The Electric State (2025)

The Electric State is not a Christmas movie, at least not in my opinion. It only has two scenes which incorporate holiday elements: a flashback to a holiday interaction and a sort of virtual reality recreation of that same holiday at the end. Had the context been a little different, the finale set at the virtual holiday might be enough to justify arguing this counts as a Christmas movie (plenty of romcoms - including the classic Holiday Inn - have effectively claimed the label under similar circumstances). But for reasons we'll go into, the context here is a little different.

So why talk about it at all? Well, because I've got some thoughts about the Christmas elements, and I think it makes for an interesting case study in the way holidays are often utilized in film. I should note this is one of the very few aspects of The Electric State I found remotely interesting.

I'll start by saying I'm not approaching this with any kind of axe to grind against the Russo brothers. In fact, I'm something of a fan: their work on the series Community ranks among my all-time favorite television, and I still consider their Avengers movies fantastically executed pop entertainment. I've generally had a high opinion of them from interviews I've seen, as well, though their embrace of generative AI is a hell of a red flag. But I went into this hoping for the best.

By the time I turned it off, I had serious questions about the way Netflix was investing my subscription money. It's not so much that The Electric State is awful - I'd go with "mediocre" overall with extremely generic writing, mangled tones and themes, and lazy production... but still offering a handful of cool moments and some unusual visual design. This is the sort of movie I used to watch excitedly in the 1990s, when genre fare was so rare you'd feel grateful just for a chance to see your interests reflected on screen, regardless of whether the filmmakers could manage a coherent narrative.

Contrary to what The Electric State will tell you, however, this is no longer 1994, and my expectation for science-fiction movies has risen above giving a pass to anything with an interesting looking robot or talking ape [no, seriously: there was a time I used to defend the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes reboot. Look, it was a different time, I was young, we all experimented with bad movies in college].

In addition, I find it hard to divorce my thoughts about The Electric State from knowing it cost 320 million dollars to make. In theory, it shouldn't matter - there's a case to be made that a movie is either good or bad, and the business end of things shouldn't factor into that assessment. But expectations matter, and my reaction to a movie is going to vary significantly depending on whether I'm watching it as a major motion picture event or a cheesy, B-movie. Seven years ago, I wrote a positive review for The Cloverfield Paradox, and clearly I'm not embarrassed enough to hide it. That was supposedly made for around 45 million and dropped on the platform as a sort of midnight movie. It wasn't so much "good" as "fun," and half the fun was in the presentation.

The Electric State, on the other hand, cost as much as a major blockbuster. This is Marvel or Star Wars movie money, and (as I mentioned) I paid for a tiny piece of that - everyone subscribed to Netflix did. That doesn't give us the right to dictate how the company is run, but I think it gives us a right to feel annoyed when shows we love are cancelled while things like this continue going into production.

The movie is inspired by a 2018 graphic novel that is infinitely better than what Netflix made. The graphic novel includes none of the generic epic nonsense dragging down the movie and is best described as an artistic expression of tone and emotion. There are ideas here that could and should have been fantastic when transferred to the screen, but the movie constantly fails to deliver on them.

Supposedly set in the 1990s in an alternate universe in the aftermath of a robot war, the movie follows Michelle (played by Millie Bobby Brown, who I hope received a substantial paycheck for this) and John (played by Chris Pratt, whose compensation I don't really care about one way or another) as they work with their robot companions to try and track down Michelle's brother, whose mind is controlling the robot helping Michelle.

Eventually we learn Michelle's brother is a genius being kept on life support by Elon Musk analogue Ethan (played by Stanley Tucci, lest there weren't already enough reminders of the Michael Bay Transformers movies). This is because the boy's mind is so powerful, it's able to maintain Ethan's online network of VR and robot drones that have all but replaced human work and interaction.

The protagonists are also being pursued by Giancarlo Esposito using a robot body, which is likewise part of the aforementioned VR network. He switches sides at the end for reasons that feel even more tacked on than usual for these kinds of movies.

Michelle and John get reluctant help from a dead mall full of robots that survived the war. This group includes a baseball-playing bot, a US mail robot, and Mr. Peanut, who serves as their leader. The movie clearly wants this to be whimsical and funny, but it's presented far too blandly to work on that level. Still, the robot designs are sometimes fun in and of themselves, so it's not a total loss (though it really comes close).

The bot housing Michelle's brother's consciousness is eventually captured and taken to Seattle, so Michelle and John rally the surviving robots to attack the compound. This culminates with Michelle reaching her brother and interacting with him via VR, where he tells her that the only way to stop Ethan from killing her friends is to unplug him from the life-support system, thus bringing down the digital world keeping the drones operational. Naturally, the setting for the VR conversation in which Michelle needs to let her brother go is a Christmas memory we previously saw in a flashback.

It would be nice to say that the reason this is set at Christmas is to capitalize on established themes of nostalgia inherent in the setting, itself a sort of wasteland populated by forgotten robot mascots and crumbling buildings from our childhoods. And I assume that's in some way what was going on here, except... that's not the theme of the damn movie.

Actually, the theme of the movie is basically four or five themes, none of which are meaningfully connected or developed. The one the movie ends with is a sort of repudiation of our addiction to our online lifestyle and a call to return to person-to-person interaction. Or something. It's an idea sort of briefly set up at the beginning, dropped entirely as the movie focuses on various other themes, then resurrected in a speech Michelle gives at the end.

I think the premise, at least at some point in production, was to use the 1990s imagery as a sort of nostalgic counterpoint to the less personal tech that is now overtaking society. The ending calls on the viewer to reject the new technology and new world (so, the internet, social media, and the like) and instead return to the things we grew up with. It's a very similar theme to what's explored in traditional holiday movies, aside from the fact that instead of lionizing small-town America, this is asking us to return to the simpler time of 1990s mall culture. Under this reading, Christmas would essentially be reinforcing that connection.

The problem is this isn't developed or communicated throughout the movie, which instead fires a barrage of other themes, including embracing found family, believing in oneself, consumer culture and its impact on the environment, and marginalized communities overcoming their oppressors (with the help of white protagonists, which I suppose is one of the few things in this that feels authentic to '90s movies). None of these themes receive the sort of organic development necessary to make them work: they're just kind of hinted at visually or dropped in a couple lines of dialogue that superficially resemble resolution to an arc that was never properly constructed.

The same goes for using Christmas as a symbol for nostalgia and the '90s stuff. You can piece together what it was probably supposed to mean, but the concepts aren't conveyed by the narrative or with any kind of compelling emotion. There's no catharsis or impact, because the themes feel disconnected from the story, which....

Look, it's the wrong story for this setting. Sad, dystopian landscapes lend themselves to road trips exploring emotion through scenery, not war stories about overthrowing evil empires. I'm not saying you can't pull one off, but you damned well better have an interesting take, or else you'll end up with a generic, tedious waste of time and money.

Whether or not this has anything worthwhile to say is irrelevant, because The Electric State fails to say anything in a manner we care about. Its characters are empty excuses for generic lines of dialogue, its setting is a confused jumble of tech that can't decide on an era (I know it's supposed to matter the robots are designed to look vintage while the drones are supposed to look modern, but the movie doesn't even bother trying to make this work), and the look of the movie works against anything interesting in the designs.

And, not that it matters, but Christmas sequences which could have played off nostalgic ideas connecting to our memories of childhood, consumer culture, the way we dispose of things and even culture, and a whole bunch of other concepts worth exploring... are instead just dangling threads the movie is too lazy to weave together.

Again, a lot of money went into this, and while I'm guessing the bulk was spent on the stars' paychecks, a sizable amount made it into the effects, which means there are some neat looking visuals on occasion. There's a good chance that's going to be enough for a lot of kids and for a few adults whose preferred esthetic matches that of the movie. But unless you take one look at a poster or trailer and knew you were waiting for this, my advice is to skip it. There's no shortage of effects-driven sci-fi anymore, and you can do much better than The Electric State.