VERY loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 retro-sci-fi illustrated book of the same name and directed by the Russo brothers, The Electric State is set in an alternate 1990s where robots, gaining sentience after decades, rise up and engage a full on war, ultimately won by the humans using headgear controlled remote drone soldiers. After the war, the headgear/vr sets are sold commercially to pacify the masses, while the surviving robots are sent to a giant desert prison colony.

We follow a juvenile delinquent, Jessie (Millie Bobby Brown), whom lost her family in a car accident years ago and is now a foster kid, as one night she gets visited by a robot of Kid Cosmo, her beloved brother’s favourite childhood cartoon, which claims to actually be him, leading the two in a roadtrip-escape adventure…..

One that plays it super-straight, all in an attempt to get us invested into this world… hard to when there’s simply no charm, with the movie actively refusing to embrace its inherent sillyness AND doubling down on being “gritty”, which backfires on a nuclear scale.

There’s a palpable attempt at telling a Spielberg style tale, but there’s no soul or substance to it, just a Ready Player One masturbatory penchant for pop culture regurgitation (that makes NO SENSE in context, to boot), well known actors half-assing their admittely bad characters, and a plot being a senseless, meaningless hodgepotche that makes even less sense as it goes on, never committed to anything besides vague, overly basic metaphors, or Funko Pops-friendly character designs.

Those that aren’t already well known brand figureheads like fuckin Mr. Peanut (what is this, Food Fight?).

It’s not even boring, but it’s quite bad, stupid, mostly just so confounding you had to wonder “Why?”, especially when it had a 320 million dollars budget.