink to the level of a hate-watch, really get a fair shake next to even a middling movie-theater experience? Yet I can say from experience that these movies still feel off on the big screen, because that's actually how I saw Red Notice, 6 Underground, The Gray Man and The Electric State, among others. Sometimes they're screened for press this way, but all of those also played limited, barely promoted theatrical runs a week before their Netflix debut, and I dutifully paid for tickets to all of them. While certain sequences from all of them have a bit more grandeur projected on a bigger canvas, and most do benefit from the initial charge of seeing major stars in their natural habitat, all of these movies do a quick real-time fade as they're playing, whether at 60 in or 60 ft. Electric State is a particularly dull watch; whenever the camera isn't catching the special-effects marvels of its robot characters (which, for all the movie's Amblin aspirations, land somewhere between the Transformers and the imaginary-friend denizens of IF), it becomes easy to notice how drably inexpressive the movie's actual settings are. The Netflix blockbuster is rarely based on ultra-popular pre-existing franchises – Electric State is from an acclaimed but not franchised graphic novel; The Gray Man and Red Notice are, gulp, writer-director originals – yet its echo-chamber effects feel like the work of a world where the only reference point is other mainstream junk. The directors come across like a version of Quentin Tarantino that only ever watched The Goonies and bits of Star Wars, even when they're making stuff attempting to knock off Hitchcock capers or Bond-style action. This problem isn't a Netflix exclusive. There are plenty of genuine theatrical releases with a similar level of huckster-y chintz. Real Steel, another robots-have-heart picture, directed by The Adam Project's Shawn Levy, comes to mind, and Red Notice's Dwayne Johnson is no stranger to mockbuster aesthetics with movies like Skyscraper. It is strange, though, that all of this Netflix spending has never yielded, say, an intermittently brilliant indulgence like Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger or the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending. The streamer is far better at producing mid-level genre pictures like Carry-On or the Extraction series, the kind of meat-and-potatoes thrillers traditional studios have largely abandoned. Maybe that's because at-home viewings have, over the course of a century of film, become part of those movies' DNA, whether through TMC, TNT, or now free streamers like Tubi. Blockbusters, on the other hand, have always been deceptively difficult to replicate; on some level, most of them seek some kind of overwhelming sensation, whether it's thrills, big laughs, melodrama, spectacular visuals or some combination; these things can be faked or strung along (plenty of middling mega-movies have been big hits), but the presentation is part of that fakery, which in turn can be part of the fun. A well-crafted one can sweep you up in the moment even if what they're doing isn't all that clever or insightful and leaves you with empty calories; JJ Abrams owes his whole career to this phenomenon. The Netflix auteur movies, meanwhile, are made with the confidence that they will transcend their humble smaller screens (or maybe the serene knowledge that at least they'll be shown at a lot of festivals before they make it to streaming). The most striking aspect of their mockbuster cousins is how they feel infused with the knowledge that this avenue is closed to them; it's almost astonishing how inept they are at faking otherwise. Movies like The Electric State can throw around millions of dollars, big stars and cutting-edge effects, but they just can't shake the bone-deep knowledge that they're content first.
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Electric State review – Russo brothers' robot saga is a bogglingly expensive dud
The Russo brothers' latest Netflix venture arrives on our screens under a cloud. A $320m-sized cloud, to be precise. It's a mind-boggling figure that makes no sense, either artistically or economically. The Electric State, which unfolds in a dystopian alternative version of the late 1990s, ranks among the most expensive films ever made. In the aftermath of a humans versus robots war, the defeated robots have been forced into a blighted exclusion zone, similar to the alien slum in District 9. Orphaned teenager Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) must venture there with smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt, recycling the same performance he delivers in pretty much everything) to discover the fate of her younger brother Christopher. It looks phenomenal – the quality of the special effects is exceptional. But this is soulless, emotionally inert storytelling. On Netflix
