Latest news with #Russos'
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
$320 Million Can't Buy You Into the Zeitgeist
Joe and Anthony Russo, better known as the Russo brothers, have enjoyed two of the most lucrative careers in Hollywood. The bulk of their success comes from the features they've co-directed for Marvel: Three of those projects, in which they helped turn comic-book characters into icons and 'cinematic universes' into a standard practice, are among the 50 highest-grossing movies of all time. Two of them—Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame—made more than $2 billion at the box office globally. Apart from James Cameron, they're the only directors to have crossed that milestone at least twice. Judging by their filmography since Endgame, though, it's unlikely that the Russos will do so for a third time—at least, not without the Avengers. The astronomical budgets the pair have commanded over the past half decade have not yielded Hulk-size cultural footprints: Netflix, which began green-lighting expensive movies to help build its own franchises, stated that the Russos' $200 million spy thriller The Gray Man topped its most-watched list for two weeks. But neither the film nor Ryan Gosling's assassin protagonist has lingered in the public memory. Citadel, the Prime Video series the Russos produced, is one of the priciest shows ever made, at more than $300 million for its first season. Conceived by an Amazon executive, Citadel was meant to kick-start a 'global franchise,' but it barely made an impression with viewers; in its first month of availability, the show never entered Nielsen's Top 10 streaming rankings. Without Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the Russos' work has become formulaic and ephemeral. Ambitious studios, it seems, can't simply buy their way into the zeitgeist. Yet here the Russos are again, with another exorbitant attempt to establish a new blockbuster series. The Electric State, now on Netflix, is a $320 million adaptation of Simon Stalenhåg's graphic novel about a girl who, joined by an intelligent robot, searches for her brother across a retro-futuristic, dystopian America. Some of that money has evidently been put to good use: The visual effects are seamless, the robot designs are genuinely cool, and the set dressing is meticulous. The cast, too, is stacked: Holly Hunter, Colman Domingo, and Brian Cox pop up. Their roles, though, are so absurdly small that they suggest heavy reshoots and excised footage. [Read: What Avengers: Endgame's historic box office means for the future] Hollywood studios granting massive funds to directors who have made box-office hits is a common practice—especially for projects that appear likely to return on the investment. But the Russos have become unusually adept at demonstrating the creative limitations of those piles of cash. Companies have made clear their desire to generate fresh cinematic universes, and Stalenhåg's book is an excellent starting point for an expansive film adaptation: His evocative artwork explores lands that practically beg to be rendered on the big screen, and his heroine's quest is filled with pathos. Anthony Russo himself said, during a panel at New York Comic Con last October, that he and his brother were excited 'to figure out what kind of story we can tell in this world.' The story they tell, however, replaces the originality of Stalenhåg's book with algorithm-friendly, inelegant slop. The Russos reduce the graphic novel's haunting and macabre tale down to a clichéd battle between unethical humans and sentient machines, in which the latter tried to assert their rights and lost; it's a generic good-versus-evil setup not unlike those found in The Gray Man and Citadel. Millie Bobby Brown—the closest thing Netflix has to an in-house star—plays Michelle, a teenager sympathetic to the automatons' plight who rallies a group of misfits to dethrone a heartless tech mogul, Ethan (Stanley Tucci), who believes that humans and robots shouldn't coexist. Ethan wants to give people the edge by hooking them up to the virtual-reality headsets he invented; Michelle would like everyone to log off and touch some grass. What Michelle and Ethan do have in common is that they're both one-dimensional archetypes with tragic backstories. The film around them is equally bland. The Electric State is so transparently eager to satisfy as many demographics of viewers as possible that it proves its own message: that a world dependent on business interests and technological optimization dulls artistic potential and human ingenuity. All that's left is a wasteland of half-baked ideas searching for a home. [Read: 'Netflix thinks exactly like an old movie studio'] There's a self-conscious streak to The Electric State that renders it inert from the start. The Russos populate the cast with big names (and Marvel standbys) such as Chris Pratt and Anthony Mackie, actors whose chemistry with each other almost distracts from the weak storytelling. Michelle resembles the protagonists of 2010s young-adult films, complete with pithy lines ('I have a condition where I can only live in reality,' she scoffs) and a signature hairdo. Each character is meant to be easy to root for or against, which forces them to be simplistic; Michelle's ally Keats, lazily played by Pratt, is so underwritten that I'm surprised he even has a name. And many of the robots, despite how lifelike they look, have boring personalities. Woody Harrelson voices the Planters mascot, Mr. Peanut—further proof of the budget going toward procuring recognizable imagery—but the generic role stifles the actor's eccentric charm. As I watched The Electric State, I was reminded of other projects, good and bad: the philosophical musings of Blade Runner, the flashy incoherence of the Divergent films, the character design from the terrific horror video game Soma. The Russos were obviously influenced by Steven Spielberg's output in particular, but what they've achieved is more akin to the much-maligned, reference-ridden Ready Player One than E.T. The directors had the money and incentive to strip popular works for parts—mimicking previous successes seems like a safe bet for attaining the widest possible appeal and the highest number of viewing minutes, the metric by which many streaming platforms assess how well their projects perform. But such choices leave the movie feeling too familiar, and it's unable to build an identity of its own. Every intricately devised robot, every 'Hey, it's that guy!' actor, every closely replicated image from Stalenhåg's graphic novel becomes nothing but window dressing. Of course, even the most acclaimed filmmakers can fall victim to the constraints of corporate expectations. Barry Jenkins's best efforts to enliven the Lion King prequel, Mufasa, couldn't prevent it from feeling like a capital-p Product. Jenkins's fellow Oscar winner Chloe Zhao similarly struggled to set Eternals apart from the rest of Marvel's green-screen-heavy fare. The Russo brothers, meanwhile, are known for their past accomplishments with transforming movies into merchandising opportunities. But their latest entry into this costly genre is yet another embarrassment in a string of them, and similarly destined to be forgotten. The Electric State, with its predictable final shot teeing up a sequel, argues for a society that values togetherness and imagination. Yet the movie—under the guidance of its directors and producers—just can't be bothered to do any of that imagining itself. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Netflix's Most Expensive Movie Ever Is Here, and It's a Monumental Disaster
When he got his first glimpse of a movie studio, Orson Welles excitedly proclaimed it 'the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.' But with a reported budget of more than $300 million, Joe and Anthony Russo's The Electric State makes Welles' train set look like a busted caboose. The most expensive movie in Netflix's history, it's also among the costliest of all time, joining a list that includes the brothers' own Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. If the Russos are the most profligate creators in history—their Amazon series Citadel is also one of the most expensive TV shows ever made—they're among the most successful too. Endgame and Infinity War grossed nearly $5 billion in movie theaters alone. And yet for all the money they're making, and all that they're allowed to spend, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much. The Electric State certainly wants you to think you're having a good time. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who, with the exception of the typographically doomed Cherry, have written all of the Russos' movies since 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, populate their world—an alternate mid-1990s in which labor-saving robots have been a fact of life for nearly four decades—with a range of quirky machines, from animatronic popcorn buckets to a chatty barbershop chair that keeps pestering Chris Pratt's shaggy metalhead to submit to a haircut. Although the story is set mostly in the aftermath of a war between humanity and robots that cost countless lives, the tone is consistently, even aggressively, chipper. (Humans themselves generally stay at home, puppeteering mechanized exoskeletons they can manipulate from afar through a primitive version of the internet.) Every character speaks in the same quippy, sarcastic patter, and their jokes are double-underlined, first by another character's shocked response, then by the original speaker's smug Yeah, I said that smirk. A common complaint with modern megabudget movies is that it's impossible to tell where the money went. Watching the Russos' nondescript Netflix action thriller The Gray Man, for example, it's easy to look at its washed-out colors and uninspired set pieces and think, $200 million for that? The Electric State at least looks expensive. Much of the story takes place in the Ex, an arid chunk of the American Southwest that has been turned into a reservation for the defeated robot survivors, where hundreds of intricately designed and meticulously realized sentient devices have gathered in an abandoned shopping mall. There are massive battles in which cars collide with skyscrapers several stories up, and belowground there's a cavernous lair filled with black-market memorabilia. (In the post-conflict '90s, G.I. Joe lunch boxes have suddenly become valuable contraband.) And yet the movie suffers from a constant lack, not of resources but of imagination, of inspiration—of, to put it simply, fun. There are plenty of things in The Electric State that ought to be fun, like the revelation that the robot uprising's leader was a familiar commercial mascot, a human-sized legume with a top hat and monocle. But when we're informed that 'Mr. Peanut signed the treaty of surrender with President Clinton,' there's no wink at the underlying absurdity, just a flat recitation of fact. In the movie's reality, self-governing robots were first realized by Walt Disney in 1955 as a theme-park attraction, and they retain an element of midcentury kitsch, but we never get a chance to linger on the darkly humorous implication that untold thousands of human soldiers must have met death at the hands of an ambulatory doughnut or homicidal pay phone. The story cries out for some of Paul Verhoeven's consumerist satire, but instead the Russos have chosen to play it as Spielberg—or, more specifically, like the cut-rate Spielberg imitations that clogged multiplexes in the 1980s after E.T.'s runaway success had the studios scrambling to keep up. Its villains, a monomaniac tech mogul (Stanley Tucci) and a bloodthirsty general (Giancarlo Esposito), are like a child's imagined version of what their parents do at work, inhabiting vacant, generic spaces that tell us nothing about who they are or what they represent. For most of The Electric State, we're stuck following Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a rebellious teenage foster kid who lost her entire family in a car crash just before the war. For reasons Markus and McFeely's script can't be bothered to explain, Michelle becomes convinced that her younger brother somehow survived the accident and is remotely controlling the movements of a robot named Cosmo, a grinning, metallic humanoid with a Bob's Big Boy pompadour, who clanks his way into her backyard one night. This ought to entail a massive leap of faith, one made even more daunting by the fact that Cosmo speaks only in catchphrases gleaned from a children's TV show. But the Russos don't seem to care about a young girl wrestling with the idea that the brother she's mourned for years might still be alive, so they simply skip past the emotional deadweight and move on to the next eye-catching spectacle. The beats of a Russo brothers movie are so predetermined they don't bear lingering on, but The Electric State might be the first time they've opted to just skip over them altogether. For as much as it owes to the Spielberg movies of the '80s, The Electric State is most directly indebted to Ready Player One, which likewise takes place in a world built of pop-cultural discards and conglomerated intellectual property. But as much film-geek fun as Spielberg had rummaging through the Warner Bros. vault, he at least realized he was creating a dystopia. The Russos don't see anything viscerally wrong with a world built entirely out of other people's creations, because that's how they make movies, bringing nothing of their own but a saw and a bucket of glue. (There's nothing wrong with pastiche, but you still have to contribute something original.) It doesn't occur to them that giving the defeated robot army's military commander a courtly Southern drawl (courtesy of Matthew McConaughey) evokes Confederate nostalgia, any more than they can process the contradiction in putting Captain America at the heart of a '70s-style paranoid thriller, because they're just stripping the past for parts. As the music swells at the climax of The Electric State, you start to notice a familiar melody creeping into the underscore, and then you realize: It's just 'Wonderwall.' Why write your own tune when you can buy one from Oasis? The Russos are pushing the boundaries of the film industry's economics, if nothing else. But they're branch managers at heart, at their peak when they're enthusiastically carrying out directives from the head office. Their Marvel movies draw on decades' worth of comic-book storylines, dreamed up by people whose names are saved for the end-credits crawl, and they put just enough spin on familiar conventions to make audiences feel as if they're seeing them anew (although, in truth, it's their inevitability that makes them feel satisfying). But when they have to make something of their own, for a company that now seems content to simply copy whatever's already popular, it's almost awe-inspiring how little they come up with. They've got the coolest toys imaginable, and all they can think to do is follow the instructions.
