By Brian Landa
@BrianLandaLawyer
“Stranger Things.” Eleven. Millie Bobby Brown owes a lot to Netflix for kickstarting her career in 2016. The show put her on the map and essentially consumed her childhood. Along with a lot of Eggos.
Brown’s Netflix “business parents” are still very much in her world until the final run of “Stranger Things” episodes later this year. And now it seems they wanted her to return the favor by starring in a not so great robot movie, The Electric State, which cost a gargantuan $320 million, with no production company co-producers.
This seems to be a Netflix exclusive original, which was recently and prominently screened at SXSW 2025. But it does not seem to be getting much of a theatrical release anywhere, domestically anyways. As a curious person who is always interested in knowing why a Rotten Tomatoes split is so vast, I see that this one is currently holding at 15% for critics and 70% for viewers.
Now having watched the film, it is somewhat of a muddled mess, but it has its moments. The cast is A-List extraordinary. But the plot is confusing. Set in an alternate timeline 1990s (seems a lot of projects are doing this so not everybody onscreen is looking at their smartphone the entire time, as we tend to do), where there has been a robot war involving mostly mascot & corporate icon robots who have now become self-aware and want human-like independence.
A big part of the war is a company that develops drone bots controlled by humans in order to fight the mascot robots. The rebel bots are led by a metallic Mr. Peanut, voiced by Woody Harrelson. Sensitive and caring he may be, but he is also a machine.
Ke Huy Quan, absent from the screen for decades, but seemingly popping up everywhere all at once since his Oscar win for that one, Everything Everywhere All At Once (he was even a voice on the phone recently on “The White Lotus”) shows up as a scientist who knows all about the symbiosis link, as well as his robot spider-legged PC, who essentially shares his brain and everything in it.
Apparently, the special effects took a very long time, because they are nonstop and almost relentless. It’s too much of a sensory overload, but some of these robot designs are very cool. I particularly like the brave & eager postal woman robot voiced by Jenny Slate of Marcel The Shell With Shoes On. Jenny’s ex-husband, writer/director Dean Fleischer-Camp (they co-created Marcel over a decade ago) is actually a close cousin by marriage on my mom’s brother’s side. The live action Lilo & Stitch is up next for him, opening Memorial Day Weekend. I love small world connections and coincidences.
Now, back to the robots. Somehow, they discover Brown’s younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman) is the smartest person on earth and they need his brain nonstop to power the drone robots in order to fight the robot war. And beyond, to power VR-like headsets to allow for escapism and keep the populace docile and calm.
Shades of Ready Player One and lots of other source material plundered here. I don’t think it’s supposed to make much sense. This is based on a graphic novel by Simon Stalenhag, but I don’t know how much of it they actually used.
So somehow, Brown’s brother is kidnapped in his human form and integrated with the evil corporation’s system (Of course they’re evil. They’re a corporation) to keep the drone robots running. And nearly the entire film is a race against time to save the kid. But with the symbiotic nature of things, will saving him end him as well? And do we really care? Apparently, most critics did not.
It was difficult to figure out if they were brother and sister for a while in the beginning, and the whole plot line of the brother’s soul being in a TV show character robot on a quest to save him was very difficult to parse. Nonstop visuals are not compensation for a poorly executed script. And this one could’ve used a lot of improvement.
A-Listers keep popping up everywhere though. Jason Alexander, best known as George on “Seinfeld” shows up as a bad foster dad who spends most of his time in headset. Both Giancarlo Esposito and Colman Domingo play possibly sinister humans controlling drone robots. The great Stanley Tucci (although not so great here) is the head of the corporation. Holly Hunter also shows up briefly to do something, but she is not around for long.
The most entertaining character is a multi-sized construction robot named Herm and voiced by Anthony Mackie (The MCU), who plays Chris Pratt’s best buddy. Oh yes, Pratt (The MCU) is also in this. He’s kinda the male lead. He looks like he is having fun, as he usually does. But I’m not sure this is a solid addition to his résumé.
None of his forced catchphrases in this one are likely to catch on.
I love when Esposito pops up in things unexpectedly, but he’s so limited to this little face screen in the drone bot that you can barely see anything he does. He comes out of that headset every once in a while to do some real acting, but he’s mostly going through the motions. I think he understood the material was not exactly “Breaking Bad.”
The Russo Brothers made my favorite MCU film to date, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, so I had high hopes for this. That one was pure 1970s paranoia thriller, and even features Robert Redford in the cast. He starred in at least a few of those back in the day.
Hopefully this one will do very well overseas. I need my Netflix. Everyone will recover and move forward, though $320 million is quite a hit for something not all that likely to be a hit. Then again, the RT viewer score is 70%, which is higher than most.
This one could actually have (robot) legs!
