You might remember that, a year or so ago, we lost our goddamned minds over what Robert Zemeckis was doing to Richard McGuire’s Here (and we see you revisionist nerds out there pushing your glasses up on the bridge of your nose getting ready to hit us with a spit-spraying “ack-tually” — the movie was that bad), and now we’re similarly frustrated by what the Russo Brothers have done to Simon Stalenhag’s The Electric State. That’s a sad fucking book with gorgeous imagery, and apparently the Bros behind Cherry and The Gray Man have decided what that story needed was… AliExpress Han Solo in the form of Chris Pratt.
Just look at the damn poster — you’ve got a robot doing the Dreamworks smirk. If you’d like to see a solid representation of Stalenhag’s beautiful art on screen, go check out Amazon’s Tales from the Loop, which came out quietly a few years ago and is a delightful (and, yes, horribly depressing) little series. But if you really want to stare into the nightmare world, well, take a look at this trailer that Netflix dropped for the project earlier on Monday.
Peep it:
Jesus Christ.
Here’s a synopsis:
“‘The Electric State’ is a spectacular sci-fi adventure from the directors of ‘Avengers: Endgame’ set in an alternate, retro-futuristic version of the 1990s. Millie Bobby Brown (‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Enola Holmes,’ ‘Damsel’) stars as Michelle, an orphaned teenager navigating life in a society where sentient robots resembling cartoons and mascots, who once served peacefully among humans, now live in exile following a failed uprising. Everything Michelle thinks she knows about the world is upended one night when she’s visited by Cosmo, a sweet, mysterious robot who appears to be controlled by Christopher — Michelle’s genius younger brother whom she thought was dead. Determined to find the beloved sibling she thought she had lost, Michelle sets out across the American southwest with Cosmo, and soon finds herself reluctantly joining forces with Keats (Chris Pratt, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ ‘Jurassic World’), a low-rent smuggler, and his wisecracking robot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). As they venture into the Exclusion Zone, a walled-off corner in the desert where robots now exist on their own, Keats and Michelle find a strange, colorful group of new animatronic allies — and begin to learn that the forces behind Christopher’s disappearance are more sinister than they ever expected.”
Yeah, this is Shaq-level missing-the-point. The book is one of the most relentlessly depressing and terrifying visions of dystopian life published this century, and it seems they took out all of the interesting bits (it’s hard to imagine Chris Pratt trying to riff on VR tech funnily causing society-wide infertility — “Mah NUTS don’t work!”) and replaced them with garden-variety Netflix horseshit.
You’ll fold laundry while not paying attention to The Electric State when it starts streaming on Netflix on March 14. Thank god the Russos are returning to the Marvel Containment Unit soon.