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New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Electric State' Review: 1990s Robot Apocalypse? As if!
In 'The Electric State,' a young woman and a silent robot slowly make their way across the carcass of the United States, littered with beached war ships and drones. In this alternative history, machines got on a fast track to sentience during the 20th century and waged war against humanity, which barely won. By the alt-1990s, hyper-capitalism and virtual reality have destroyed communal and social bonds — people are so addicted to V.R., which they mainline via helmet-like neurocasters, that they can go into vegetative states, oblivious to the world around them. The story is muted and evocative, and it leaves you with a powerful feeling of bereavement and grief for what we, as a species, have brought on ourselves. I'm sorry, I was talking about the illustrated novel 'The Electric State' (2018), by the Swedish artist and writer Simon Stalenhag. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo's movie version, streaming on Netflix, is quite different. It does have the same context and setup, but whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb. (For those interested, the Prime Video series 'Tales From the Loop' is a much worthier adaptation of Stalenhag's universe.) Naturally, a film can have an autonomous worth, equal but distinct from its source material ('Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' and 'Blade Runner' come to mind). But even considered on its own, this 'Electric State' remains a hyper-processed industrial product packed with sugar and sodium (in the form of quips and battles), along with such wonderful additives as goopy sentiment and automatic-pilot acting. We still have a young woman, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), and she is still accompanied by a robot, Kid Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk). But she is no longer central to the story or even the cast, having teamed up with a swashbuckling smuggler, Keats (Chris Pratt), and his own bot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). Because it's easier to blame epochal collapse on one bad guy than on collective apathy, we also get Stanley Tucci as Ethan Skate, a tech tycoon up to no good. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘The Electric State,' Jolting a Robot to Life
Kid Cosmo's head is enormous, as robot heads go. The primary nonhuman hero of the film 'The Electric State' (on Netflix March 14), Cosmo has a bright yellow globe of a head the size and shape of an exercise ball, propped atop an incongruously spindly frame. Cute? Yes. Mechanically feasible? Not really. Cosmo's character was inspired by Skip, the similarly bigheaded hero of Simon Stalenhag's graphic novel. A cult hit when it was first published in 2018, the book 'The Electric State' is set in an alternate 1990s universe after a mysterious war has ravaged the California landscape, leaving the husks of enormous drones and robots in its wake. 'Simon Stalenhag's work is what attracted me to this movie to begin with,' said Matthew E. Butler, the film's visual effects supervisor. 'But his designs are often aesthetically cool and engineeringly impossible.' In the film, Cosmo and his young companion, Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, embark on a journey across the American West to find Michelle's brother. Along the way, they meet up with scores of other robots, many just as improbably designed as Cosmo. Of course, Cosmo doesn't really need to make mechanical sense in either the graphic novel or the feature film, given the flights of physics fancy regularly found in both mediums. But Anthony and Joe Russo, the film's directors, wanted to ground their movie in reality, even more so given the story's 1990s setting (think Orange Julius and MTV News with sci-fi enhancements), and the film's fanciful robots, which include a midcentury postal carrier (voiced by Jenny Slate) and an urbane Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson). Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
