REVIEW: The Electric State (2025)

Movie Reviews

The Electric State should have been great. The materials are all there: the creative team behind most of the MCU’s best films, a charismatic and lovable lead actor, a story about familial love transcending tragedy, themes of freedom and the loss of humanity, some truly excellent special effects, and even a good score. But it drops the ball on its characterizations, particularly with the heroes, and what should have been an involving story about relatable people becomes a slow and steady march to the end credits with a few brief respites for action and humor, with some of modern cinema’s most infuriating tropes peppered in.

In the early 1990s, robots gained sentience and demanded rights, leading to a war between them and us that saw people sacrifice their humanity to maintain dominance over the machines. A couple of years after the war, teenage orphan Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), adrift after losing her family, encounters a robot claiming to have been sent by her brother, who is still alive. To find him, she must team up with a smuggler named John Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot sidekick Herman (Anthony Mackie) and journey into a walled-off section of America designated for the robots.

This is a good setup for a movie, and the opening sequences of The Electric State are engaging and successful at establishing the film’s alternate history. The war is explained economically but with enough detail to allow the audience to understand what happened, how it happened, what the outcome was, and what effect it had on society. It’s also a nice commentary on the way war can dehumanize both sides of a conflict; the robots were sent off to live in a Mad Maxian wasteland, gaining their freedom while being forced to live like scavengers, while the humans retained their society but – due to the technological advances that were necessary to beat the robots – became sedentary drones, hopelessly addicted to virtual reality helmets and losing their connection to each other. Michelle embodies this, eschewing the computer headsets but still refusing to rejoin humanity after losing her brother. So far, so good.

But that element ends once the adventure begins. After Michelle sets off on her quest to rescue her brother, The Electric State flatlines, drifting through its story like wreckage at sea. A big part of the problem is that she has no one to play off of in any meaningful way. Chris Pratt’s Keats is a wasted opportunity, especially with an actor like Pratt in the role. The beginning establishes that he was a soldier who fought in the war, but when we catch up with him later, he’s got a long 80s hairdo replete with a mustache, and he’s scrounging up old merchandise in the robot zone and selling it to people across the border wall. Surely, something must have happened to cause him to change his lot in life so drastically; he must have wants, goals, and a reason for helping Michelle on her journey. I mean, I’m guessing because The Electric State never develops one of its two main characters. Keats is such a nothing presence that he could be completely removed from the film without changing the story, and the occasional attempts to give him an arc fall flat because they’re too brief and come way too late. And he’s so empty a vessel that he drags Michelle down with him because she has no one to emote to.

As a result, The Electric State gets boring in its middle section, and it really shouldn’t be. On paper, there’s plenty going on, but none of it feels like it means anything. Some of the robots get more characterization than the humans, particularly their leader, Mr. Peanut, played by Woody Harrelson. (The voice work in The Electric State is quite good; I couldn’t tell who most of the voice actors were until I read the cast list later.) Part of the problem is that, like seemingly every movie made today – especially the big blockbuster types like this – there is a constant string of humor that undermines much of the drama. Keats exists to make jokes rather than be an actual person, and his only saving grace is that Pratt delivers a handful of good lines that made me laugh. Even so, these lines don’t have as much weight as they would have if Pratt’s character were better defined. There’s also a confrontation later in the film involving a minor character with a surprisingly strong arc, but it’s undercut by having him deliver nonsensical one-liners rather than actually debate his point of view. What should have been a human and thought-provoking plot becomes a generic “then they did this” story with flashes of what it could have been.

But it sure is pretty. The Electric State looks so wonderful it’s baffling that Netflix didn’t release it in theaters and make some money from it (although I guess you never know these days). The special effects are fantastic, easily some of the best I’ve seen in a while, with the robots looking like actual, tangible machines. When they stomp on the ground or interact with their environment, they look real, like physical beings rather than globs of CGI soup, in stark contrast to most modern special effects. The movements and view screens give a good deal of humanity to the robots as well, which helps bring them to life. The Russo Brothers filmed them well, and I don’t know if they had to hide any imperfections, but if they did, they pulled it off. The action scenes are also expertly filmed, with plenty of energy and coherence. And I very much liked the score by the legendary Alan Silvestri, which keeps the energy pumping even as the script lets the film down. This is a well-put-together movie, but like the robots – or, at least, the argument against giving them their freedom – it lacks the soul it needs to really come to life.

Let us know what you thought of The Electric State in the comments!

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