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.
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